Imprisoned in a Settlement

I didn't want to spend a day in a settlement. I didn't even want to go into one. But we were three hours southwest of Denver, had hours and hours to go across some of the emptier parts of Colorado, and my gas tank was almost dry. I carry a few extra gallon jugs in the bed of my pickup and those were dry too. In that town the settlers got the only gas shipments, so we were stuck waiting for their tanker truck to show.

Those who have kept up with these articles I've been writing from the road may have noticed that all of them discuss food. It's a natural interest of any Westerner, I'd bet. When you're often hungry, it makes a big impression to be well fed.

Forget about that when it comes to a settlement. Every settler lives on the same prepackaged garbage: onion powder instead of onions, chili flakes instead of chilis, tomato paste for tomatoes, oleo for butter, powdered eggs, powdered milk, powdered potatoes, instant coffee, canned meat and vegetables. What average Westerners would eat if there were no black or gray markets, no hunters, and no gardens—if we had to rely on our federal distributions. Only the company manager does better. He's a regular at Jack's, the train-car restaurant I described in my last post.

Eating their stuff just a few meals was bad enough; it was spooky what it's done to the people who've been stuck with it for years. I’d already known how hunger can make you listless and stupid. You can't think anything complicated because all you want is to eat. Well, settlers have the opposite problem. Day after day they get energy and nutrients but no pleasure. They shovel in these canned, fat-laden things and get fat, and then they’ve got nothing to talk about but their health problems and their wills. They’ve got no plans and no drive. It’s depressing.

It can't help that they live in an old prison. The Feds must have decided it was cheaper than building the usual defensive walls.

The Feds haven't made the settlers live in the old cells, though. They knocked down a couple of the buildings (irreplaceable Western history, by the way—before Occupation part of the place was a museum) and jammed as many double-wide trailers as they could into the space. About 250 people live close-quarters in them.

One thing they didn't knock down, oddly, was the gas chamber. The museum had it on a lawn in front of the old warden's house (which at that time was a ticket office but has since been turned back into a house for the company manager). The straps and locks and so on are all still in it. Because the temporary-classroom trailers they use for a school are parked beside it, and because it has only small, porthole windows, the few high-school students sneak into it constantly to smoke. There’s a plaque on the outside of that gas chamber explaining that this is the prison where Alferd Packer served his time. (There’s a tasteless joke to be made about that and the settlers’ eating habits—several, in fact, starting with the word “tasteless”—but I’m going to resist.) I don’t know why they put the plaque there. The gas chamber couldn’t have been in use when Packer was here.

Alferd Packer, if you don’t know the story, came east from Utah with four friends, bound for the gold country of Cripple Creek. The Utes told them not to go, it was too late in the year and they were bound to get stuck. And I bet you can all guess the rest of the story just from that much of it: they did get stuck in the Rockies, near what is now Lake City, and Alferd killed his friends and ate them. He ran away for a while; the Supreme Court invalidated his first conviction on the grounds that murder hadn’t actually been a crime when he’d done it, some quirk of pre-State Colorado law; and at last he was convicted of voluntary manslaughter.

Supposedly the judge who sentenced Alferd the first time gave him the death sentence as a warning to other “emergency cannibals.” I doubt it was necessary. By the early 1880s, the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad had already built two narrow-gauge lines over the Continental Divide, one passing right by this prison on its way from Pueblo to Leadville, to Gunnison, to Grand Junction. (The other ran more strictly west from Walsenburg through Alamosa to Durango.) The Atcheson, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad had wanted to build that same line, and there were years of court battles over it. Some shooting battles too.

In those kinds of railroad races, it was the Chinese laborers who took it on the chin. Lots of Chinese workers died working for the Denver and Rio Grande on the western side of the Rockies in particular, laying rail from Durango to Silverton. Lord knows how many. To give some idea how bad it was, ten years earlier, around 1870, railroads dug up 1,200 Chinese bodies alongside their lines and shipped them home. 20,000 pounds of bones.

We thanked them by passing the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. It stayed illegal for Chinese to come to America until 1965.

Some of you will probably call me a hypocrite for caring about that, because of what I’ve said in the past about immigration and Ticket Home. I think it’s pretty clear how the situation is different. White folks were just as new to the West as Chinese back then. They had no right to say they belonged and the Chinese didn’t. Only the Indians had that right, and if you read my last post, you might remember what it got them. But today we’re the natives and we have the right to defend our soil, especially against immigrant settlers trucked in to stuff the ballot box.

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If you’re wondering, I did find out the story behind why settlers all wear those same coveralls. I'd always assumed they were required to wear them, but that's not true. They own other clothes. It's just that their companies only sell that one style from some other connected company that got the Fed contract. If they wear out their regular clothes they can't replace them, but if they wear out coveralls—which happens all the time, since they're made as cheap as they look—they can get new ones easily. The regular clothes stay in boxes for some day in the future, but since they all get fat on their packaged foods pretty soon none of the stuff fits.

My reporter friend asked me to put on a pair before we went to dinner at the company canteen, at the end of our first full day there, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I marched in there in my belt buckle, hat, and jeans, feeling proud. I wasn’t going to let them intimidate me. I kind of wished I’d lain lower, though, when my reporter friend stood on her chair and demanded to know which one of them stole her passport and visa.