Golden Glosa Recalling Dearfield’s First Year

These are to be our fields and because they are ours, [because we hope to develop them, they] will be very dear to us, so why not incorporate that sentiment in the name we select and call our colony: Dearfield? 
— Dr. J.H.P. Westbrook

For the first year, living off the heat of sagebrush, these 
were the things that kept us going: our faces as they are 
or were, hog black and shining, turned to 
bask in the slough of May crisp moonlight; to be, 
as Greeley said, young men going West, our 
backs heavy with leather, tin, axe, and flask; and these fields 
speckled with balsamroot that kinned our mothers and 
soon our daughters. Because 
we proclaimed in our chorus of they: 
These are to be our fields. And because they are

our fields, because each grist and raindrop is ours, 
and ultimately, because 
God had arrowed his grin toward the Negro, we 
made a settlement out of sandstone and sheer hope. 
For the first year, we slept two to 
a cot in tents and worked to develop 
a plan for our immaculate obsidian city. To them, 
the men at the governor’s office and the chaps that swing they 
cocks out wagon windows at our women, know this—and be it His will—
ours. Because we hope to develop them, they will be 

supporters of our enterprise, we’d say. Fat off our crops, our very 
labor. And paying us for it! Dear 
O.T. would puff, his face a conduit for tobacco smoke to
speak through, to speech through, to motivate us. 
They thread no water from the reservoir to us, so 
we hold out our hands, flasks, birthing buckets and why 
even our uncrowned mouths, to catch the rain. Not 
for drinking, but for spitting. To incorporate 
alongside rye seed and earth, to grow wheat in our field that’s 
very dear to us. So why not incorporate that sentiment

into the land we farm, into the dry dirt in 
which we bury our hands and our hopes? The 
love we put into the buffalo chips we scald for warmth, the name 
we call out to the meadowlarks that flock the plains, the women we 
kiss, send to scatter the marmots and select 
to nurse our young. And 
they, the white men who suffocate Denver, Boulder and call 
us out our names will see the fruits of our 
resilient and God-ordained colony
in the name we select and call our colony: Dearfield.