Grand Valley’s Radical Poets—Making Resistance Sound Good—1894 to Club Q
Poetry and song have always been a part of resistance movements, verse seems to have the power to strengthen one’s resolve—to move people…
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The Closet: LGBTQ+ folx in the Grand Valley, 1881-1976
The Ute people have called this region home since time beyond memory. Like most native cultures, the Utes held space for the gender…
Say Their Names!
Edna Ainsworth was just seventeen years old on August 13th of 1920. The young women had recently had a fight with her sweetheart.…
The Mayor; The Sentinel, and the Socialist Free Speech Fight of 1905
Walter Walker was not the first editor of the Daily Sentinel to wage an all-out war on the Socialist parties in early 20th…
George N. Falconer: A Highlander and his Mother
George Nichol Falconer was born 1863 in Edinburgh, Scotland. His mother “was a daughter of the Clan Fraser, a group of Highland cattle…
Bar Fights, Jail Breaks, Hold-ups and Lots and Lots of Booze: “Silver Tip Bess” and “Irish Kate” Two Women Putting Wild Back into the Wild West
Why should all the men have all the fun? Bessie Belvins, better known around the west as “Silver Tip Bess” certainly didn’t think…
Hobo Armies, Chain Gangs and Wobblies: The Grand Valley and the Golden Age of Vagabonds
Hobos, bindle-stiffs, tramps, coxeyites, transients, yeggs, vagrants, bums, scatterlings, wobblies, migrants laborers, vagabonds, roofless mother f#8%rs, okies and/or the un-housed have always been…
Why “A People’s History of the Grand Valley”
This project really began in 2006, I was writing for the short live radical paper, “The Red Pill.” Grand Junction was celebrating its…
Larry Ruiz, GJ ‘State Home, and the Americans with Disability Act
In 1954, when Larry Ruiz was born, diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy, and abandoned by his mother at the Grand Junction ‘State Home,’ an…