Denver Post Book Review of This Cursed Valley 
by Larry K. Meredith

History, fable cross in Colorado tale
By Nancy Lofholm
Denver Post Staff Writer

When Will Martin rode into Colorado's Crystal River Valley in 1880 on his way to California, the Texas cowpoke didn't know he was running smack dab into an Indian curse that would bedevil him for the next half-century he ended up spending in the valley. That curse and its effects on Martin, the three loves of his life and his offspring make up a page-turner, night-light-burner of a Western saga, “This Cursed Valley,” from new Colorado author Larry K. Meredith.

Meredith, an administrator and teacher at Western State College, hangs the fictitious tale of Martin on a frame of historical fact that has the cowboy interacting with the likes of Bat Masterson, the Earp brothers, Doc Holliday, Teddy Roosevelt and coal king J.C. Osgood.

Martin's life intersects real events that took place between 1879 and 1929 in a valley that stretches from the headwaters of the Crystal River north of Crested Butte to its junction with the Roaring Fork River near Carbondale.

Some of those events that underpin “This Cursed Valley” read like the news behind today's headlines: Thousands of new residents pour into Colorado. Boom-and-bust balloons and shrinks towns. Mining for the mountains’ resources scar once beautiful lands. Landowners lose their property to encroaching development. American Indians face discrimination.

The story begins with the curse. It is placed on the valley by Owl Man, an elder Ute holy man, after the Meeker massacre sent Utes fleeing from the beautiful area that had been their summer home. As he prepares to leave the valley, Owl Man stands on a high rock outcrop, calls to the spirits and asks that any white men who live here in the future lead lives of pain and sorrow.

Martin's life in the valley includes some serendipity in addition to the inevitable pain and sorrow. When he first rides into the mining town of Schofield, he wins a silver mine in a poker game. That is the first event to derail his plan to go to California. The second is Tracey Collins, a married woman Martin falls in love with. Martin further ties himself to the Crystal Valley by forming a partnership with another cowboy to run a horse ranch near the north end of the valley.

Martin quickly learns of the curse on the valley from its somewhat spooked inhabitants. Within a decade of putting down roots and suffering some of the curse’s effects himself ─ not being able to marry his first love, having a failed marriage to his second and becoming estranged to his children from that marriage, losing a child with his third ─ Martin becomes a party to the curse.

On his many wanderings through the valley he has come to love, Martin encounters Owl Man, who has returned to the remote spot in the valley where he first placed the curse. Before he dies, Owl Man anoints Martin as the bearer of the curse and the one who can control the spirits behind it.

Martin eventually will need those spirits as he faces some truly bad men and women. One of his own sons is among them.

“This Cursed Valley” was chosen as a finalist in the best original paperback novel category of the Spur Awards, which have honored books such as Larry McMurtry's “Lonesome Dove,” Michael Blake's “Dances With Wolves” and Tony Hillerman's “Skinwalker.”

It is a novel action-packed enough to be read in hours-long, chapter-absorbing chunks. When the last page is turned, a reader is left wondering if the curse still brings trouble and calamity to those who would use the Crystal River Valley for self-serving ends. “Perhaps,” Meredith notes in his afterword, “the curse is not such a bad thing after all.”

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