NAME: Zeb Miracle

AGE: 25

QUOTE: “I’ve always been interested in history.”

It’s hard to come up with a more apt moniker than Zeb for a Colorado historian.

It was, after all, Zebulon Pike who spotted the big rock now known as Pikes Peak.

Notwithstanding Zebulon, N.C., “Zebulon” is redolent of Colorado.

So Zeb Miracle, 25 (he turns 26 on March 12), might have had little choice but to be a historian of the American West.

No matter, actually, that his name stems from the Biblical figure Zebulun, 10th son of Jacob in the Old Testament, Miracle felt the call of the past early on.

The really distant past.

He started off as a volunteer at Dinosaur Valley, then went to the Museum of Western Colorado’s downtown Grand Junction dinosaur museum, working on the earliest known Colorado residents, albeit not the small, hairless bipeds that walked upright and made tools who arrived in only the last few hundred years.

“I’ve always been interested in history,” Miracle said. “At first I wanted to be a paleontologist.”

He became a museum volunteer even before he started attending Central High School.

After graduation, he went to the University of Colorado at Boulder, working on double majors in history and psychology.

Eventually, he concluded that his mix of majors made little sense, so one day he walked into the anthropology department and declared his second major for anthropology instead.

As it turned out, his electives in history fit into his anthropology core and his anthropology classes worked for his history degree, so Miracle was able to graduate on time with a double major as intended, just not the same mix with which he started.

While history majors around the world find themselves working far from libraries and original texts, Miracle found himself with an opportunity back home in Grand Junction, where David Bailey, then interim director of the Museum of Western Colorado, was needing help.

Miracle is “a Renaissance guy,” Bailey said. “He’s kind of like a sponge in that he’s interested in everything.”

Which, in a small museum, he had to be.

So it is that Miracle’s office is adorned with bits of everything, not least a collection of Civil War books.

“It’s hard to be a history major and not have a thing for the Civil War,” Miracle said.

But there’s not much in the way of Civil War history to be found in western Colorado and Miracle in any case is just starting out.

Miracle has been a grunt, albeit an observant grunt, on several treks to work on mysteries that the museum and the Western Investigations Team — a joint effort of the museum and Mesa State College — have set out to solve.

He’s sifted earth in search of bits of metal or shard of evidence that might shed light on the fate of Alferd Packer’s party of gold hunters stranded along the Lake Fork of the Gunnison River. He’s moved rock to learn more about what happened in the Kannah Creek drainage more than two centuries ago.

And now he’s come into his own.

Miracle again is doubling up as the curator of archaeology and the curator and site manager for the museum’s Cross Orchards Historical Site.

In his latter capacity, he’s working on a way to put the museum’s collection of farm machinery under cover to protect it from the western Colorado elements.

As the head of archaeology, he’s the designer of the display on the earliest human settlers of western Colorado, the ancient Puebloans, Fremonts, Utes and others who trod across the arid, sage-covered plateaus and sub-alpine forests hundreds and even thousands of years ago.

All of that has taken Miracle into archaeology, but he doesn’t see himself as an Indiana Jones type, and that’s despite the battered hat that adorns his office, but never his head.

The aspect of archaeology that attracts him, Miracle said, is the one that shows how ancient civilizations and tribes were tied together.

He’s a connect-the-dots guy, and his dots cover centuries.

So, for instance, where many might see a fired clay pot found in the Southwest and marvel over how such a piece of work survived fire, drought, beating sun and freezing winters, Miracle might see a piece of pottery out of place.

That the work of one tribe or clan might show on lands associated with another suggests that there was interaction between the two.

That interaction might have been peaceful trade, it could have been the booty of a raid, but it’s evidence that the ancients didn’t live in a vacuum.

“These aren’t faceless people,” he said.

Miracle told the tale of the earliest residents through the pots on display in the Museum of the West, shedding light on how they lived and what they valued — like the cup with a handle that’s indistinguishable from the modern-day coffee cup.

Next on the list of Miracle’s projects is photography.

Not taking photos, but studying the old negatives.

Turns out that those negatives are kind of like, well, sponges.

They took everything in. An old negative studied anew can reveal details that no one ever knew were there, Miracle said, pointing at an old photo of an early Grand Valley cabin with a dark space for a door.

Close inspection, though, shows more than an empty space. A shadow suggests someone still inside.

How much can be revealed from old photos is a secret Miracle for the moment is keeping to himself.

“There are some cool, new techniques,” of studying photos, he said, and what they reveal “is fascinating to see.”

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E-mail Gary Harmon at gharmon@gjds.com.