FROM the days of the Dominguez-Escalante expedition and of Zebulon Pike, people had talked about the charms of these highest Rocky Mountains. Artists with the early explorers—Titian Peale with the Long expedition, Richard Kern with Frémont and Gunnison—depicted them in dramatic sketches. In 1867 Bayard Taylor, the celebrated poet and world traveler, published an enormously popular book Colorado: A Summer Trip,1 which attracted thousands to the mining regions, not to get rich but just to look around.
Four years later, General William J. Palmer laid out and widely publicized his dream town at the foot of Pikes Peak, a town that had nothing to do with mining or ranching or any other respectable industry. Colorado Springs was the first genuine resort west of Chicago, and Palmer designed its wide streets lined with shade trees to test an odd theory of his—that aesthetics and good taste in a real estate development would pay off commercially. Though it had no springs, Palmer named it Colorado Springs because most of the fashionable resorts back East had the word springs attached to their names.
The general built it primarily as a place of residence for people of means who liked scenery, pleasant weather, and outdoor sports, or who thought that the climate would cure their consumption or asthma. Rowdies were not welcome. Refinement was the watchword. Palmer permitted no houses of prostitution or dance halls within the city limits, and he banned saloons, though he had no objection to gentlemanly drinking. Many of those who settled there were Britishers who drank tea, dressed for dinner, and sang “God Save the Queen” on Victoria’s birthday. To accommodate the transient tourist and health seeker, Palmer and his partner, William A. Bell, platted Manitou five miles away and installed there a talented English man of medicine Dr. Samuel E. Solly, whose ecstatic booklet on Manitou explained why its nauseous springs would positively cure anything, be it water brash or flatulence or catarrh of the genitourinary passages.
At this time Colorado Springs benefited from the alluring magazine articles about the Pikes Peak region by one of the nation’s best-known literary figures, Helen Hunt, who went to Manitou in 1873 to see what Dr. Solly’s miracle waters would do for her catarrh, and stayed on in Colorado Springs as the wife of a Denver and Rio Grande official, William S. Jackson. In that same year, an English writer Isabella Lucy Bird—“liberated woman” would describe her more accurately—bought a pony named Birdie in Longmont, donned a huge hat and Turkish trousers over her bloomers, and rode astride Birdie to an incipient dude ranch in an obscure upland intervale called Estes Park.
She boarded at the ranch for some months, with time out for a ride of five hundred miles alone on Birdie south to Colorado Springs, west to what is now Lake George, across the north end of South Park, and back over Kenosha Pass to Estes Park. A second interval was spent consorting with a handsome Irish ne’er-do-well known only as Rocky Mountain Jim. She spent two days and two nights climbing Longs Peak with Jim. (The spot that he picked for her nighttime “bower of evergreens” is still called Jim’s Grove.) Then she wrote all about it in a book called A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains.2 This “scandalous” true confession, a best seller to this day, brought instant notoriety to Estes Park and was one reason why Windham Thomas Wyndham-Quinn, the fourth Earl of Dunraven and Montearl in the Peerage of Ireland, hurried to Estes during the next summer to set up a hunting lodge, game preserve, and hotel. The spot for the hotel facing Longs Peak was chosen by Albert Bierstadt, whose painting of the peak adorns the reading room of the Western Collection in the Denver Public Library. Though none of Lord Dunraven’s projects worked out very well, his pioneering marked the beginning of Estes Park as a resort.
Colorado Springs and Estes Park were designed for those with time on their hands. But most visitors to Colorado through the 1870s and for three decades thereafter were short-termers in search of excitement. The tourism which they created was a byproduct of the remarkable system of narrow-gauge and standard-gauge railroads which had been built for the mining industry. Every paying mine at no matter what dizzy height along the spine of the Continental Divide came to be reached by one of the railroads—the narrow-gauge D. and R. G., perhaps on a spur to Creede, or the standard-gauge Colorado Midland to Basalt and Aspen, or the Denver and South Park to Breckenridge, or the Colorado Central to the old Gilpin County diggings, or Otto Mears’s little cliff crawlers serving Gladstone and Telluride.
This accessibility into the stratosphere was unparalleled not only in the West but in the world. The railroad companies wasted no time providing luxury equipment to entice tourists to their trains. Blushing newlyweds boarded Pullman palace sleepers and pinned their marriage licenses outside their berths before retiring. The menus of diners offered quail and antelope and champagne. From the verandas of rococo observation cars ladies and gentlemen gasped in terror as the train rattled over spindly trestles on the Cripple Creek run or groaned up Marshall Pass en route to Gunnison, or up Hagerman Pass short of Aspen, or over Lizard Head above Rico. The Georgetown Loop to Silver Plume was recommended highly for scaring people to death and so was the circling Cumbres Pass trip from Alamosa to Durango, during which engine and caboose passed one another three times while gaining altitude for the crossing.
The luxury rail traffic brought luxury hotels to replace the crude log inns of the mining towns soon after the tracks arrived. In No More Than Five in a Bed Sandra Dallas has described these Victorian hostelries, many of which thrive today. At Central City Henry Teller’s Teller House (1872) featured in its bar life-sized statues of Leda and Venus, Aphrodite and Juno, and other plump charmers of the long ago appropriately unclad to support the claims of the management that the bar was “well supplied with things to cheer and inebriate.”3 At Georgetown the reticent Frenchman Louis Dupuy opened his elegant Hotel de Paris in 1875 and reigned for twenty years as the greatest chef in the Rockies.
In Durango young Henry Strater opened the Hotel Strater (1882) with wood-burning stoves in every room and an adjoining Pisa-like column of privies three stories high. The La Veta Hotel (1884) in Gunnison was so magnificent that it failed of its own extravagance, even though trains of the D. and R. G. stopped a few feet from the lobby and its owner offered free board and room to guests for any day that the sun failed to shine. The railroads were late building to Aspen, which explains why the handsome Hotel Jerome, a Victorian masterpiece, was not opened until 1889. Its proprietor, Jerome Wheeler, called the Jerome “the handsomest hotel on the Western Slope” and he equipped it with such modern devices as electric lights and an elevator, which the passenger operated by pulling on ropes.4 The rope elevator has been replaced, but in other Victorian respects the Hotel Jerome of 1976 is much the same as it was in the nineties.
Surveyors for the ubiquitous railroads became adept at finding medicinal hot springs along their rights-of-way, which gave the lines more plush hotels to serve, and more bathhouses where the ailing could boil the poisons from their systems. A pioneer health hotel was the Cliff House (1874) at Manitou Springs. Another was the Beebee House in Idaho Springs, which did poorly until 1881, when it was found that the springs of Soda Creek contained quantities of the miracle mineral radium. The Beebee house gave way to the huge Radium Hot Springs Hotel, built right over the magic waters to which, the proprietors declared, “the stretcher is carried in only one direction.”5 Trimble Hot Springs and Hotel, a favorite with miners suffering from lead poisoning, opened near Durango in 1882 with a D. and R. G. depot at one end of the croquet court. The Antero Hotel and Mount Princeton Hot Springs prospered not far up Chalk Creek on the line of the Denver and South Park running to Gunnison.
Of all these health spas, the most spectacular was the Hotel Colorado at Glenwood Springs. It was built in 1893 at a cost of $850,000 by a New York mining engineer Walter B. Devereux and his sons Horace and James. It had two hundred bedrooms, nearly a hundred baths, a dining room as big as a basketball court, and a ballroom seventy-two feet long and twenty-four feet wide. A $100,000 stone bridge led from the hotel to the great mineral pool, the waters of which stood at ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit the year round. The Devereux men were famed polo players, and their hotel manager Harvey Lyle was a national star. From the hotel veranda, visitors could watch games on the hotel’s polo field between the Glenwood team and a team from Denver or Colorado Springs. The Hotel Colorado catered strictly to the famous or the very rich or both. Theodore Roosevelt might be registered there, or P. D. Armour or Diamond Jim Brady or Buffalo Bill. To stress its high standing with nabobs, the hotel was equipped with a railroad siding large enough to hold sixteen private cars. One of the spaces was reserved for whatever president of the United States might unexpectedly drop in for a warm swim.
The evolution of this minor tourism by rail into a major Colorado industry was foreshadowed in 1900 when a pioneer automobile manufacturer John Brisben Walker drove his Locomobile up the Pikes Peak carriage road as far as Glen Cove with the help of a brace of strong mules. Two years later, a Denver auto sales agent, W. B. Felker, made it to the top unaided in his Locomobile. The engine of Felker’s car was a steam model, the patents of which Walker had bought experimentally in 1899 and sold back to its inventors, twin brothers named Freelan and Francis Stanley.
These ingenious twins, born in Maine in 1849, were manufacturing dry plates for photography near Boston in 1900, a process they would sell soon to the Eastman Kodak Company for a million dollars. Their next project was building two-cylinder, thirty-horse-power, kerosene-fueled Stanley Steamer cars. When Freelan Stanley’s friend Walker, the Locomobile man, told him of the beauties of Colorado and what automobiles could do to bring those beauties to the masses, Freelan freighted a Stanley Steamer to Denver in June 1903 and drove it up St. Vrain Canyon by way of Longmont to Estes Park to see if Walker was telling the truth. He made the forty-mile trip on the rough St. Vrain stage road in less than two hours, which was ten times faster than the record time for the trip by stage.
In 1903 Freelan Stanley was evaporating rapidly from the ravages of tuberculosis. (He weighed only a hundred pounds.) But the majestic scenery of Longs Peak and the Continental Divide lifted his spirits. The climate of Estes—crisp, cool nights and sunny days splashed with brief afternoon showers, braced him wonderfully. He gained weight and strength and began taking long walks with a slender, red-haired, voluble young innkeeper named Enos Mills, whose romantic notions about the future of Estes Park impressed Stanley deeply. Mills was a Lincolnesque character who had packed his thirty-three years with an incredible amount of manual work, self-education, and adventure. He was born in 1870 on a Kansas farm and had left the cornfields to stake a homestead, at the age of sixteen, directly under Longs Peak. (He got his patent when he became of age and later his Longs Peak Inn adjoined the homestead.) For a dozen winters he had worked in the copper mines of Montana, and, in summer, guided parties to the top of Longs Peak, or anywhere else that visitors wanted to go in that welter of mountains, glaciers, timberline lakes, and forested canyons.
Mills’s manner of living in those years was so spartan that a few dollars of saved wages were all he had needed to finance months of travel—to Alaska and Mexico and Yellowstone Park, to the High Sierras of California and the Swiss Alps. All the while he had read incessantly to teach himself to become what he actually was when Stanley met him in 1903—the first professional environmentalist in the Rockies. His inn turned out to be more of a workshop for students of wildlife than a business. In choosing this career, Mills had been encouraged and inspired by a much older man, the great conservationist John Muir, whose activities in California had led to the creation of Yosemite and Sequoia national parks.
Mills passed along to Stanley his idea about how tourists ought to enjoy themselves in Colorado—not by taking the baths and riding scary trains, but by camping out, by hiking the mountain trails, by listening to the music of creeks and forest breezes, by studying the birds, wildflowers, trees, and animals. A knowledge of nature, Mills told Stanley, was the basis of wisdom, since everything man knew about beauty and truth came from his observation of natural forms, animate and inanimate.
Freelan Stanley found it easy to combine Mills’s love of nature with the interests of the Stanley Motor Carriage Company. He saw that Estes Park had developed very slowly because of its isolation. What it needed was more Stanley Steamers to bring more nature lovers to Longs Peak quickly and easily from Lyons and Loveland. And the park needed a modern hotel to supplement the limited space in the handful of old-time lodges like Stead’s, the Elkhorn, and Abner Sprague’s. As a first step he bought Lord Dunraven’s large holdings of land. Next, in 1907, he started a dozen Stanley Steamer Mountain Wagons shuttling to Estes from the plains towns on roads which he improved at his own expense. Two years later he designed and built, at a cost of half a million dollars, the Stanley Hotel, a sedate white clapboard echo of those White Mountain inns that he had known in New England. When tourists filled the Stanley to the rafters, he built a large addition in 1910—Stanley Manor.
Stanley’s enterprise stimulated the growth of Estes Park enormously. In ten years after 1903, the number of summer visitors increased from a few hundred to fifty thousand. Many of these visitors became addicted to Enos Mills’s rules for enjoying the outdoors. Meanwhile, Mills himself had achieved the stature of a national celebrity as a highly paid writer of books and articles on nature. He had no time for the outdoors now, being busy with a project that John Muir had suggested to him—to remove the national-forest part of Estes, which was most of it, from the jurisdiction of the Department of Agriculture and make it a national park under the Department of the Interior.
Mills found himself with an ugly and exhausting fight on his hands. The idealistic preservationist Gifford Pinchot had been dismissed as Forest Service chief in 1910. The new Forest Service was directed by men interested mainly in making money out of the forest reserves by the unrestricted sale of timber and grazing permits. These officials denied Mills’s claim that such commercial activity would do great harm to the natural environment of Estes, and they did not want to lose the region to Agriculture’s bitter rival, the Department of the Interior. They organized battalions of lumbermen and cattlemen to oppose Mills—a case of well-heeled Goliaths challenging one unsupported David.
But Mills had a compelling idea, and he found an admiring audience of millions as he lectured throughout the nation on the theme of “Room, glorious room, in which to find ourselves.” And, in the end, he won his point, which was, in effect, that the interest of countless Americans in meeting a fat marmot on the Longs Peak trail was more important than the economic interests of a few. On January 26, 1915, President Wilson signed a bill creating the 400-square-mile Rocky Mountain National Park. Sixty years later, two million people were flocking to Longs Peak annually looking for marmots or whatever else Mills had made it possible for them to discover.
One man who watched the success of Stanley’s hotel and his steamers with more than casual interest was Spencer Penrose of Colorado Springs. Penrose, a big, handsome Harvard graduate in his early fifties, had come to Pikes Peak from Philadelphia in 1892 and had made a vast amount of money, first at Cripple Creek and then by promoting a very profitable copper mine in Utah. He was the kind of man who ought to be rich, for he enjoyed the good things that money could buy—good food, good clothes, good whiskey—with the same zest that Enos Mills enjoyed spotting a pileolated warbler.
Penrose admired what Stanley’s hotel and his steamer had done at Estes Park, and he decided to do some promoting of his own at Pikes Peak. As early as 1902, when a Springs friend of his, W. W. Price, drove his buggy-shaped Winton to Glenwood Springs over Tennessee Pass, Penrose had believed that the automobile would revolutionize life in the United States, and particularly in Colorado, beribboned as it was with mining roads. To counter the mining slump, he had backed the formation of the Colorado Good Roads Association in 1905, the Rocky Mountain Highway Association in 1908, and the State Highway Commission a year later, which became the State Highway Department. To show his own faith in cars, he tried a new kind every year, and then settled on four of them—all Loziers—for his personal use, at a cost of $5,000 each.
In 1913 he rejoiced when the Colorado highway department co-operated with the Forest Service to build the first auto road in the Rockies to cross the Continental Divide, the forty-two-mile Wolf Creek Pass highway, which is still one of the loveliest drives in the state. It replaced the often impassable Ellwood Pass wagon road between San Luis Valley and the San Juan mining region. But Penrose felt that the triumph at Wolf Creek was not publicized enough. To show more effectively the merits of motor cars in mountain travel, he transformed the old carriage road to the top of Pikes Peak (14,110 feet) into the highest auto road on earth—a vertical climb of 6,746 feet in seventeen miles. He expected it to cost $25,000, but he had spent a quarter of a million dollars before it was finished in October 1915. The following August he organized the first Pikes Peak Hill Climb auto race with the celebrated Berner Eli (Barney) Oldfield among his twenty racers. Rea Lentz won the race in a tiny eight-cylinder Romano—twenty minutes and fifty-five seconds on the twelve-mile run to the summit. Oldfield could do no better than to place twelfth in his French Delage.
The race was reported around the world, and its success as a Pikes Peak tourist attraction encouraged Penrose to embark on his next promotion—a resort hotel, but not in the prim and proper style of the Hotel Stanley at Estes, patronized by earnest nature lovers. Penrose had another kind of patronage in mind—those rich Texans and Oklahomans and Kansans who vacationed abroad normally but could not do so now that a war was tearing Europe apart. To lure these frustrated hedonists to Pikes Peak, he planned a two-million-dollar establishment combining the most elegant features of the hotels that he himself had visited in Monte Carlo and Baden Baden, Cairo and Biarritz and Peking, with emphasis on all the expensive sports, plus a small zoo for the children. To design his hotel, Penrose chose the firm of Warren and Wetmore, who had shown talent for grandeur by building the Grand Central Station in New York. He called it The Broadmoor, and he placed it under Cheyenne Mountain on the site of the Count Pourtales Casino that had failed in the 1890s.
For elegance and variety, the Broadmoor outshone even the Hotel Colorado in Glenwood Springs, and the fading Antlers that General Palmer had built in downtown Colorado Springs. Penrose opened the Broadmoor on June 29, 1918, with a thoroughly European banquet prepared by an Italian chef, featuring a German band, sherry from Spain, and a French menu including veloute de volatile and braised sweetbreads aux perles de Perigord.
It was characteristic of Penrose that no little thing like a world war was going to delay his hotel construction plans. The first units of the American Expeditionary Force had arrived in France in 1917 to join the Allies in their struggle with Germany. It was a popular war in Colorado despite the misgivings of many German-born residents. People thought of Kaiser Wilhelm as the overdressed tyrant in the spiked hat who meant to make a Prussian colony out of their spacious state and substitute slavery for the freedom of their upland democracy. Some forty-three thousand Coloradans served in the army and navy. Those who stayed at home obeyed the pleas of President Wilson that they buy liberty bonds, wrap bandages, plant war gardens, and eat less meat.
A thousand Coloradans lost their lives in the sodden trenches of France before peace came with the armistice of November 11, 1918. The war brought some compensations. The dry-land farmers around Holyoke, Akron, Yuma, and Cheyenne Wells who had survived the drouths and depression of the 1890s made large profits on $2-a-bushel wheat. They bought Model-T Fords and improved their homes with modern plumbing and with windbreaks of locust and Russian olive trees. They bought windmills and steam tractors and multiple plows with which to carve up the grasslands to grow more wheat. The sugar-beet farmers prospered too, receiving twice the usual contract price for their beets from the refineries on the South Platte and Arkansas rivers. The beet growers had strong financial support from men like Charles Boettcher of Denver and George W. Swink of Rocky Ford, who had pioneered both beets and irrigation in the Arkansas Valley. Some of the transient labor for harvesting beets was supplied by revolutionists coming up the ancient Spanish trails from Mexico to earn money, which they would contribute to overthrow the Carranza government.
On the western slope the war caused a boomlet in a rare metal vanadium for hardening steel. It was a by-product of the uranium ore used by Marie Curie in 1898 when she discovered in it the radioactive element radium. Vanadium was mined in the hauntingly beautiful canyons of the Dolores and St. Miguel rivers that Dominguez and Escalante had explored during their rambling trek to Utah in 1776. Another steel-hardening metal called molybdenum was taken from Bartlett Mountain near the top of Fremont Pass (11,318 feet above sea level) on the Continental Divide north of Leadville. Molybdenum had a high melting point, but nobody knew much more about it in 1918, and it wasn’t expected to come to anything.
Three years of hard times throughout the nation followed the ephemeral prosperity of the war period, though the hardship in Colorado was less severe than in most states. The fall in price of farm products was offset somewhat by co-operative marketing and improved methods of high-altitude agriculture. The new federal land banks offered low interest rates on loans in a program to reduce foreclosures on farms hit by the collapse of land values.
One post-war incident had no economic import, but it was applauded on both sides of the Continental Divide and tended to improve the abrasive relations that existed between east and west slopes. Until 1921, “Colorado River” signified the stream discovered by Coronado’s men in 1540. It flowed to the Gulf of California from the mouth of present Green River in Utah. The other stream at the Green River confluence had been labeled “Grand River” in Hayden’s atlas, which showed it crossing western Colorado from its sources in the future Rocky Mountain National Park. After Colorado won statehood, its citizens grew increasingly annoyed that no part of Colorado River was in Colorado. To meet their complaint, the Colorado legislature picked a day in 1921 when the Utah legislature was not in session to change “Grand River” to “Colorado River,” forestalling a Utah plan to extend the name “Colorado River” to include the full length of Green River. Congress approved the Colorado action before the Utahans had time to organize a protest.
That same year of 1921 marked the start of one of the most serious aberrations in the state’s history—the rise of the Ku Klux Klan under the Grand Dragonship of a strange Denver physician Dr. John Galen Locke. Many residents of Colorado, like Americans elsewhere, found themselves full of fears after World War I—fears of hard times, of the communism of Karl Marx, of Eugene Debs and his American socialism, of the Industrial Workers of the World and their violence, of spies in the land working for foreign governments. To these fearful people, especially in the Front Range cities, Locke’s program of “One Hundred Percent Americanism” had great appeal. They found joy in Klan activities, dressing in sheets, burning crosses on Table Mountain near Golden and atop Pikes Peak, and boycotting the businesses of their opponents. They persecuted Catholics and Negroes and, especially, successful Jews such as Jesse Shwayder, the son of a Polish immigrant who had created the huge luggage firm, Samsonite Corporation. The Klansmen took advantage of the unemployment to attack recent immigrants to Colorado from Greece and Hungary who had jobs in the Denver smelters around the Globeville section and at the C. F. & I. steel works of South Pueblo—jobs which the Klan said should be held by “real” Americans. The Klansmen advised Denverites to cease patronizing restaurants bearing “foreign” names like Pagliacci or Benito or Ciancio or Wong or Torino. By 1924 the Klan membership was large enough to elect the state’s governor, a senator, the mayor and chief of police of Denver, and a majority in the general assembly. But within months most of these Klansmen turned out to be inept public officials. And when Locke resigned in June of 1925 as Grand Dragon after being jailed for contempt of court in an income-tax matter, the power of the Klan ended abruptly and completely.
The rest of the decade passed pleasantly enough. As Stanley and Penrose had hoped, cars replaced horses rapidly. The state highway department was chronically short of funds, but some progress was made in improving roads. By 1924 motorists in summer were whisking over Berthoud Pass on a new road sixteen feet wide en route to Salt Lake City. Other drivers made it from Ouray to Durango over what were called “the double hairpin loops” of the Million-Dollar Highway—so named because its gravel was alleged to contain gold. Drivers with steady nerves could manage a run over Kenosha Pass into South Park, over Poncha Pass into San Luis Valley, and over what is known today as Old Monarch Pass from Salida to Gunnison. (The present Monarch Pass highway was opened in 1939.) In the fall of 1928, the highway department assembled some homemade snowplows at Leadville and achieved a miracle by keeping Tennessee Pass open all winter. Up to then, motorists wishing to take their cars from Denver to the western slope had to freight them by rail across the Continental Divide.
Prohibition in the twenties was more of a nuisance than a problem in Colorado, which went dry in 1916, three years before passage of the national Volstead Act. Thomas Hornsby Ferril, the eminent Denver poet and essayist, has written nostalgically of the cheerful Italian speakeasies in north Denver where plenty of red wine went along with the spaghetti dinners.6 Guests in Denver arriving at private cocktail parties often found the host at his bathtub making gin for the occasion. Ferril has described also the huge tonnages of sugar from the South Platte refineries that were shipped to Leadville, where many distilleries hidden in the hills transformed the product into illicit “Leadville moon.” This fine sugar whiskey was supplied in five-gallon tins (price, $10) to customers all over the state by bootleggers driving Ford and Chevrolet sedans equipped with special springs to handle heavy liquid loads. Some bootleggers sold “Casper moon” from Wyoming and some specialized in “Red Lodge moon” from Montana, a liquor of such excellence that companies in Canada were said to bottle it for export to the United States as bonded whiskey.
No event of the twenties boosted the state’s morale quite as much as what might be called Act Two in the three-act play based on David Moffat’s railroad which we left stalled at Craig in 1913 under the presidency of William Gray Evans, son of the late ex-governor John Evans. As World War I ended, William Evans was seized by a passion—to realize Moffat’s dream of a 6.2 mile tunnel under James Peak and to continue building the railroad from Craig to Salt Lake City. The tunnel would pierce James Peak at a point 2,400 feet below Rollins Pass, reduce the distance across the divide by twenty-three miles, and eliminate the grades, curves, and blizzards of the pass. And it would permit the line to achieve Moffat’s second goal of bringing growth to the ranches of Middle Park and the coalfields and oil-shale deposits of northwestern Colorado. The pioneer bore of the tunnel would serve to test an old idea—the transfer of water from streams on the western slope to Denver’s east-slope reservoirs.
For a state of moderate wealth and less than a million people, the Moffat Tunnel was a horrendous undertaking. At the time, only four tunnels of greater length existed on earth, all in heavily populated areas in or near the Swiss Alps, and at much lower altitudes—the twelve-mile Simplon, the nine-mile St. Gotthard, the nine-mile Lotschberg, and the eight-mile Mount Cenis. Robert G. Athearn has told the story well in his history of the Denver and Rio Grande Rebel of the Rockies—how William Evans fought to overcome the general skepticism about the project from 1913 on. Voters and state legislators turned down again and again the bond issues that he proposed to raise funds for the tunnel. Officials of the Missouri Pacific and Western Pacific blocked his plans in Congress and Wall Street. Their railroads connected with the Denver and Rio Grande, and they were about to buy the latter road. They wanted no competing shorter line across the state.
Evans got no help from the leaders of Pueblo and Southern Colorado who were perennially opposed to anything that would benefit Denver and the northern tier of counties. They refused to be seduced when he promised them tunnels of their own at Monarch Pass and at Cumbres Pass. And, in late May of 1921, he was forced to conclude that his cause was lost when the Moffat Road found itself close to bankruptcy after the line had run deficits of $100,000 a month for a year and more in the vain hope that the postwar slump would soon be over.
And then a bad kind of good fortune came to Evans’s rescue. It began to rain hard in Pueblo on June 1, 1921. The Arkansas River rose slowly as the downpour continued into June 3, and residents were warned to move to higher ground. Some did move. “Others,” Robert Athearn wrote,
were morbidly curious. They jostled each other along the levees, anxious to see the display. At half-past eight that night, the torrent swept aside a breakwater west of the city, and a wall of water cascaded through its streets, carrying a mass of debris with it. The lights went out. Panic-stricken drivers gunned their engines, leaned on their horns, and joined the caravan of mad flight to higher ground. Minutes later a mile-wide swath of downtown Pueblo was submerged under twelve feet of water.7
A hundred residents of Pueblo and migrant workers living in tents along the Arkansas drowned that night in the worst flood in Colorado history. Damages to homes and office buildings exceeded sixteen million dollars. After the cleanup of dead horses, smashed autos and railroad cars and rubble, groups of Puebloans formed to demand flood-control districts. The result some months later—a double bill for flood control and a tunnel bond issue—was a surprise to many people but not to William Evans, who had been pulling wires at the statehouse to produce measures that would give Pueblo its flood control if the city supported his bond issue for the Moffat Tunnel.
The double bill passed, the tunnel was built, and five years later, on February 26, 1928, a twenty-car passenger train roared through this unique property of the State of Colorado, the initial cost of which was $15,470,000. William Evans was not among the officials on that first train. Like David Moffat before him, he had worn himself out on Denver’s seventy-year-old dream of conquering the great Rockies barrier to the West and had died in 1924 at the age of sixty-eight. Gerald Hughes, a son of Senator Charles J. Hughes, assumed the Evans role in the Moffat Road drama, which floundered through a dull Act Three of interminable maneuverings by the state tunnel authority, the Denver and Rio Grande, half a dozen transcontinental railroads, and the U. S. government.
The climax came in 1934 when Denver found itself on a direct line at last to Salt Lake City and San Francisco, but not on the tracks of the Moffat Road, which was fated to remain forever stalled at Craig. The Denver and Rio Grande had won the tunnel route by buying the Moffat Road and building a forty-mile link between the D. and R. G. station at Dotsero, near the head of Glenwood Canyon and a point on the Moffat called Orestod, where that line emerged from Gore Canyon, of the Colorado. “Dotsero” was alleged to be the name of a beautiful Ute Indian maid who loved railroads. “Orestod” became a name when some doodler thought of spelling Dotsero backwards.
On the whole, the twenties were good years for Coloradans, in spite of their disenchantment with the aftermath of the war. The motor car brought them not only the economic benefits of an expanding tourism but a greatly enlarged playground for their own enjoyment. Airplanes were hauling mail and passengers before the decade ended. A boom in oil began in 1925. Three years later, the United Mine Workers union, which had withdrawn from the state in 1914 after the Ludlow tragedy, returned to sign a contract with the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company owned by the militant and progressive feminist Josephine Roche—a contract “to establish industrial justice, substitute reason for violence . . . and a union of effort for the chaos of present economic warfare.” 8 This historic document paved the way for a new era in the nation’s labor relations.
While old-timers mourned the death of gold-mining and silver-mining, a talented writer and artist Muriel Sibell Wolle was scrambling around the hills discovering and sketching what remained of several hundred ghost towns of the argonauts so that they would never be forgotten. The result of her searches was a huge and wonderful book called Stampede to Timberline, which endures as a Colorado classic.9
Of course a small cloud appeared with the stock-market crash of October 29, 1929. But Wall Street was far, far away, and Coloradans did not believe that the small cloud would darken the blue skies of their sunny empire.
1. Bayard Taylor, Colorado: A Summer Trip (New York: G. P. Putnam and Son, 1867).
2. Isabella Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (London: John Murray, 1879).
3. Sandra Dallas, No More than Five in a Bed (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967), p. 55.
4. Dallas, Five in a Bed, p. 73.
5. Dallas, Five in a Bed, p. 182.
6. Thomas Hornsby Ferril and Helen Ferril, The Rocky Mountain Herald Reader (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1966).
7. Robert G. Athearn, Rebel of the Rockies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), pp. 269–270.
8. Colorado: A Guide to the Highest State (New York: Hastings House, 1941, 1970), p. 58.
9. Muriel Sibell Wolle, Stampede to Timberline (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1949).