The Hendrick Account
On the Autonomous Scarecrow · Fremont County, Colorado · October 1893
Rode the Ute Pass road at first light. Found a scarecrow standing alone in the road, three miles from the nearest cultivated field. No post, no mounting frame — simply standing, weight distributed as though the ground had accepted it. No wagon tracks. No boot prints. The surrounding earth was undisturbed in every direction. The gale had passed three days prior. No field hand has reported a scarecrow missing from the Ute Pass corridor.
Returned to the site. The figure is still present. Hat of unfamiliar manufacture — not consistent with local provisioners. Wide brim, stitching pattern not recognized by the milliner at Canon City. Object has not been tampered with. Several crows observed perched along the fence line to the west, none closer than forty feet. They did not move when I approached. They did not move when I left.
Traced the scarecrow's probable origin to the Mule Creek field, Huerfano County, based on the knotted burlap face and flour-sack torso — construction matching a figure documented there in a field survey photograph, September 1891. The Mule Creek post is intact. Undamaged. Still standing in its original hole. The figure it carried is gone. No one witnessed the departure. The farmer does not use the field in October.
Account of the Moving Scarecrow
The post at Mule Creek had held a scarecrow for two harvests without incident. The farmer, a man named Ord, had built it himself in the summer of 1891 from materials on hand — a flour sack stuffed with straw, a coat no longer serviceable, a hat retrieved from a ditch. He had sunk the post himself and bound the figure to it with wire. It did not move during the storms of 1892. It did not move during the hard winter that followed.
After the October gale of 1893, it was gone.
Ord found the post intact and the wire still looped at the top, as though the figure had been carefully unbound rather than blown free. The wire had not snapped. There was no storm damage anywhere on the fence line. The hat — his own, retrieved from the ditch — had been replaced at the post with a hat he did not recognize. Wide-brimmed, dark, with a stitching pattern the Canon City milliner could not identify. Ord left it where it stood. He did not attempt to find a new figure for the post.
The figure itself was found three miles away, in the Ute Pass road, by this correspondent, on the morning of October 14th. It stood in the center of the road with no visible means of support. It was upright. The surrounding earth showed no tracks of any kind — no drag marks, no boot prints, no wheel ruts. The storm had passed three days earlier. Whatever ground moisture remained from the gale had preserved the surface in an undisturbed state.
There are limited explanations for this. Someone transported the figure, dismantled its post, removed it from the Ord field without leaving any evidence, and placed it standing in an open road three miles away — also without leaving any evidence. And then returned to the Ord field to leave a different hat on the empty post. Or the figure moved on its own account.
When I describe it as standing in the road, I mean to be precise: it was in a posture of standing. Not propped, not leaning, not collapsed against a fence. It stood the way a person stands when they have arrived somewhere and are not certain whether to proceed.
Ord reported in spring of 1894 that the figure at Mule Creek — the original, the one found in his road — had been replaced. He awoke one morning to find it back at the post, bound with new wire, wearing the unfamiliar hat. The wire was not his. The binding was tight and well-executed. He had not done it. His wife had not done it. There were, again, no tracks.
He did not harvest the Mule Creek field in 1894. He said the figure was watching the road, not the crop. He did not attempt to explain this further and asked that his name not be used in print. It has been omitted accordingly. The scarecrow in the road is documented. The post at Mule Creek is documented. The hat is documented. These facts do not resolve.
In every field where this figure has been documented, crows have been observed in the immediate vicinity — but at distance. They do not land on the figure. They do not approach the post. They perch on fence lines and on the ground and they watch. They have been observed watching the road for some time after the figure passed from view.
Whether this represents ordinary corvid wariness or something more particular, this correspondent cannot say. The crows are consistent. Their distance from the figure is consistent. Their attention is consistent. That is all that can be said with confidence.