On June 27, 1943, a freight train traveling west toward Grand Junction, Colorado developed a hot box (an overheated axle) when passing through a rail tunnel in De Beque Canyon. The train stopped in Palisade, where workers repacked the axle. A hot box was always dangerous, but in this case it was especially so, because […]

                              Big Foot Mary was well known among ranchers and inhabitants of the Uncompahgre area for having, well, big feet (interestingly, the leader of the last wolf pack in the Bookcliffs and Roan Plateau was reportedly named Old Bigfoot, so maybe […]

Poaching leads to nothing good. The results can be unbearable. Take the trapper who stole two wild bear cubs from their mother on the Grand Mesa and sold the cubs to interested parties. John Duncan Hart, a longtime state and federal game warden in Mesa County, relates that the cubs went to a brothel on […]

In these days of quarantine and online schooling, parents of antsy, hyperactive kids everywhere are wondering how to provide discipline that works (my own kids have interrupted me several times as I write this blog post. Fun!). Discipline has always been a concern of classroom teachers, but interviews from teachers and former students in Western […]

Working at libraries, particularly those with vibrant historical collections, you meet all kinds of artifact hunters. Occasionally, they let drop a hint or two about how they go about their business. While I cannot vouch for the man in Denver who claimed to be following plans for the recovery of buried treasure (supposedly passed from […]

If you came down with a highly infectious disease in the late Nineteenth or early Twentieth century, you were likely to end up quarantined in Mesa County’s Pest House. The Pest House resided in the old Mesa County Hospital building, located just over the Colorado River from Grand Junction on the rise up to the […]

If you have ever taken the Durango Silverton or stopped in Silverton for a rest during a nail biting and beautiful drive on Highway 50, you may have come across the Grand Imperial Hotel, an old and intriguing building that thrives with tourist traffic. Is the Grand Imperial Hotel haunted? It might be, according to […]

Mesa County Libraries have plenty of resources to delight those interested in history, such as our Veterans Remember collection of interviews, the Mesa County Oral History Project collection, our online obituaries, and the Rashleigh Regional History Room in the Central Branch. But did you know that our history collection also contains linguistic knowledge that, due […]