When rancher Marie Scott died in 1979, her will ignited a turf war that still rumbles 30 years later

From a cabinet in her china hutch, Frances Talbert pulls out a bundle of papers that is so thick and weighty she needs both hands to lift it. "Parts of this will always be a mystery," says the feisty retiree as she snaps off a rubber band and begins to sift through the yellowed letters, legal forms and check stubs. The mystery — and the attendant hard feelings that years haven't softened — centers on a little flame-haired, bow-legged woman dead for nearly 31 years, the storied Marie Scott. When Scott died in her modest home down Colorado 62 from the Talbert place in the winter of 1979, she was a land baron without equal. But she had no immediate relatives and no shirttail kin — at least that she would claim. In a story told and retold so often that it is worn at the edges of memories like an old book, Scott divvied up what was left of a ranching empire that once stretched for 100,000 acres from Ridgway into Utah. Scott split her estate among a dozen friends, neighbors and business associates. They were mostly hardworking people who had pleased Scott by loving the land as much as she did or by doing things for her as simple as opening gates or stringing straight, strong fence. During her lifetime, Scott never tolerated what she termed "monkey business." And she was often quoted as saying, "The more I know of people, the more I like my dog." That quip may have been prescient. What some people did as soon as Scott was laid to rest under a pine tree — some say even before — would not have pleased her...more