TC46

The bodies of the men and horses which fell in the canyon were completely gone, with no sign of having been burned or buried. No one believed Welles’ claim that a single man made all the bodies of the fallen men and horses disappear with a staff. So the Army broke up Fort Price and left, marking the whole thing down as one of the spookier mysteries of the high plains.

The white settlers who did not take up the plow instead platted out the new town of Headwater on both sides of the river crossing. In the beginning these were Harry and Hester Hilling and their four children, who built and ran a general store. Ivar and Anna Zinter opened a blacksmith shop. Joshua and Miriam Lange, with abundant Kuwapi assistance, built the Temple at the place where the New River emerged from the base of Green Dome hill. It was the gathering place for all the people, Red and White, every Sunday. With each homily Seer Joshua Lange and Elder Jashen Shybear established the wall of Church doctrine steadily, as though laying bricks.

The most well-known of these doctrines was really just a sop to keep the White Wing within the bounds of the original church. A Stiffneck was expected to marry only his or her first cousin, or a second cousin in a pinch. It was never spoken aloud, but clearly understood, that the Stiffnecks could not stand the idea of a young man among the Kuwapi getting hitched to a white woman. With this in mind, the basic fact that Leliel and Miriam had the same parents was never revealed by anyone in the know.

In 1869 the rumor of gold was heard tell along the upper stretch of the New River. Headwater swelled with a massive influx of prospectors hungry for the shiny yellow stuff. Some did grow rich, but most of the “Sixty-Niners” struck out. Some of these stayed behind as converts to the Headwater Fellowship. After a railroad spur connected the growing town to the new Union Pacific line running across the country it was easy for cousins of fresh new Stiffnecks to make their way out west and get hitched.

Secondary tabernacles were established in the mission field throughout the United States and Europe but all Fellowship funerals, called Last Rites, still took place at the heart of the mother church in Headwater.

In 1906 Chief Takoda died at the age of eighty-four and lay in state in the Temple sanctuary for two weeks. Many Stiffnecks scattered across the country journeyed by train or even by horseless carriages to pay their last respects to this man whose name meant “Friend To All”. The Church had grown far beyond what even the Seer envisioned at the founding of Headwater. And when Jashen Shybear committed his father’s body directly into the hands of God it was a sight that few but the oldest members present had ever seen.

But not everything was so grim. During the fair held in honor of the Seer’s sixty-fifth birthday a barnstormer came to town offering rides in his biplane. Absolutely fearless, Joshua Lange stepped up to be the first to fly, to the delight of everyone present. Few religious leaders have been so beloved. And Lange certainly did not look to be sixty-five years of age.

But in the 1920s the first persecutions of Stiffnecks began. Nebraska and South Dakota joined a dozen other states in banning marriages between first cousins and the Church was obliged to perform its weddings on the Wyoming side of the state line to make them legal. Their objection on First Amendment grounds got bogged down in the Federal court system. Other Christian groups rejected the Headwater Fellowship wholesale for distorting the Bible and introducing an entirely new one called the Green Book.

Then in 1930, with no advance notice, Joshua resigned as Seer and departed Headwater for parts unknown, taking Miriam with him, apparently. Just as inexplicably they did not take young Ariel and Jael, the two siblings the childless Langes had adopted for their own in their old age. The five year old children were thought to be orphans, and it seemed cruel beyond measure they should be abandoned a second time, and deliberately at that.