If you’ve been reading High Country News for a while — or for any time at all — you likely know at least part of our story. We were founded in Lander, Wyoming, in 1970, then migrated south to western Colorado in 1983, eventually opening an office in a former feedstore in the small town of Paonia. Though our staff now lives and works all over the West and beyond, Paonia remains our mailing address. It’s also where this publication — and more than a few of its past and present staffers — did a lot of growing up.
Paonia and the surrounding North Fork Valley taught many of us, including me, not to romanticize the West: Though I still consider the North Fork the most beautiful place I’ve ever lived, I lived there long enough to know that, like most places, it is both welcoming and exclusive, fortunate and impoverished, sunlit and shadowed. It taught me that even the smallest place can be layered with stories, and that each story changes with time and its teller.
For me — and, I suspect, for many of us who think we know the North Fork Valley — Trent Davis Bailey’s haunting photographs in this issue are both familiar and disorienting. There’s no mistaking that light, or those ridgelines. And yet Bailey’s experience of the valley is not quite my experience of the valley, nor is it anyone else’s. To see a place through another’s eyes is, in a sense, to see it anew.
The complexity of place has special historical significance in Jaclyn Moyer’s feature about Letitia Carson, a Black woman who came to Oregon from Missouri in 1845 and, despite the new territory’s Black-exclusion laws, homesteaded there for the next 40 years. The land Carson lived on near present-day Corvallis, Oregon, was storied long before she arrived, and has acquired new stories since. Now, the inheritors of all those stories are debating how best to commemorate them.
I’m delighted to report that HCN Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Sahn has returned from leave, and that you’ll hear from her in our next issue. It’s been an honor to serve as your acting editor-in-chief for the past nine months; I look forward to all the stories to come.
We welcome reader letters. Michelle Nijhuis is acting editor-in-chief at High Country News. Email her at michelle@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline An accumulation of stories.
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