On a recent “nickel tour” of the Frontier Historical Museum (FHM) in Glenwood Springs, Bill Kight, museum director, talked local and personal history. Kight’s stories are among the best, including the one about Fort Defiance. “The fact of the Defiance name is still kind of controversial,” said Kight. It all had to do with prospectors and a Ute treaty violation.
“The original [Ute] homeland extended all the way into eastern Utah, southern Wyoming and down into New Mexico,” he explained. Ute territory was reduced in 1868 to a small area, and according to Kight, Defiance was inside reservation boundaries. According to visitglenwoodsprings.com, the prospectors built Fort Defiance a few miles east of Glenwood on the north rim of Glenwood Canyon. “Defiance is named after the fact that they knew they were coming into Ute territory and were defying the treaty. People don’t realize that.”
Kight pointed to health tags, in one of several glass cases scattered throughout the museum, that were issued by Dr. Marshall Dean to Glenwood’s “ladies of the evening” in the late 1800s, the porcelain doll in the children’s room that young tourists say looks like the evil doll Chucky, a beautiful, hand-sewn quilt with a portrait of Baby Doe Tabor in the center, countless curios, priceless paintings and photos of a Glenwood Springs that none of us will ever see again.
Kight is right at home in the museum; although he is retiring after nine years as director at the end of April. His life’s work has been all about probing prehistory and modern history, and bringing what he finds to the public. “It’s just a calling, I guess,” he said. “You know, we have callings and we either answer them or we go do something else with our life.”
Kight’s calling began in the late 1970s at the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in New Mexico where he was hired as a temporary archaeological technician. He quickly advanced to professional archaeologist, assigned to the San Augustine Resource Area and from there, was transferred in 1984 to Glenwood Springs as area archaeologist.
The Ute Trail
“It was definitely a calling to answer Frank Olson’s challenge,” he recalled. Olson was retired U.S. Forest Service and pretty much stormed into Kight’s BLM office one day in 1985. “He went right to my desk with his hands on his hips and stood there,” said Kight. “He goes, ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re gonna do about the trail.’” Kight added, “Being a smart ass back then and knowing a little bit, I said, ‘Well, what Ute Trail? There was one that Dominguez-Escalante set in 1776.’” Olson said, “Well, if you get up off your ass and come with me, I’ll show you.”
Kight explained that he could have been the typical bureaucrat, demanding an appointment. “But I got off my ass and went with him and that started the 20-year Ute Trail Project.” The trail called him. “When I got out there and was on my own looking around, the land spoke to me,” said Kight. “Not like in Moses’ burning bush, but a question: Where are the people who belong here?” Over the next 20 years, the Ute Trail Project helped bring the Utes back to their homeland.
Kight joined the White River National Forest in 1992 as heritage resource manager. Those decades were filled with experiences like the 1993 United Ute Pow Wow that brought all three tribes together in Glenwood Springs for the first time in 150 years. It also spawned pow wows in Meeker and countless stories of the magic that came from walking the land with Northern Ute Elder Clifford Duncan or Southern Ute Kenny Frost, both gone now.
Kight’s 1995 poem “Eagle Ways” is the story of taking Northern Utes to the Flat Tops.
…five eagles swoop down into a clearing
just opening around klines folly lake
as if weather itself is bent by our coming
knowing they are more than fishing
this more than mere performance
…but it is for us
to show the way
and make it straight
to bring the light through
all our cracks of doubt
to give blessing —
allowance to be
on this sacred path today.
Wildfires
Kight has been working wildfires and other calamities since the 1980s, including the aftermath of the 1988 Exxon Valdez oil disaster in Alaska. When asked for fire stories, sometimes he’s reluctant to share. After a little persuasion, however, he might tell you about the time he met up with a giant, swirling fire column in the Flint Hills of South Dakota.
He and his team were creating backfires along a road to try to stop the main fire from advancing. “So we started along that road and we kept burning out and burning out and burning out,” explained Kight. “And I’m busy. I’m not looking anywhere.”
Suddenly, his partner tells him to stop. “And he goes, ‘Bill, look up,’” Kight recalled as if he were right back in South Dakota. “And I looked up and I looked up and I looked up, and there was this huge column, 35,000 feet in the air.” He said when columns get that high, the main fire starts sucking in oxygen— and all those backfires Kight was setting. “The pucker factor is a nine out of 10,” he added.
He retired from the U.S. Forest Service and firefighting in 2013.
Retiring again
Now, he said, it’s time to start a new chapter. After the Ghost Walk, the Doc Holliday Museum in the basement of Bullock’s in Glenwood and nine years of building a team, Kight retires from the FHM at the end of April. One highlight, he said, was moving one night of the October Ghost Walk to the Glenwood Vaudeville Review last year for those who couldn’t walk up to the cemetery. He’s proud of what he and museum volunteers have accomplished and said the museum is in a good place. “It’s being passed on because there is a team here that works,” he said. “It wasn’t just me.”
You can watch his recent presentation on the Ute Trail at www.glenwoodhistory.com/lecture-series