Eldridge Trott

Gathering at Vantage Eldridge Trott

Perhaps this is a romance, or it could be an accounting of the way life was in the 19th and 20th centuries. They came to Vantage over a five-decade period-drifters, entrepreneurs, developers, the railroad, the ranchers, the Blacks, the Irish, beautiful women, including a Kentucky belle and a yound Irish immigrant. The mystic hanging valley, high in the Rocky Mountains, isolated, almost hidden from civilization, captured and held them except for a few escapees. Their lives were at times shaped by a Victorian society. A bank robbery compounded the problems. On a lesser scale that foreshadowed major issues of the coming century, the resident engaged in racial and environmental incidents. Drugs, a major problem even in that time, took their toll. Residents often found refuge in the cemetery that held a venerated place above the town and provided a panoramic view of the high country landscape. The young journalist came to Vantage in 1921 searching for his deceased mother's identity, but fell in love with a beautiful young Irish girl and left the valley in frustration, finding neither his mother's story nor a successful completion of courtship of Kelley. The girl is stubborn in her love for the valley even as she faces a need to answer the journalist. Some violence, explicit sex.