Like delving into a great detective novel, studying the written legacy of our town's founder, Ezra Small, only presents more fascinating mysteries the deeper one goes. Early segments of his diary offer a fairly straightforward description of a typical trapper's life. The only hint of things to come is his occasional mention of "spells," periods of lost time when he would experience increasingly disturbing dreams and visions.
But as the journal progresses, Small's writing takes on an almost metaphysical tone. He gradually shifts from straight expositional prose to a sort of odd prophecy constrained by three-line text fragments. Some of the early verses seem to simply be laments or reflections on his existence:
Night and cold
Twin enemies mine
Take me to your breast
Fill my heart and mind
O drown the voices forever
Someone, somewhere, sometime
Not exactly Walt Whitman, but intriguing nonetheless. Further on, the reader may begin to question Small's sanity, which surely must have been tested by the long winter months alone in his cabin:
Between 37 and 40, 94 and 102
Great shifts occur
Time and space collide
The yellow bounty swells
The green torment spews
The black heart smirks
And as the later diary pages chronicle the steady deterioration of Small's mental state, seemingly random strings of letters and numbers completely cover the margins of every sheet, even lacing among the poems:
hdzm mlg nfgv ivw gfork xirvh 36 vckozrmh 89 ifov gsv uozdvw zovczmwvi zg gsvyvh wzb rh xlnrmt povrm gl hkivdvoo izl nzwv fh
No matter the literal interpretation of these strange writings, several broad conclusions can be drawn from them. One, Ezra Small was a complex, dark and deeply lonely man. Two, alone in the unsettled Kansas wilderness, he was forced to give free rein to his occasionally terrifying demons, whatever their source. And three, by so painstakingly committing his
