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DOLORES

Dolores is a tiny town nestled in a canyon of the San Juan Mountains with the Dolores River running along one side and rocky cliffs on the other. The people who live here are proud of their town, its four parks, the library, and the Galloping Goose Historical Society Museum. The Galloping Goose is a resourceful combination of a Buick or Pierce-Arrow body and an enclosed truck bed that was used to carry, mail, freight, and passengers on the tracks of the Rio Grande Southern Railroad. The first Goose was built in 1931 and delivered mail to the mountain towns. There were seven Geese operating in Southern Colorado until the 1950s, when the railroad lost the mail contract. The Geese were converted for tourist use and carried passengers on the Durango-Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad and the Cumbres-Toltec Railroad.

Centuries before the railroad came to southwestern Colorado, the Ancient Puebloans built their adobe homes high in the cliffs above the canyons of Mesa Verde. Their civilization flourished for hundreds of years but mysteriously vanished by AD 1300. The Spanish explorers came in the 1500s, looking for cities of gold, but when they found only adobe pueblos, they didn’t return for two centuries. In 1765, Don Juan de Maria de Rivera led an exploring party into the San Juan Mountains, looking for gold and silver. They left some evidence of their early mining efforts and named several of the area’s rivers: the San Juan, the Rio de las Animas (the River of Lost Souls), the Mancos (the River of the Crippled One), and the Rio de Nuestra Senora de las Dolores (the River of Sorrow).

Galloping Goose #5 carried mail, passengers, and freight for the Rio Grande Southern Railroad. Courtesy of Wendy Williams.

In the 1870s, the water of the Dolores River and the lush grass lining its banks drew cattlemen to the Dolores Valley. The little town of Big Bend was settled in a sweeping curve of the Dolores River, and it grew very slowly due to its isolation. There was a constant threat of attack by the Utes, whose hunting parties roamed the valley and frightened the settlers working in their fields. Afraid that the Indians would torch their cabins while they were sleeping, the settlers often hid outside in the brush at night. Investors refused to go where “savages lurked,” and the ranchers didn’t want any Utes for neighbors, certain they were stealing their horses and slaughtering their cattle.

By 1881, most of the Utes had been pushed out of Colorado and sent to a reservation in Utah, only the Southern Utes remained on a reservation southwest of Durango. Treaties had established their right to leave the reservation to hunt, but this increased tensions with the farmers and ranchers. On June 19, 1885, a group of white cattlemen attacked an Indian hunting party at their camp on Beaver Creek, north of Dolores. They killed six Utes and wounded two others, then they fled. A few days later, in retaliation, a party of Utes attacked a settler’s homestead, burning his cabin, killing the father and seriously wounding the mother, who managed to escape with her children. Once again, settlers fled their homes to hide in the brush as troopers from Fort Lewis, near Durango, patrolled the Dolores area. Suspicious ranchers quickly threw together a log fort where the settlers took refuge.

Newspapers as far off as Denver raged and demanded that the Indian atrocities must be stopped, completely ignoring the fact that the Indians had been attacked first and were the victims at Beaver Creek. The June 23, 1885 Durango Ideal insisted, “The progressive white people and the lousey [sic] greasy Indians cannot occupy this country together.” Editorials shouted for the complete removal of the Utes from their Southern Colorado reservation. They cited the fate of the Northern Utes, who’d been removed from Colorado and placed on the Uintah reservation in Utah.

The Rio Grande Southern Railroad Depot at Dolores displays nineteenth-century railroad memorabilia. Courtesy of Wendy Williams.

As the months went by, calm gradually returned to the Dolores Valley. The whites who had killed the Indians at Beaver Creek were never identified, and the Utes’ off-reservation activities were restricted. The relations between the two factions did not improve, but as the years passed, the hostility slowly lessened, and the shame of the Beaver Creek Massacre gradually faded.

The small town of Big Bend had three general merchandise stores, a blacksmith, a livery stable, and one saloon by 1884. Cattle ranching was the leading business in the Dolores River Valley, and the first herds of Shorthorns and Herefords were introduced. They could survive the severe winters and high altitude better than other breeds, and the herds multiplied. The mining camps in the nearby San Juans were lucrative markets for meat, hay, and farm produce, but the cattlemen also needed a means of transportation to the eastern markets.

When the railroad arrived in Durango in 1881, cattle from Dolores ranches were driven to its depot, loaded on the train and shipped to Denver and St. Louis. In 1891, the Rio Grande Southern Railroad established its railhead a few miles east of Big Bend and built a depot there. Most of Big Bend’s merchants packed up their goods and moved to the tiny new town, which they named “Dolores.” The majority of Big Bend’s citizens followed, and Dolores grew slowly. It survived the closure of the silver mines, the Great Depression, and two world wars. Today, it is the center of a recreational paradise of fishing and hunting, hiking, climbing, and outdoor activities.

RIO GRANDE SOUTHERN HOTEL

Opportunity arrived in Dolores with the Rio Grande Southern Railroad, and early settler E.L. Wilbur seized it. He quickly remodeled his own family home, built in 1873, into Dolores’s first hotel. Wilbur opened the Rio Grande Southern Hotel in 1893, and it was a great success. The guest rooms were clean, and Mrs. Wilbur served delicious, home-cooked meals. Two trains arrived daily from Durango. The first came at noon, and the passengers were eager to stretch their legs and have lunch at the hotel. The second train from Durango pulled in around 8:00 p.m., and its passengers spent the night at the hotel. Railroad conductors, engineers, and others who worked for the Rio Grande Southern happily joined their passengers for a night at the hotel. Then everyone continued on their journey or their job the next morning. Railroad workers who were laying tracks from Dolores north to Telluride boarded at the hotel until the line was completed.

Dolores had no newspaper, so the hotel lobby became a popular place where townspeople mingled with travelers and caught up on the news. The hotel, whose name was often abbreviated to “The Southern,” was the only one in town and, as a major employer, very important to the local economy. Today, the hotel is one of Dolores’s oldest businesses, located in one of the original buildings.

The Rio Grande Southern Hotel was a welcome stop for passengers traveling on the Rio Grande Southern. Railroad. Courtesy of Wendy Williams.

In 1906, Teddy Roosevelt made the hotel his headquarters when he visited Mesa Verde before designating it as a national park. Western novelist Zane Grey came to research the area in 1911 and wrote several chapters of his bestselling novel, Riders of the Purple Sage, while sitting at a desk in room no. 4. During the 1920s, when the region’s shale oil business was booming, Conoco and Texaco employees often boarded here.

The Rio Grande Southern has had several owners over the years, and at one time, its restaurant offered a popular Friday night fish fry. Locals flocked to the hotel to enjoy the food and the hand-crafted beer created by a local brew master. Chef-writer Rita Bergstrom operated the Old German Restaurant at the hotel for nearly a decade and wrote her bestselling cookbook, Taste of Old Germany, while working there.

GHOSTS

Today, some of the hotel rooms are rented by permanent residents, while others are reserved for travelers and tourists. Everyone living at the hotel has heard the strange stories about its ghosts, and some have even encountered these apparitions. The hotel has been investigated by a paranormal group that determined several different spirits reside here. Some people have seen the apparition of a young teenage girl on the second floor as she dashes about and then vanishes. Occasionally, she appears in a guest room but disappears quickly.

When the hotel was being renovated, a tall stranger, who was often seen carrying a ladder, came and went. Construction workers and the hotel owner thought he was one of the workmen hired for the project. Then one day he walked right through a wall in front of several stunned employees. Guests and residents have seen a wispy, elderly gentleman who resembles an old photo of a local physician. Many years ago, the doctor married the woman who owned the Southern Hotel at the time. The couple lived there for several years.