Those same five men in an early Aspen mining camp; the mule train, ore wagons, crossing Independence Pass; what my mom said was probably an afternoon shift at the Smuggler Mine; two miners underground, setting black-powder charges; the formal portrait of the brave- but sad-looking Jerome B. Wheeler; the horse-drawn wagon, a beer delivery, at the Hotel Jerome; the dark-skinned hotel maid, maybe Mexican (Little Ray thought she was Italian). No, I’m not forgetting the boy or young man I didn’t describe to my mother—I still hadn’t described him to her. That kid from the 1940s, handsome but childlike, a short boy with a tall snow shovel. I’d sensed—I still sensed—he might have been a different kind of ghost, the kind who can hurt you. Or maybe he was just a recurring dream, but I didn’t think so. What was slightly off about him haunted me: his ski sweater and the hat with a pom-pom. The sweater was too big for his shoulders; the pom-pom on the ski hat was girlish, or it accentuated something girlish about him. A hotel guest, a woman, must have left her hat and sweater behind. In the passage of time, these images never changed—old black-and-white photographs don’t lie, do they?

There’d been another image, more disturbing than the rest. I’d talked to my mom about it.

“Oh, those guys,” she said, unconcerned. “The white guys are Aspen volunteers—I think they put down a Ute uprising.”

In a telephone conversation with a helpful person at the Aspen Historical Society, I said I was trying to understand what was going on in a black-and-white photo I’d seen: armed white men are posed with the bullet-riddled body of a dead Ute. One of the white men’s dead companions is propped up in a more dignified position than the splayed-out body of the disrespected Ute. Aspen was once called Ute City, a silver camp in the Roaring Fork mining district. The Utes were removed to Utah in the 1880s. There’d been a Ute uprising in 1879, and another one—a small one, maybe the last—in 1887. The historical society had no record of the photo. I don’t know which Ute uprising I got a glimpse of. Does it matter? They’re all ghosts now, not just the two dead guys. Only the disrespect remains.