Thomas Riggs

Thomas Riggs was born in 1858 in central Indiana, the third son of a grain farmer, and came to southeastern Colorado in 1881 as part of the homesteader wave that would, within a decade, transform the short-grass prairie of Baca County into a patchwork of dry-land claims and failed ambitions. He did not file a homestead claim. He came instead with a set of well-drilling tools he had learned to use on farms in eastern Kansas, and he understood correctly that water was the only thing those plains could not provide on their own. Every claim needed a well. He had the equipment and the knowledge to put one down.

By 1885 he had established himself as the most reliable driller between Springfield and the Kansas line, working a circuit that took him across Baca, Prowers, and Kiowa counties in a roughly seasonal pattern following new claims as they were filed. He charged by the foot and kept detailed records. His field journals — narrow canvas-covered booklets, eleven in total across thirty-two years — document formation types, depths to water, casing materials, flow rates, and the practical observations of a man who spent his working life studying what lay beneath the surface of the southeastern Colorado plain.

In the summer of 1898, Riggs was working a well northeast of Vilas for a homesteader named Cummings. The claim sat over a section of the confined aquifer system that underlies the Ogallala formation in that part of Colorado — an artesian zone where water under natural pressure can reach the surface without pumping. Riggs completed the casing at 312 feet on July 10. The well flowed at a rate he noted as "sufficient and stable." He remained on the property two additional days to observe pressure consistency and seal the casing head.

The entry is accompanied by a hand-drawn diagram showing what appears to be a wave pattern with harmonic intervals marked. The notation system used in the diagram does not correspond to any standard geological or acoustic shorthand the archive has been able to identify. The same secondary notation appears in journals three through eight, interspersed among standard well records and formation notes, beginning in 1891 and continuing through 1908.

Riggs kept his journals in two distinct registers. The primary register is straightforward technical documentation — formation descriptions, casing depths, flow rates, GPS-equivalent location descriptions using section and township markers. Any trained well driller could read them and find the information useful. The secondary register appears beginning in Journal No. 3, dated from 1891, and runs through No. 8 (1908). It occupies margins, back pages, and occasionally full entries. It uses a consistent notation system the archive has been unable to attribute to any known shorthand, geological code, or personal cipher system on record.

Riggs also captained the volunteer fire brigade in Springfield from 1901 until his death in June 1914. He served without incident and is remembered in the county records for organizing the response to the grain warehouse fire of 1907, which he contained before it reached the adjacent grain elevator. His death at age fifty-six was attributed to a cardiac episode while on a routine drilling job north of Campo. He died in the field, alone, beside a completed casing.

Of his eleven journals, nine have been located. Six of the nine contain the secondary notation. The two unlocated journals — believed to be numbers nine and ten, covering approximately 1909 to 1912 — are thought to have been retained by his eldest daughter, Mabel, who last appeared in Denver city directories in 1921. Her subsequent whereabouts are not known.