In a recording made for his son, Don Rogers talks about his family’s cattle ranch on Pinon Mesa in the 1910’s, about getting lost in the wilderness at the age of six, about an expert tracker named Avery Burford who led the search party, and about being found the next morning after he spent the night alone on a sandbar of East Creek. He recalls a gunfight between cowboys Louis Stewart and Blue, a shooting by a man named Pete Lapham, and tensions between sheep and cattle ranchers. He speaks about Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, and their gang the Wild Bunch, who, Rogers claims, often stopped at the Rogers ranch on the way to their hideout at Robber’s Roost. He remembers his mother Anna (Bowman) Rogers and her teaching career prior to marrying his father. He describes his family’s love for horses, his father’s response to an incident of animal cruelty, and trapping a grizzly bear that had been killing cattle. He speaks about deer hunting, incidents of poaching, and cattle rustling. He talks about a white Arabian horse that he trained and rode as a boy. He describes the log cabin his father and grandfather built on their Pinon Mesa homestead. The interview was conducted by the Mesa County Oral History Project, a collaboration of Mesa County Libraries and the Museums of Western Colorado.
*Photograph from the 1928 Grand Junction High School yearbook
