WRITE IN THE THICK OF THINGS: WIP: Haunted Gunnison Valley

Our current project is the most ambitious yet -- researching, collecting stories, and investigating the haunted goings-on of the entire Gunnison Valley!

The Valley's history is rich and deep, dating back to human habitation as early as 10,000 years ago and more "recently" documented through one spur of the Spanish Trail in the 1500s.

But the haunted history goes back at least as far as the 1880s, and that's where we'll begin, seeking out the accounts and investigating the paranormal activity leading to the present day.

Join us on this next great adventure through accounts of our progress at the blog postings on this site, through updates at our "Wraiths in the Thick" Facebook page, through live tweets during our investigations-in-progress onr Twitter, and through our documented evidence on YouTube. All the links are below.

Website: WriteintheThick.com
Blog: WriteintheThick.blogspot.com
FB page: facebook.com/WraithsintheThick
Twitter page: twitter.com/WriteintheThick
Google+ page: plus.google.com/+KymnMarkTodd
YouTube page: youtube.com/c/KymnMarkTodd

Mark's Goodreads Reviews

Mark's books

American Colonies: The Settling of North America

American Colonies: The Settling of North America

by Alan Taylor

Over the past three years, the genealogy bug has really bitten me, and I've plunged into genealogical and genetic research that started putting together the pieces of who I came from. But when I'd learn that so-in-so moved from Virginia to North Carolina, and then the next generation split up to move on to Mississippi or Kentucky or Alabama, the documentation rarely told me why.

Enter Pulitzer Prize-winner Alan Taylor's American Colonies, the sort of historical nonfiction book I hoped could help explain what had inspired my assorted great-great grandparents to migrate to and among the various colonies and territories of British Colonial America. And wow, did I ever get what I bargained for.

Though not with what I expected. My doctorate had specialized in eighteenth-century American Studies, and I thought I had a pretty good handle on the times. But what Taylor's excellent and very readable prose provided was the disturbing exploitative nature of English colonial empire-building.

Taylor's opus is organized chronologically by colony (or territory), repeating the chronology for each colonial initiative, explaining the politics and socio-economic dynamics that existed on both sides of the Atlantic Pond. We think politics is complicated these days (and they are), but complexities faced by our ancestors equal ours in every way, and more.

Nonetheless, the underlying story is framed to explain the systematic displacement of indigenous populations and slave-driven economies fueling much of early colonial development. Taylor does this with copious statistics and first-hand accounts and justifications by our ancestors, but the author's tone is even and never descends into judgmental asides.

It felt like getting back into the classroom to learn a history that hasn't been sanitized by the victors, sobering but compelling.

Highly recommended.

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WIP: Haunted Gunnison Valley

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