FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF FINAL AFFAIRS
The Department does not typically group entries by location of proximate physical features. Death is common in fields; farmers, ranchers, and their hired hands expire at a rate commensurate with their time outdoors, and the proximity of any given death to any given section of ground is rarely a meaningful detail. Occasionally, however, three entries share a characteristic that the Department considers worth noting, not as a cause, but as a correspondence.
Entry 1 — Elias Croft, Pueblo County, August 1893
Elias Croft, age fifty-eight, was found at the eastern margin of a wheat field north of Pueblo on the morning of August 19, 1893. He had been employed on the property for eleven days as a harvest hand and had not been reported missing until the other workers arrived at the field at dawn. He was found in a kneeling position at the edge of a section of flattened grain, facing east. The county coroner recorded the cause of death as cardiac failure and made no further notation.
The Department notes what the coroner did not: the section of flattened grain at which Croft was found represents the end-point of a formation that another member of the same harvest crew described, in a letter submitted to this archive roughly twenty years later, as an incomplete arc with an eastward spur. Croft was found at the terminus of the spur. He was facing the direction the spur pointed. Whether he arrived at that spot before or after whatever produced the formation is not determinable from the record. The county has no note of the formation itself.
Entry 2 — Reuben Tait, Alamosa, November 1908
Reuben Tait, age forty-four, was a land surveyor who had spent portions of 1903 and 1904 working in England, principally in the county of Wiltshire. He returned to Alamosa in the spring of 1905. In the years following his return, neighbors and colleagues noted that his professional drafting work had become accompanied by persistent marginal drawings. These drawings, examined after his death, were uniformly geometric: concentric arcs, partial rings, spirals that resolved and then restarted at slightly different radii. His workshop floor contained a series of such marks drawn in chalk that had been repeatedly overwritten as if he were working toward a form he could not quite locate.
Tait was found at his drafting table on the morning of November 7, 1908. No cause of death was recorded. His compass was open on the table. The drafting paper beneath the compass showed three concentric arcs, each incomplete, the inner arc slightly collapsed toward the outer, which the Department notes corresponds to the formation recorded near Alamosa in 1907 and classified in the field fragment log as CC-CO-02. Whether Tait had seen or documented that formation is unknown. Whether he had seen the Wiltshire formations that appear to complete the same geometry is a matter of record: he had been present in Wiltshire during the period those formations were active. He did not, as far as the Department can determine, discuss this.
Entry 3 — Josiah Deane, Del Norte, August 1911
Josiah Deane, age sixty-one, was a hay farmer in Rio Grande County who discovered an incomplete spiral in the margin of his crop field in the early summer of 1911. He did not harvest the affected section. When asked by neighboring farmers why he had left a section standing, he said only that he was waiting to see if it finished. It did not finish. Deane was found at the unresolved terminus of the spiral on the morning of August 3, 1911, approximately six weeks after the formation appeared. He was lying on his back, facing east, with one hand extended along the ground in the direction the spiral had been traveling.
His journal, recovered from the farmhouse, contained entries through August 2nd. The final entry was wordless: three arcs drawn in the margin of the last page, each opening east. Nothing else was written.
Department Notation
The Department does not speculate about the cause of field formations, the geometry of incomplete marks, or the relationship between a compass bearing and a human death. The Department records. What the three entries above share is the following: all three individuals were found facing east; all three deaths occurred at or near the terminus of an incomplete arc or spiral; the open end of each formation, measured at the point of maximum termination, bears an eastward orientation.
The Department also notes, without elaboration, that no Wiltshire deaths have been submitted to the Department for any formation in that cluster, complete or otherwise. The complete formations, it seems, do not collect the same correspondence.
This observation is filed as a record, not an explanation.
— D.M.
The Department maintains a separate file on the Bent’s Fort survey mark of 1868 and the surveyor who drew it. That man died of a fever in Kansas in 1872, facing, according to the attending physician’s note, east. That entry predates this one. The Department chose not to combine them.