Walter Bigelow Cross seems to have been a man of mystery to the people of Mesa County, Colorado, a well-off person who kept largely to himself and shared few details about his life. They were well aware that he owned Cross Orchards, one of the largest fruit growing operations in Colorado in the early Twentieth […]

In the days prior to adequate floodplain and stormwater management in Mesa County, flash floods could be an issue for valley residents. Charles Buttolph, former manager for the Red Cross Land and Fruit Company (and then-owner of his own fruit farm on adjacent land), talks about one such flash flood that swept through Cross Orchards […]

Residents of the American West are no strangers to the idea of flash floods, but having one actually crash down on you while you’re camped in a canyon is different altogether. On August 28, 1939, cowhand Merle Winters was camped in the Utah Bookcliffs in a canyon of Diamond Creek. Winters was working for the […]

The Denver and Rio Grande Railroad (D&RG) gave Grand Junction its first permanent transportation link to the outside world with the completion, in November 1882, of a railroad bridge over the Colorado River at the confluence. The first train arrived at seven minutes of five o’clock on November 21, 1882, coming over the bridge with […]

In the old days of rural schoolhouse education in Mesa County and the Western Slope, most kids simply withstood the smacked wrists and hits they received from teachers, and understood it was the price for bad behavior. Farm and ranch kids, the boys especially, were thought to be wild by nature, and they often simply […]