Sunday, April 16, 2006
Traveling East to See the West
Next week I’m heading to Kansas with a man I met on the Internet. Don’t worry if you’re reading this, Grandma. It’s all legit. We are hot on the trail of Henry P. Larrabee, a man who played a rather notorious role in Humboldt County history, but about whom very little is known. I met my soon-to-be traveling companion, Jim, several years ago on a genealogy discussion board as I was researching a documentary I wanted to make about Blocksburg, which we think was originally called “Laribee” before it became Powellville and then finally Blocksburg. Jim was much further along in his research and had even managed to locate some of Larrabee’s descendants, who--somewhat surprisingly--painted quite a different picture of Larrabee after he returned from the West. It turns out the man was a lot more complex than the facts we originally had allowed us to see. Well, for various reasons my movie never happened, but I became fast friends with Jim and his family, and he has continued to correspond with various members of the Larrabee clan. Over the past couple months, a series of events has made Jim decide it’s time to go meet some of these people in Texas, Kansas, and Montana. And most exciting of all, he’s asked me to come along and record the interviews. Maybe I’ll get to make that movie after all....
