Piñon Mesa is a real place. It is a large mesa, part of the great Uncompahgre Plateau of western Colorado. It contains some of the best grazing land in the area. For many years, the early day cattlemen actually did hold a ban on sheep on these ranges. They intimidated any sheepman who dared to try to break their ban by ruthlessly destroying his camps, killing his sheep and beating his herders.

I ranched in this area for thirty years, where I had a small herd of Beefmaster cattle. I have personally ridden over much of the country described in my story, so I know some of it pretty intimately. I also knew and worked with many of the ranchers whose ancestors had first come into the area as sheepmen after the ban was finally broken. By the time I ranched there, these men and their families had become integrated and accepted into the community the same as all of us. Most of them now run both sheep and cattle. I would not have gotten some of my ranch had it not been for the help of two of those sheepmen.

It was as I rode this country, and worked with these neighbors, that the idea for my novel, Piñon Mesa, took form in my mind.

It is very important to me to present the people and the country as close to the way things actually were and as factually as is possible. This includes the way they lived and thought, not just what they did. Mine is not a story about famous gunfighters like so many modern westerns are today.

It also mentions the man, John Otto, who was responsible for getting the Colorado National Monument established. I tried to describe Otto as the ranchers who knew him felt about him.

The first Anglo settlers were allowed to settle this area in the early 1880s when the Ute Indians were taken off this land by the government and forced onto reservations I personally knew the man who had been the first white child born in the Escalante Canyon west of the little town of Delta. He and his parents had taken part in the sheep wars. By the time I knew him, his sons ran one of the largest ranches on the Uncompahgre. Much of their range was now leased government land. I often rode with them and they helped me get my herd started.

Piñon Mesa is based on the fact the cattlemen once actually had a ban on sheep. It is about how they thought and felt about sheep and sheepmen. I will readily admit it is fiction and should be read as a story and not as a factual history of the way things really happened.