Why I Wrote the El Dorado Trilogy—from Gravel to Novel

Photo Courtesy Mt. Tom Images

The El Dorado Trilogy is a story framed in historical events. It is a story easy to tell.

A 1979 proposal to mine gravel in Colorado’s Front Range prompted the story. Highlight the region’s past, I reasoned, and our 20th century inhabitants will protect it.

I gave the story to…

~ a Frenchman who stayed too long at a dance in the Pennsylvania hill country,

~ a fur trapper who hired on with a Mormon preacher outbound for the Willamette,

  ~  the preacher’s intended bride. Beautiful, of course. 

I gave them Independence, Missouri. And the Oregon Trail as far as Fort Laramie. At the fort I separated them and headed south down the Taos Trail. Those left behind at the fort I whisked west, out of the way. So far, so good.

Alas, coming face to face with the mountains did nothing to inspire my runaways. Forget sterling descriptions. Mountains to them were nothing more than wheel locks. It was at this point that I realized my story no longer belonged to me. It belonged to history already written, to characters who did whatever it took to survive. Unlike the novelist, there was nothing for me to invent.

Clutching at recorded fact, jumping from one hypothesis to the next, I had but to hold on.

My friends came to a river, and I researched the crossings. That dirty old Platte, I discovered, is full of tricks. The Colorado River due east of the canyon lands has only one good crossing. The Indians knew where it was. The Mormons used Indian guides, as did my friends.

It’s all there in the history books. All I had to do was to search…and search…and search.

Poe’s Eldorado suggested the trilogy’s titles. Emigrant diaries bewail bare mountains in the moonlight, but it is Poe’s rhetoric that best frames the treeless expanses.

Poe’s “valley of the shadow” I am sure, is the western foot of the Wasatch Range. And the route our gallant knight must ride boldly? the emigrant trail south from Salt Lake City to Cedar City. Wallace Stegner wrote of that deadly trace. Of Brigham’s betrayal, of the tables loaded with food that wouldn’t be shared, of the brave souls who came after dark in unlighted wagons bringing potatoes to the starving Fancher party.

Mormon soldiers shot the women and older children in the massacre in the mountain meadows. Pawnee braves were promised emigrant horses to do the dirty deed. Instead, they decorated their horses with the emigrant goods and rode off. 

I used the Pawnees' words, recorded in interviews conducted by the American Army, to write of that massacre. I could not bring myself to write of it through the victims’ eyes, nor those of the Mormon men.

It is here that yesterday’s events foreshadow today’s. Brigham saw the Pawnee refusal to kill the women and children as betrayal. And swore vengeance. Today the Pawnee remain the poorest of the native tribes.

The third novel brought my characters home, whining about the wind and the dry, home with their backs to the mountains where I live. My Cheyenne warrior counted coup on his grandson’s enemies here, right in the heart of the gravel pit proposed a century later. My Union soldier, now an old man, hauled the kid down Indian Gulch and put him to bed in a rock and mud cabin at the foot of North Table Mountain. 

And by the way, a blind fiddler did indeed pay for his meal in the Guy House with music. Just as Loveland did indeed build his railroad into the mines. And there really was a festival on Argentine Street in Georgetown with lanterns swaying in the pines.

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Editor’s note: The gravel-pit fight which precipitated my narratives was settled in favor of the opponents in 1983. The trilogy was completed in 2006.