UNSTOPPABLE / Before the first act
This is Ryan’s story, though his part begins long after the first act.
No life begins with its own arrival.
We inherit the ambitions, curiosities, and contradictions of those who came before us. Some remembered, others forgotten, yet none entirely absent. To understand what follows, we must first return to what came before.
Daybreak
The name given to my great-great-grandfather, Edward Proctor Hunt, four days after his birth on the Acoma Mesa in 1861.
A fitting place for this story to begin.
“Daybreak” Edward Hunt 29 years old (Circa 1890). Photographer: Charles Fletcher Lummis (1859–1928)
1861 | Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico Territory
Born on a mesa high above the desert, he was named Gaire meaning “Daybreak”.
At ten, a horse nearly killed him. His family prepared to bury him. Then, as the story goes, the boy opened his eyes to the sun.
Years later, at school, his hair was cut and his language forbidden. He took a new name. Edward Proctor Hunt. But Acoma's stories remained with him.
Decades later, in Washington, he would preserve those stories in the written record, despite those who believed they should never leave the mesa.
I never knew my great-great-grandfather. Yet I've spent a lifetime imagining his. The worlds he crossed, the things he endured, and what he chose to leave behind.
Before I had a story of my own, I had his.
Center “Daybreak” Edward Proctor Hunt 67 years old (Circa 1928).
HISTORY RECORDED
Far from the mesa, Edward became Chief Big Snake. With his family, he toured Europe as a Wild West entertainer, performing in arenas a world away from home.
In 1928, he sat before a different audience. With his sons helping translate, he spent weeks recounting his telling of Acoma’s beginnings to Smithsonian researchers in Washington. An inheritance carried in memory passed from his voice to the page.
I imagine him between those worlds. The spectacle of the traveling show. The quiet work of remembering. A man whose life stretched far beyond the place where it began.
His travels took him across an ocean. His words would carry him across generations.