Jim Gardner
Interviewer Cara Doyle

August 23, 2002

This Cara Doyle and I am with Jim Gardner.   It is August 23rd.    and we are ready to do an oral history. All right, we’re ready to go.

As you mentioned I’m Jim Gardner, I’ve lived in Park County all my life, my dad lived here all his life, and my grandfather came in here as a homesteader in 1919.  So, a lot of what I’m going to say here in history, I’m 52 years old, so a lot of it I know, a lot more of it I know from my father, and know it from my grandfather.  My father was a good oral historian as well, and he was very attentive to the older folks in the area.  He interacted well with people in their seventies in the 1920’s, so he actually had people tell him things from back in the days when the Indians were still here, seriously.  So what I have is what I call an institutional memory, the Gardner institutional memory is what I’ll be talking about here.  I guess the main focus will be around the Hartsel area?

Anything around the whole county.

Well, I’ll start off with how my grandfather came in here so we’ll have a little bit of the background on that.  My great-uncle John which would be my grandfather’s brother came here before the beginning of World War I, and came into South Park, and went down to Buena Vista, but he liked it here around South Park, and so he got ahold of my grandfather, who had homesteaded first up in North Dakota in 1904, about 1915 he got a whole new s  roster, you’ve gotta come down here, you’re going to like it.  Well he kind of took a circuitous route, went through Mississippi and actually left off some relatives there.  These were people on the move and of course they traveled on the railroad, and they came to Colorado and by the time granddad got it here it would have probably early 1916, and I believe World War I was already beginning or had begun at that time and he was too old for World War I, so he was part of the work force, so they settled down in Ordway which was just outside of Pueblo, for a while. They had a little farm out by Sugar City, actually out by Ordway.  They were there for about a year and then they moved into Pueblo because times were tight during the first world war, and the spent the remainder of 1916 and 1917 and early 1918 in Pueblo and during that time my dad contracted rheumatic fever.  They had planned to move up to the Park.  The Homestead Act was open in this mountain part of the west in 1916, and I believe it was on the strength of that my Uncle John told my granddad, who was Roscoe Byron Gardner,     to come out here, it was an interesting place to be.  So he came out, and was intercepted by the war, so he wasn’t able to get up here to get his homestead started in 1917 when he wanted to.  Then my dad came down with rheumatic fever; there were six kids in the family and my dad was the third oldest, so he was the middle child, basically.  He almost died; rheumatic fever was a very serious deal back then, but he was seven years old in 1918, born in 1911.  He recovered from that but he had a serious heart murmur that was with him all the rest of his life.  The doctors had talked, and of course the doctors didn’t have the background educational and medical skills that they have now, but they basically said, “If you take that boy up to the high elevations it’s going to kill him.”  My granddad waited about six more months and dad didn’t get a whole lot better, and said “Well he’s either going to die or he’s not.” And so they took off.  They actually came up from Pueblo, came up what is now Interstate 25, and came up the old US 24, with a team and wagon. Understand that in 1919, originally granddad was up here, and my dad came up finally with the rest of the family in 1921.  They came up in a covered wagon, because A, my granddad didn’t have the money for a car, and he was from the horse and buggy era.  Granddad was born in 1883, and he thought in the old ways, and so he came up.  It took several days, through Pueblo, Colorado Springs and came up old 24.  At the time old 24 of course came over Wilkerson Pass, where it does, but instead of going down where it goes across now, it went down across by Donerry’s ranch and by Sam Hartsel’s ranch.  The county road there is old US 24; you can still the old trace of 24 as it goes over the top of Wilkerson; and comes down and bears off to the left just after you get over the top, and goes off to the other side of Spinney Mountain.  I believe part of it is under the lake. 

But, anyway, my dad told me on the 13th of May in 1921 was when he first saw South Park. It was a beautiful Sunday morning.  The further up in elevation he came the better he felt.  And of course the short of this particularly long story is that he obviously lived, because I’m here.  And in fact he outlived all of his sibling except hone.  So the doctors were wrong.  They came into Hartsel the evening of the 12th of May in 1921.  They stayed at the Harold Chalmers ranch.  My granddad had been up there for a couple of years previous to that establishing the homestead, so he’d already made friends with some with some of the ranchers around and for the benefit of the transcriber and listeners here, the situation wasn’t a whole lot different with the homesteaders coming in and displacing the way of life that the large ranch and sheep people—the Chalmers and Galloways were sheep people—but it was actually seriously displacing their way of life, because they had been used to using all of that previously considered Department of the Interior, now BLM land, most of it was private land because it was homesteaded.  But they had been using all of that land for their grazing.   So the problems like the buffalo wars and the cattle wars that you are experiencing down around Hartsel right now in 2002 because of people moving into small lots and no longer wanting free ranging cattle and free ranging animals running around on their property.  It was a little bit different situation then but the gist of it was, it was greatly foreshortening and lessening their ability to run those cattle because the homesteaders would come in—part of the Homestead Act was that you had to fence your 640 acres, a homestead up here in this part of the country was 640 acres because it was deemed that it took 640 acres to make up any kind of a viable stock raising homestead.  It was called the stock-raising homestead act.  There’s some little sidebars to that stock-raising homestead act.  After 1916 any land homesteaded no longer had the mineral rights with it.  So a great deal of land that’s now owned in the subdivisions, was part of originally what were stock raising homesteads and the feds own the minerals.  But to go back to how they were sort of upsetting the status quo, when the homesteaders came in, and my granddaddy of course was just one of many that came into the Park at the time, the ranchers at the time had been used to raising their cattle everywhere.  The key, just like it is now, to cattle ownership or to any livestock operation was water.  And so these folks that came here in the 1860’s and 1870’s, most came in the 1870’s, about when the railroad came in, and they at that time—it was a different type of a claim, but it was a homestead type of claim—and they would claim the waterholes.  So if you wanted to go back and do a deed search on most of the land,  anything down in the Hartsel area, the Elkhorn area, clear on down to Lake George, you’ll find that the good springs, the good water sources, are all very old deeded pieces of ground with mineral rights attached, by the way, because they were homesteaded before the government stripped the minerals off of them.  That water was key to controlling the rest of the land, so if you controlled the water, not unlike today, if you controlled the water, you controlled the rest of the land from a livestock grazing perspective.  When the homesteaders started flooding in here—most of them didn’t start to come in until World War I ended some time in 1918, and so there wasn’t really much activity until the war ended.  And then all these guys that had been in the war, it was actually supposed to be open to veterans of World War I, but it was open to anybody of age.  But these people came streaming in and a lot of them made enemies.  But my granddad came in and he was much more of a diplomat than most, and he made friends with a number of these folks, so that’s why they came and stayed with Harold Chalmers, because he had already gone over and done some work for Chalmers, and convinced him that he wasn’t a bad guy.  In fact they were friends for years and years and years after that.  Then on the next day, on the 13th of May, 1921, they headed up—the Chalmers ranch, which was just outside of Hartsel on the north side—the Santa Maria ranch, I guess it’s called now.

Didn’t it used to be called the E M ranch?

Well, it was called the EM ranch at one time, it was probably called the EM  when the Chalmers were there and became the Santa Maria at some time in the late 20’s or early 30’s, I don’t know.

Do you know how it got that name?

I don’t know how it got that name, but there is a spring, seven mile spring—there’s a Santa Maria gulch, on up what’s called the basin in the area on the east side of the Reineker ridge on the west slope of the Elkhorn ridge, the basin that’s in there is called ‘the basin’ but in that basin is the Santa Maria gulch.  I suspect it was named after that because that probably was named predating or at least concurrent with the surveying of the property in the first survey, which was named the Santa Maria.  And they probably just renamed it because, a lot of times when somebody takes over a new business, they rename it and probably the same.  Both ranches retain the names.  I don’t how it got to be called that.

I talked to the people who own it now and they didn’t know.

I think that’s why.  If my dad was around I could ask him, but I can’t.  He probably would know.  But anyway the next morning on the 13th of May in 1921, they headed up the basin, we just talked about, heading up to my granddad's homestead, he’d gotten it ready.  Understand that he had been up there as a bachelor for a couple of years, getting it ready, building a small cabin and getting the corrals and all because it was an agrarian society, basically you had to have your chickens and your milk cow and your horses and one thing and another to make a go of it.  So he had all that ready, so then he came up with the team and wagon he had all his milk cows in tow, and actually I think he had a couple of oxen. I’m not sure but what the oxen might have been pulling the wagons.  He was more of an oxen kind of guy, he never really liked horses, and a guy from that era you think of them as being great horsemen, he was not really a horseman, he liked cows a lot better, I guess. 

But anyway, about halfway up there, my dad always told about this blinding snowstorm that came in.  It was coming in so thick that my granddad had to get out in front of the wagon and lead—it may have been horses and it may have been oxen—I have pictures of him with oxen and pictures of him with horses, but I don’t know which it was.  But anyway, they were heading up to their new abode through this blinding snowstorm, which dropped over a foot of snow.  The next day it came out all sunny; it melted in; the trees leafed out and everything was green, and my dad who’d been sick for the last year or two down in the suburbs of Pueblo, so to speak, they ran a dairy out there—it was dry and desolate.  They came up there—a lot of people think of this area as dry and desolate—but then it was the most heavenly place; because there were green trees, it was cool, the air was fresh, and he thrived from there on.  The place they moved into was, his homestead cabin was right adjacent to an eighty-acres piece that was owned by the Mills family.  Now the Mills, the Chalmers, the Galloways, the Slaters, the Wadleys were all English, Scottish sheep people and they were all related.  They were all intermarried.  They were pretty much all sheep people.  The Wadleys place was over here where Ebels are at now, the Red Hill Ranch.  The Slater ranch was the one that’s the infamous  P Sportmans ranch that the SP Cup project on –that was the Slater ranch, In fact the Slater ditch runs down here.  They were some of the early folks in here.  Now the Mills and the Chalmers were I believe Mills married a sister of Chalmers and married another sister,  I believe that was their in-law relationship.

Or was it a Galloway?

Well the Galloways were related, too.  You may not have heard much about the Mills family, but the Mills were around, too. They were sheep people.

Didn’t the Mills’ manage the Hartsel ranch for a while?

They did.  They also ran the Hartsel ranch.  But they also owned  these little pieces of ground.  And actually again, with my grandad’s maybe better negotiating skills, was shrewder in figuring out how to work deals. He had already talked the Mills family out of an eighty acre piece, because they could see the handwriting on the wall.  The government had opened up the entire area to homesteading.  They know that their goose was cook, so to speak, in the way that they had been doing business.  Most of the homesteaders fought—put up fences and stood in corners with shotguns and all.  But my granddad said, Hey, drive your sheep right on through here in the pasture.  He knew how to work with them.  And to that end he also got pieces of ground.  He got the Mills piece. He got a piece that belonged to the Link family out of Como.   It’s called Link Springs, and its now along the Elkhorn.  But it was originally a Mills piece, too, I believe.  The Links bought it from the Mills.  But it was also a water spot.  And the eighty acre piece that adjoined my granddads homestead was a water spot. 

On that spot, part of that eighty acres, was the old Elkhorn Stage Stop.  Not too many people know much about the Elkhorn Stage route.  But the stage route—this predates 1870--, whenever it was when the railroad came through here.  When it first came into Jefferson it came to the bottom of Kenosha pass on the other side of Hall Valley.  It terminated there in 1870 or 1871.

It might have been later than that, they were still building it in 1879 when the paper started.

Then it was probably in the late 1870’s. It took them a couple of years to get over Kenosha, anyway.  So anything previous to that was when the stage routes were operating.  And that stage route—everyone seems surprised that there was an actual stage station, way station there, that went straight down the basin.  In fact that was probably the road that my granddad came up, up the basin. 

Is there anything left of the stage stop?

Sadly, there isn’t.  The stage route came up from Hartsel.  There was another one that went over and came up from Lake George.  They came up and met there in the way, because there was a fantastic spring there.  We’re getting back to the water.  And that’s why my granddad right away saw the need—if he was going to raise stock he had to have water, so he bought that from the Mills family.  The hill right behind it where there’s an oil well, there’s actually a gas well on it now, it was always locally known as Mill’s Hill.  I don’t think it ever made it onto the topo map, but it was Mill’s Hill because it was on the Mills’ property.  Anyway, they actually lived in that stage stop for a little while while granddad was finishing up the cabin.  They moved into the cabin, which turned out that it was along the edge of the fault seam there so there was some really good water all along.  So they were able to dig a very shallow well, because wells were hand-dug back then.  They dug a shallow well that is still being used by the people that live there now.  So they ceased using that stage building.  In the old stage building—my dad told me, I never saw it, it was torn down while I was a little kid, it was torn down long before I was a little kid, and made into fence posts and firewood—the real crime of it was, that inside on the walls was of course graffiti from everybody that came through there since the 1860’s but also there was every brand of every ranch that had ever been in the area carved into those walls.  And my dad was, probably in his late teens or early twenties when they tore it down, so it would have been previous to 1930, probably 1927 or 8.  They decided to tear it down.  They used it for a barn for a while after they moved out of it.  They just cut a hole in one end of it and used it for a barn.  It wasn’t a good location, it was a little bit too steep on the far side.  One of the neighbors, a guy named Russ Lakeman, wanted some of the logs and so it didn’t get made into firewood exactly.  But all those old brands—it was two-story, and on the ceiling of the bottom story, it was just rough sawn wood—all of that disappeared. It’s really a shame, but that’s what happens.

 But you can still see the old stage road going out along the Elkhorn, a portion of it goes through my ranch.  And it goes across the Elkhorn ranch subdivision, which was my grandad’s ranch.  And they went over to the base of Kenosha, the place that Swanee Hunt has now.  It was called the Case ranch and it’s had a number of different ranch names over the years.  But that was the stage stop on the south side of Kenosha pass.  But if you came in on the train, on the Colorado and South Park Pacific, that they called at the time, and you stopped at Webster and got on the stage and you came over Kenosha pass and came down to the bottom of  Kenosha to the place that Swanee has there now.  That was the stage stop.  And you could go on down and go through the Elkhorn stage stop down to Hartsel and over to Lake George, or come the other way, obviously.  That stage road went from there along the base of Kenosha to the north, over the Jefferson Lake road.  It actually goes through the back side of Bea Bartle—the Bartle ranch.  Anyway the old stage road goes through there, and it skirted the edge of the mountains, because the weather was so much better than going out across the park.  You can imagine going out across the park in a ground blizzard.  Well, that’s why they skirted.  Then it came over to the town of Hamilton or Tarryall, whichever one was on—probably both of them were there right across Tarryall Creek from each other.  And then it came into Como, which really didn’t come into being until the railroad got there, so there really wasn’t any town of Como, but there was a town of Hamilton and Tarryall.  And then that stage road went on out around the hill by Como and made it to Fairplay, and I believe the original stage road may have gone up kind of through behind Ebel’s and up over the back of the pass, and the railroad came through up over the back of Red Hill.  The pass that we call the Range?  Center.  When the railroad came through it stopped of course it stopped in Jefferson and Como, and then the terminus stopped for quite a while, it was down where the Western Safari ranch is now.  If you look when you go up Red Hill you can see a trace of the old stage road that goes right underneath the high --?  That’s the old stage road.  So they leave that place at the Safari Ranch,  and that actually got taken over by a homesteader named John Clark eventually, but that was a stage stop for quite a while, until they sent the railroad down and came back up from Garo to Fairplay.  So if you wanted to get to Fairplay anytime soon, you would get off there, and take the stage up over Red Hill, where you could go on to Fairplay.  I got sidetracked onto stage routes.

That’s ok; it’s part of history, too.

It’s all part of the history of the area, I guess.  Where you want me to go from here?

Your grandfather’s spread was part of the Mills property—was that the Mills out of Hartsel or the ones out of Como, there were two of them.

They were related, but it was the Mills out of Hartsel.  Well, I told you that he had homesteaded in 1904 in North Dakota.  The homestead allotment there was 160 acres, so he had 480 acres left on his homestead allotment.  Because you got X amount of allotment, if you had homesteaded another homestead somewhere else, a 160 allotment area, you probably wouldn’t have had anything left, but because he had come here to a 640 acre allotment he had 480 acres left that he could homestead.  So he came here and homestead 480 acres.  He bought the Mills piece and found out very quickly—I think he probably knew it before he came here—he came from a farming background, from the hollow? - that’s what you do back there, is you plant things and raise them or farm them.  He got out here and figured out really quickly that there wasn’t a whole lot that grew here and what did was hard won, hard bought, and there wasn’t much of a market.  The only thing that really grew properly was potatoes, and he could market those pretty well.  So he set about, well he had to make a living some way.  Many people that came in here,  most homesteaders, almost without exception, that came here expected to make a living off of 640 acres.  And just like people that come in here now that try to make a living off a large ranch, it takes an awful lot of land if you’re doing a stock raising homestead.  It takes a tremendous amount of land—it takes forty acres per animal unit—so 640 acres is only sixteen or something like that.  Not enough animals even then to make a year round living.  That’s why water rights and hay were so important.  That’s why this is no longer a ranching area, because the water has been sold off and there’s no more hay raising ability.  And of course this year there isn’t anyway.  But he found out very quickly that you didn’t make a living in the agrarian livestock.  You didn’t raise cows—you didn’t have enough land on 640 acres, you didn’t have enough land on 6,000 acres really to make a half-way decent living because the economy of scale, everything kept growing you know maintenance costs, and even back when taxes were microscopic and the cost of living was so much less than it is now.  You couldn’t expect to really make a living unless you had hay ground.  If you had fully irrigated ground, you could flood the field and grow your own hay.  And of course everybody that came in here earlier, in the 1870’s and 80’s, they had all that locked up already.  So there wasn’t a whole lot—you had to buy your hay, and that’s what they did for a number of years because, you know,  my granddad did go into the cow business. 

But in the meantime they determined that timber products were far, far more profitable than livestock. Railroad ties, in particular.  So during starting in about 1923 all the way through about 1928, they hacked ties.  You hear about the tie hacks.   You went out in the winter, the wintertime was basically the time did that kind of thing because you couldn’t do anything else.  So they’d go out with a two-man saw, and usually my granddad, in the beginning because my dad was too young, Harry was two years older, they’d go out and they’d saw the trees down, then he would come along with a broad-axe, and hack the side of the tie to about seven inches thick—six and a half or seven inches thick-- and five and a half feet long, that was a narrow-gauge railroad tie.   Those ties delivered to the rail head at Como paid I believe toward the end of the twenties they paid about $2 a tie.  That doesn’t sound like much now, but for them it was.  In the winter of 1928, my dad was old enough then to work full time, and he and my Uncle Harry and granddad cut 10,000 railroad ties, hacked them out, hauled them all the next summer with a team and wagon, and that’s when he finally decided that maybe he should modernize and buy trucks.  So the fall of 1929, probably a few days before the depression, he bought two brand new 1929 Chevrolet trucks.  The depression put a wrench in a lot of people’s lives, but the railroad still needed ties and the mines still needed timbers.  Those 10,000 ties was basically about $20,000, which was a chunk of money back then.  So the timing probably couldn’t have been better for acquisition of land, because the people that had been there for ten years were already starving now.  And they were figuring out that they just couldn’t make a living.  Most of them weren’t willing to work sixteen hours a day like he was.  A lot of them, not unlike today, 

(end of side one).

Work was really key, and there were a number of people that didn’t want to do that much hard work.  And a whole lot more of them that spent a lot of time in the bar just like people do now.  And my granddad and my dad’s claim to fame was that they never touched a drop of whiskey in their life.  And so they didn’t spend any time in the bar and so they spent the time out working.  So basically whatever they put together they did by hard work.  But that 20,000 bucks ended up being a net of about $16-17,000 because there wasn’t a lot of overhead in those days.  It enabled my granddad to buy the trucks and a sawmill and about five or six homesteads around, plus my aunt who was born in 1904 and my other aunt who was born in 1906, my uncle who was born in 1909 were all old enough to homestead at that point.  So they all homesteaded and those homesteads got aggregated into the property, so between buying the neighboring homesteads that were from the families that came in there with these great dreams and were slowly starved out and left, there was a buyer to take the land off their hands.  They had proved up their homesteads; part of what you had to do to get your homestead in your name was to do what was called ‘proving up’—do you want me to go into this?

Just a little bit.

Okay, proving up basically meant fencing it on all four sides, and staying on it for two years; there were some caveats in there, different ways that you could do it, but I think that it was basically you had to fence it and put improvements on it, which meant any kind of ??  , but I think there was a two year rule toward the end.  A number of folks relinquished their homesteads because they couldn’t even make it for two years, then somebody else would come in and re-homestead.  And I believe a couple of those relinquished homesteads were ones that my aunt Doris and Elizabeth took over, because they were ladies and it was kind of a paper thing—the place was already fenced, so they didn’t have to do that,  and the government wanted to get rid of the land because it was an abomination to them, so they wound up owning quite a large, not huge, but about 7,200 acres.  It was fairly good sized when you consider my granddad came in with a milk cow and a team of oxen and a horse or two and about $30 in his pocket.  And he did pretty well.  Let’s see, where were we going with this?  Making a living, I guess.

So he didn’t grow potatoes, though?

Well, he grew potatoes, that’s what you did in the summer.  There was a season for summer work and there was a season for winter work.  Kind of like my dad said a week before he died, people would ask him—I quit asking him years ago—why don’t you ever take a rest, and he’d say “there’s plenty of time to rest when I’m dead.”  So they never rested.  So they were always working, so you cut timber in the winter, and skidded it out in the winter, not for really for environmental or ecological reasons of not tearing up the ground, you did it because the ground was slicker and you could skid it easier.  And also because you could prepare for summer when you could actually saw it into logs, when there was not a lot they could do, and also because during the summer, that’s when you planted your potatoes and did your fencing and did whatever else. They grew oats, they grew tremendous fields of six foot, seven foot high oats.  I’ve got pictures. 

Out here they grew oats?

Oh, yes.  They certainly did.  For a few years.  We’re going through, of course a severe drought and everybody’s talking about it in the West right now.  Actually the period of time from about 1918, 1919 through the mid-twenties was a time of extremely wet winters, and actually very wet summers.  So there was a lot of deep snow.  If you look at the hydrographs which we got to see a lot of in the SP Cup trial it shows that.  Then it tapered off during the depression, which was coincidental with the Dust Bowl.  We didn’t get hit nearly as bad up here in the Dust Bowl times, as so many did in out in Oklahoma, so it was not a terribly dry time, but the time for raising the oats, and my granddad raised oats because at least he could dry land farm these oats and have something to feed his livestock, so that’s what he did.  But  potatoes were of course we ate them,   but they were a cash crop and at the time before the trucks there wasn’t any way to sell the potatoes other than take them to the railroad, which, by the time you went through all that fol-de-rol, you might as well give them away.

Because they rotted?

Well, not necessarily because they rotted, but the railroad took their pound of flesh, and people stole them out of the—because you sell them by the pound and weighed them when they got there, and so people would, railroad workers, not to malign them or anything, but they took their part, and when they got there, you wound up with almost zero sum gain.  Granted you didn’t have much overhead in them, except your labor, and there wasn’t machine overhead and all the types of irrigation overhead, but there was still the work.  If you didn’t make anything off it, it wasn’t worth it.  When my granddad got the trucks, and again coincidental with the depression, all of a sudden, a saleable commodity such as potatoes was a tradable commodity, so they would take them to the Safeways stores in Colorado Springs.  Of course things were different back then as far as the way people did business.  They’d go down with a truckload of potatoes and trade them for flour and staple goods that they needed, and of course they had cattle on the ranch and they butchered three or four hogs every year, and so they certainly weren’t starving during the depression. 

Nor were they out of money because the railroad kept buying ties, and as the railroad—the one by Hartsel went out earlier—the one up through here didn’t go out until 1938.  They quit buying ties about 1937.  At that the time the London Mine and the American Mine were the principal mines operating out of Fairplay.  So they just switched over from railroad ties to mine props and mine timbers, and there was a tremendously lucrative business, right up until World War II started.

Then the government stopped the gold mining here.

Gold mining was stopped in—I think it was 1942.  I’ll tell you why.  You’ll find this interesting.  I own the old South Platte Dredging Company buildings down here where Kaydee…, the Pharmacy and PermaGas.  But the old building, the one that the sales office? was in, and the stone building in behind, and the blue group building, the wood building back behind, and the shop that Michael Trent has his wood shop in now, were all part of the South Platte Dredging Company’s operations.  The stone house was the assay office, the place the south shop in was the office, and the blue shed, I believe that was the nuts and bolts and machinery parts room and the building that Michael is in, the larger building behind KayDees, was the electrical shop.  Because that was an electrically-run dredge.  My memory as a kid was that there were a number of other of old buildings on the lot that were kind of like sheds, that were open fronted sheds.  But what’s significant about this is that on the door of the entry way, not the one Michael uses, but the entry way that was actually the atrium of the office of the electrical shop room.  On the door, it’s been painted over but you can read it, and it says “Last day of operation, October 15, 1942  Clean-up day October 17, 1942.”  I’ve instructed, I’ve had several renters in there, Do not mess with that door!”

Don’t paint that over—how interesting!

So I’m pretty sure of that date.  I remember my dad telling me about it because they supplied a certain number of matting timbers, matting like for dredges that would go out on the edge of trapdown? dredges, the main dredges, the big dredges were of course closed, but the chain dredges set down there near the one they tore up in 76, they supplied a number of materials for that, wood materials, you know the wood was his business.  And my dad was friends with, he was the same gregarious guy I am and my granddad was, but he made friends with everybody around.  He knew what was going on.  And he was always interested in a very standoffish sort of way—with prospecting.  He had seen too many prospectors lose their life savings, in fact we had one in the family that sort of did, so he was not eager to be a prospector.  But he always had that little bit of lust for gold, so he tied the young? around the dredge center.  He knew a guy named Pete the jeweler.  I don’t know what Pete’s last name was, I might have it from some of my tapes from Dad.  Anyway, Pete the jeweler, of course gold at that time was already illegal to own, gold coinage, and gold was illegal to own in the 30’s.  So people would buy it and make it into jewelry, of course there was a tremendous black market trade for gold.  Of course Pete the jeweler, well he was the jeweler, so he could actually make gold jewelry and it was a medium of exchange for him, and he worked the tail chute on that dredge. But the output deck,  you see all of those little, look like waves on the ocean kind of, what it was the output conveyer belt they’d run that belt back and forth to distribute that stuff.  Well he was on the output belt, just checking it, and when they’d get digging down, it was about nine foot down, those dredge ponds, the glacial overburden was about nine foot deep there.  When they’d get down to actually to red bed in the clay, when they’d get down and start digging in that clay they’d pull up big chunks of clay, and of course they would go through their trommel screen because they had the processing plant on board.  They’d go through the processing sequence and they’d get out all the fines and the course gold; they had a shaker screen.  They didn’t amalgate, there wasn’t any amalgamation.  They took the concentrates and may have shipped to the gold to the mill in Colorado Springs, that’s where a lot of the concentration and amalgamating were going around that time, the American Mill had its own concentrating and amalgamation plant, that’s why it was a super good site some time later on.  Anyway, he would work on the tail on the output belt and he’d see big old chunks of clay going up the belt and there’d be great big nuggets in that because that’s where the real gold was.  And he left the area when they shut it down in 1942, a very very wealthy man.  It was okay with the ownership of the dredge because they said nobody’s going to get it anyway.  So I guess he worked double shifts to be on that belt and he picked out over $20 an hour, tens of thousands of dollars worth of gold.  I told that story the other night down at the Center of the Colorado Water Conservancy District meeting and they said “Oh you ought to get that on tape.” I said I’m going to get it on tape tomorrow night.

Here it is on tape.

Pete the jeweler left the country a very happy man.  In fact Fairplay had electrical power before a lot of other areas because the generating station was over in Leadville.  They ran the power up to the mountains and on over the top.  They came down here to Fairplay, so Fairplay was wired by the 20’s or late teens, because that dredge started up in the late teens or early twenties, 1921 or 1922.

They had the Snowstorm Dredge there, too.

Well, the Snowstorm was right on the heels of this dredge down here, but this one down here was the big operator.  My dad said that in the thirties when they changed shifts and they’d shut down the motors on the dredge, they’d power the motors back up and the whole town would be a brownout from that.  It sucked the power down.  It used that much power, he experienced it over and over again.

So did you ever see the dredge operate?

I never saw it operate. I was out on it.  It was a scary old thing by the time I was probably, in 65 or so, but it had quit, because it had never started up after 42.  It had been dead for thirty some years by the time I was ever out on it.  It was taking on a lot of water, I don’t know if it was taking water on or if it just was cumulative water that had fallen for thirty years down in the lower decks and down in the hole.  I can’t swim a lick, and I’d go out there on the little narrow gangplanks and I knew the dredge pond was ninety feet deep and so it was good self preservation.  I didn’t spend a lot of time doing dangerous things out in the middle of the dredge. I do remember when they were disassembling it for hauling it to wherever it was they took it.

Columbia.

Yes, a guy I grew up with worked on that project and when he left here he went out to California, and they tore down a dredge out there and shipped it to the same place.

I understand it is still sitting there in boxes.

It was old technology even then thirty years ago, when they shipped it.  There might have been a few old boys around that remembered how to put it together.  They could go back to the blueprints I suppose. 

That’s probably one of the reasons it’s still sitting in the box.

I’m sure it’s a very compelling reason.

Anyway, was it one of your brothers that had something to do with the dredge?

No, I don’t have any brothers.  I was talking about a guy I grew up with was one of the guys working on the disassembly of the dredge.  One of the Tryons.  The Tryon family have all left town. They sold their house down on Main Street.

Was one of them Nat Tryon?  I just ran across that name in an obituary.

Yeah, Nat was on the Nels Tryon side.  There were brothers, so there were second cousins.  The Nels Tryon household, down there where the playground is.  It was the second oldest house in Fairplay.  And Nels Tryon lived there until he died, and his wife , who was much younger than he was, his second wife, I guess, sold the place and left; sold it to the school.  The school burned it down.  Now the real crime with burning down that house, and I argued and pleaded—I was not part of the school board at the time and I really didn’t have anything to do with the school at all at that time, other than I could see a historical process being lost.  I remember now how I got talking with somebody and I said you know I hate to see at least all these old architectural features, because this is an old, old log cabin, that had an addition put on it.  The reason they were burning it down was because it had asbestos shingles on it, and they figured if they burned it down they could just crunch it all up and take it out to the dump, and they wouldn’t have to worry about asbestos abatement.  That’s the main reason they burned it down.  It was an unspoken thing but I know that’s why it was burned down.  Anyway I talked them out of the windows and whatever other— doorknobs, anything I could strip.  As a matter of fact I stripped it so thoroughly that they had to put plywood back over it to burn it down.  In the meantime I went in there and got everything I could out of it.  It was all put together with square nails, so it predated the round nail era.  That’s a good test of how old a building is, because if it’s after about 1890 it’s going to have round nails in it.  That building was built in about 1867 or 1868.  It had been in the Tryon family practically that long and probably that Tryon you just mentioned would have been one of the forbearers.

He died in 1927, so that’s about right.

Anyway, I decided I’d tear into the walls, it had plaster walls.  The walls had newspaper and plaster and wallpaper; it had been done and redone and re re redone.  It was about half an inch thick, I guess.  And I cored through that and couldn’t make any sense of it.  Behind that was one layer of like building paper and behind that was all the old newspaper that they newspapered the walls in the addition, not even in the main part of the building.  I saved one or two pieces of that from the board, because in the news paper, the piece I tore off, I just tore a chunk out of it, the piece I tore off had an advertisement for 1879 excursions on the Denver, South Park and Pacific railroad to come up through South Park.  It was a Denver Post newspaper.  I argued with the superintendent what a crime that was to not get somebody to come and do the asbestos abatement.  They wanted to make a playground out of it, so I could understand them wanting to get rid of the house.  It was a habitable house, actually, if you liked to live in a hovel, but it was okay, it was a little house.  It was cozy, it was charming.  People in New England lived in houses three times that old and were happy with it.  It was small, and mostly belonged to the school, it was on the corner and they wanted to put a playground on it.  Why not let the building trades or the kids dismantle that place, the whole house,  architecturally one piece at a time, preserve all that stuff.  After I started in there I stopped and went over to the superintendent, and said, you know I’m taking all this stuff and I want it, but I’ll leave it all here if you want to do this kind of recovery.  No it’s too late it’s already in progress. We’re going to burn it down next week.  That kind of thing is criminal.  The kids could have gotten a sense of history, a lot of stuff could have been preserved.  They could have had a real sense, they’d have probably found all kinds of neat stuff, that I never dreamed of.  You know, stuff hidden in the walls and things that got burnt up.

So what did you do with the things you took out of it?

Oh, I stored it.

The house or cabin that your granddad built, is that still around?

No, they tore that down.  They built the main house which was still standing in 1931.  And the cabin I have pictures of, but it was just a little log cabin that sat out in front of the house, so when they got the main house built, they tore it down.  The old school house the Elkhorn school house burned, my dad and the other homestead kids, my dad and my uncles and the other homestead kids from the twenties actually bought the school five miles uphill, or whatever the story is.  It practically was that bad, although it was only a memory, serious long walks.  It’s still standing.  It’s just to the west of the Elkhorn Road.

Can you see it from the road?

Oh, yeah.  You can see it from the road.  I threatened to move it, you know I move buildings from time to time.  I threatened to move it, I threatened to get hold of the people that own it because I’m afraid that someday some kids are going to be playing there and burn it down or something.  It’s a log building and the roof was fair on it until about ten years ago.

How far down from 285 is it?

Well, if you go down the Elkhorn, it’s about, I’m going to say fourteen or fifteen miles down.

I’d like to go out and get a picture of it.

Yeah, if you want, I could meet with you and show it to you, because a show is worth a thousand pamphlets.  And there are several other buildings there that could be mistaken for it.

Do you know what the other buildings are?

Of course I know what they are.  I know what all of them are. 

Talking about the weather—it’s okay if I just okay if I just jump from one subject to another?  One of the first, I want to say friends that my dad made, was a lifelong friend, was Jim Witcher.  You’ve heard about the Witchers and you’ve heard about Jim Witcher, the Witcher ranch, which is sort of, part of it underneath Eleven Mile now; but Jim Witcher was about ten years older than my dad.  Back then, maybe even now, but back then especially, age wasn’t nearly so much of a factor in friendships as it is now, mainly because there weren’t that many people around to be friendly with, but they had a commonalty, so they hit it off.  The way my dad told it, Jim came riding up there, the sheep was almost even at that point in 1921, it was shifting from sheep to cattle to some degree.  Well, the Witchers were cattle people.  They had gotten a forest allotment, I believe, probably was over on the Tarryall; it was like a grazing association, with all of the Lee Wallace and all of these guys had all of their cattle grazing over there.  The sheep folks went up towards Georgia Pass, up in there.  And the cattle went over there, but they used the same route, well now they were somewhat restricted in their routes with all those homesteaders coming in.  So Jim Witcher came riding up through there, he was a twenty or twenty-one year old guy, to talk to my granddad to see if it would be okay to drive  cattle through there, which it was.  In the meantime, dad got to talking to Jim Witcher.  Well, Jim Witcher, and I heard these stories directly from Jim, he was enough older than dad that he had experienced, for instance, the winter of 1913, and the drought of 1909, 1910 and 1911, which I believe by what he told and what I’ve seen on the hydrographs, is probably as bad as the one we’re having right now.  Because he said 1909 was horribly dry and 1910, the ground started opening up in cracks and a lot of the trees died.  And there was nothing in the cabin to eat.  1910 was also an extremely dry year; a lot of forest fires around, I guess, then.   And then the winter of 1911 and 1912 and especially the winter of 1913, 1913 in particular was so bad, that down around Hartsel in particular, because that’s where the cow people—they had sheep, the Sam Hartsel contingent, the folks down there, still had their cattle.  And on out south on down where thirty-nine mile mountain, that’s more cattle country.  And of course they didn’t have snow plows, and they didn’t have roads, practically, and the railroad right-of-way they could go along.  It got so bad the people who got on it early enough, and the Witchers were some of those people—I used to be able to tell you who some of the others were—but anyway, they drove their cattle out when they could still get them out, drove them down into the Arkansas Valley, down by Buena Vista.  It was a bad winter down there, too.  They chopped down cottonwood, stripped the bark off, and fed the cattle cottonwood bark, and that’s how they saved even a small percentage of the herd—there was no such thing as crop insurance or stock insurance, and your livestock either lived or died, and if you saved just a vestage of them, then you could start over and feed your herd back up.  But there were people on other ranches that didn’t get their cattle out and lost practically everything.  I remember Jim reminiscing with my dad, because my dad was too young, he hadn’t even been there yet, he was about two years old and still in North Dakota when this was happening, but in the spring of 1913, when it started baring off the tops of the ridges, and the wind had blown off the tops of the ridges, Jim Witcher said you could get off your horse and walk from one end of the crowns of the ridges to the other and never step off a dead carcass.  Because all of the cattle had all gone out of the deep snow going up there and of course starved to death and froze to death on the tops of these ridges because they were the only exposed ground there was.  And after that the drought broke and actually it was fairly wet then all the way through 1927 or 8  and 29.  Just a little reiteration of bad weather—it’s happened before.

I’m sure we’ll get through this eventually.  So how are your cattle doing?

Pretty good actually.  We don’t overgraze.  We’ve got enough to get by.  But we better get some moisture this year, through the winter at least, or going through the fall.

On that Mills property, what town was closest; where did they go to do their shopping or whatever?

For many years, I’ve talked about writing a book about all this kind of thing.  I’ve thought about, if it was going to be a totally localized book, because all of the people out at Indian Mountain, I’ve done a lot of historical tours of all the old –there’s a lot of them out there and I can tell a story about every one.  I’ve thought about naming the book “The Forgotten Elkhorn.”  Because the Elkhorn area was basically unknown; the Jefferson—

Second tape

The Tarryall-Puma City area was another center down near Lake George.  Of course Como was railroading basically; Fairplay was mining and agriculture.  But the area that is shown on all the old maps as basically a blank, is really quite a large area, it’s the Elkhorn area out there.  And its because there wasn’t enough water to raise decent hay.  There were no streams flow through there at all.  So there was no running water, no water rights, just like today water rights are what it’s all about.  So there were no water rights, it was homestead land and homesteaders were considered second class citizens.  And so there just wasn’t a whole lot of attention paid to that area at all.  I was going somewhere with this—

Talking about all the people that used to live out there.

Well, you asked me where they went to do their shopping.

Yah, which town was closest.

And I guess I got off on my tangent of it being a no-man’s land.  And it’s partly because there was no community center as such, for there to be an alignment with.  In other words, if you lived down closer to Hartsel, you probably went to Hartsel to do your shopping.  If you lived over a little bit closer toward the Indian Mountain Ranch, there were a number of homesteads over there because that ranch was comprised of a number of homesteads, then probably you went to Jefferson.  But if you lived down where I still live, on the ranch that’s still the Gardner ranch, well then you went to Como.  So our family went to Como. 

And at that time, the Elkhorn Road wasn’t graded through there until 1928, that’s probably something that you don’t have in the history books.  That was actually the Sayers and the Mills and the Chalmers that kind of petitioned the county at the time to grade that road through there because among other things they needed it as a herding conduit because they were still taking their sheep up to the high country, and the high country was up behind Como, but more over behind Jefferson.  And in the past they would just run their sheep up the basin and run them right on up through there, well they couldn’t do that now because of all the homesteaders who had put up their fences, so they needed this transport route, so to speak, to run their sheep up.  They had a lot of pull with the county because they were the movers and shakers of the day, and so they convinced the county to grade the road down through there.  I’m going to say probably the spring of 1928.  Which probably somehow played into my granddad buying those trucks in 1928, because it made it a whole lot more civilized to get to point A from point B because they’d had Model T’s and all that before to get back and forth but before if you went to Como, for instance, rather than going up the Elkhorn, now where you go by the firehouse, and go up that way, you would go over through down by King City where the King Mine—it was abandoned by then—but you go down to the King Mine and go up straight, there  was a little  bit straighter road to go up there, and the reason the Elkhorn is routed the way it is was put it as close they could to the sheep people, the Chalmers and the Galloways,  and so on, and then it went down around by my granddad, who had been around long enough to have a little influence of his own.  So it went it back by his front door, then it went on down, it actually fed down around where it comes out to the east of Hartsel because that was I think the most convenient route for them to bring sheep. 

Because there was no central sense of community—in other words, the people that lived around Jefferson were very aligned with Jefferson.  You had the ranch families, you had the Steiners, the Heads, Arch Head, the Stive Six  the Howies—Jeannie Howie is a Head—she would probably have some good history for you.  The Shattinger’s—the Shattinger place was, actually Gary Shattinger was, I believe he may have been the son of Walter Shattinger.  I think Walter Shattinger was the one that came in there.  That was a different type of homesteading, I mean that was more of a…. I don’t know if you call it squatting or not.  But they acquired title to the land and of course they got good water rights.  But they were in there in the 1870’s; there were a number of ranch families in and around Jefferson, that if we do some more of this I’ll get all these names put together, so I can put them in a logical sequential inter-related order because a lot of these folks were inter-related.  But the folks that lived around Jefferson aligned themselves with Jefferson.  Later on the Coleman Ranch, they call it the Coleman-Wahl ranch, Wahl’s bought the ranch from, I think Lillies were the owners of the Coleman ranch—that kind of information can be gotten from Jeannie Howe.

Does she live here?

Well, she lives down in Jefferson and they go to Arizona about October.  They used to own the Jefferson store for years and years.  Jean Howie was Norman Howie’s brother, the Howie’s used to live in Fairplay, they had the drugstore here.  I can go on and on with all these pieces and parts that you might not know.

But the people that lived around Jefferson, the Wrights, you’ve heard of Merrill Wright, Merrill still lives down in Jefferson, they’ve been around for probably since the 1890’s or so.  I don’t know how well Merrill would take to doing oral history, I can hear him saying “Oh well, you don’t want to hear about all that, it’s boring.”  Or some such thing.  But he’s probably one of the last living of that generation—he’s 79 or 80.  I knew his mother, Olivia Wright, everybody called her Grandma Wright.  She lived down in Jefferson.  All kids would go there, she’d bake things and made things and she was the classic grandma.  She was a great lady.  She lived in the little pink house just as you turn into Jefferson.

Before we run out of tape, how did your dad meet your mom?

Let me go into the regionality thing before we get to that.  Jefferson had people that aligned themselves with Jefferson.  Como was probably the least locally aligned because there weren’t a number of specific ranches that were really—it was all tied to the ranches.  The Jefferson ranches were very productive and very powerful, for want of a better word, they were the power base at the time.  Como was a dying railroad town, even by the early twenties—still had gaslights, still had sidewalks, still had four or five saloons before prohibition shut them down whenever that was, 1922 or something, but then they had a lot of bootleggers—there were bootleggers out the Elkhorn, too—Como was the more eclectic base, if you will.  Fairplay was mining and ranching.  Hartsel was just like it is today, you were aligned with Hartsel if you were anywhere around the periphery of Hartsel.  And so for the Elkhorn area, if you lived down as far as the Wildwood subdivision, you were part of Hartsel. 

The Elkhorn area had a community center that was built in 1921 or 1922 and some folks named Johnson, that were homesteaders, they actually built this community center; it’s still standing, it’s a private house now, right along the Elkhorn Road.  And it was the community gathering point.  They had dances, and my granddad played a fiddle at those dances; he didn’t dance much but he played a good fiddle, I guess, so he like to go to those.  I meant to weave this into the Indian Mountain history and I’ve never quite gotten around to it, and I’ll touch on it later.  But the Elkhorn area had a phone system in the 1930’s, and a guy named Russell Brinkman, we’ve talked about him before, was a homesteader, and a good friend of my grandad’s lived across the way, had the homestead that my granddad never bought.  He had worked at the telephone company in Kansas before he decided to homestead—of course the telephone back was one you had to put the thing in your ear, then crank it and all that—well he got a hold of what was then surplus phones, they were old school phones in 1930-something and he actually had strung miles and miles of telephone wire and set up the buyers and set up the whole system to the entire community around there so that they were all connected to a party line.  So that area had telephone service before anyplace else did.  It was a totally private service that was set up by him just so the homesteaders could talk to each other.  He strung them on trees and he stuck poles up on fence posts.  I have rolls and rolls of his wire that my dad and I went over and got out of his homestead in probably 1970 or so, but anyway there was a phone system.  I’ll go into more detail as to which homesteads they went to and all that.

My mom bought a homestead.  My mom is not from an agrarian family, she’s actually kind of a blue-blood, actually Canadian from Nova Scotia—Halifax.  Actually I’m related to the Kenard shipping people of Canada, that’s my mom’s heritage.  So he was part of that family.  I went to the genealogical library in Halifax; it’s not real hard to find my ancestry, because it’s all right there, since the 1600’s or so. 

What was her maiden name?

My mother’s maiden name was Morrow.  My full name is James Bain Morrow Gardner.  And if you go back into the Halifax registry you’ll find three or four generations of James Bain Morrow’s and they were all descended, they were Scottish, from that point and then married into the Kenard family.  Supposedly I can still get free passage on the QEII, because if you can claim ancestry, which I can, but I’ve never done it.  But I did get free passage on the Queen Mary in Long Beach once because my aunt had told me I could do it, but anyway before we run out of tape, my mom—my granddad from that side of the family came to America as a mining engineer.  He was born in 1886 and he came to America as a mining engineer and worked for Phelps-Dodge Corporation and worked for Console Consolidation Coal Company, as a mining engineer for his entire career.  But my mom was born in Los Angeles and they moved shortly after that to Dawson, New Mexico, which is a ghost town now, but was a coal mining town then.  And mom went to school in Raton, New Mexico and she went to college initially in Las Vegas, New Mexico.  Then she came up to D U, and got a master’s in teaching, she was going to be a teacher.  She has always been quite an anti-social sort, she’s still living. She still lives around here.  When she was twenty-one years old her grandfather from her mother’s side gave her $1200 inheritance when he died.  And she had the presence of mind to know that if she just squandered it somewhere it would be gone.  So she said, “I’ll buy some land.”  So she was going to D U at the time, finishing up her master’s and she was looking through the paper, she was twenty-one years old, and saw this ad in the paper for a homestead in Park County, Colorado.  This was in 1938, and she was born in 1917.  She had gotten a 1932 Pontiac, and drove up 285.  This was right in a transitional time between when the railroad was going out and part of 285 was still a dirt road.  Anyway she came up here and it was a 640 acre homestead, and it was $1200 exactly.  I still have the handwritten piece of yellow paper, the deed where she got it, and I forget the date now, sometime in the spring of 1938.  So she got the homestead and moved into there.  That homestead belonged to a guy named Louis Schmitt.  And it was one of the few homesteads that my granddad hadn’t managed to acquire.  It was right smack in the middle of his ranch holdings.  My poor old 85 year old mother, 86 almost, as a twenty-one year old girl, I've seen her at that age in pictures.  Think of her as a fresh young girl coming into the area.  And these Gardner boys are living down the road.  Well my dad started coming over and visiting.  They were probably as dissimilar in background as they could possibly be.  Because my dad’s family were very intelligent but they didn’t have breeding, back in the day when breeding meant everything.  Even though my dad was extremely self-educated and well-spoken, he only had finished the eighth grade, so he always had that personally imposed feeling, if nothing else, that he didn’t have that educational background whereas my mom had a master’s degree in English.  And she comes from this family with some serious lineage. I’ve got some more I haven’t told you about, and I probably won’t unless you really want to know.  But she’s got the real full blue-blood heritage.  And so she comes up here, she’s this really quite eccentric lady that’s bought this place.  And pretty much scrapped her teaching career practically before it’s started to live as a hermit, so to speak, on this place.  Well, then World War II intervened, and so she went off—like Rosie the Riveter—only she went off in a managerial capacity for a consolidated aircraft outfit during the war.  My dad was too old for World War II so he stayed on the ranch.  The rest of my uncles, one of them was older than him was already working in the essential metals—copper was one of the essential metals--in one of the mines in Globe, Arizona.  Granddad was in his sixties by then, or late fifties.  Dad stayed home and took care of the ranch, while mom was off with the war effort.  After the war she came back.  This was in about 1946—she spent a year or two somewhere else, at the weather bureau in Alaska.  She came back and dad was still around because they were taking care of her horse.  She had left her horse there, so they were taking care of her horse.  She still had the homestead.  And it was just kind of a natural thing—here’s my dad and there she is and they got married and here I am. 

But her homestead was absorbed into the Gardner ranch.  By then my granddad --they got married in 1948—by 1950 granddad was getting up in years and had the family dynamics been different it would probably have been a very very large ranch, because he had plans of buying the Bardy, the Sleighter ranch, a couple of ranches over by Jefferson.  He had plans of being the mega ranch; he wanted to buy hay ranches, because he knew the value of them.  But he was starting to get angina, which back then they didn’t do any kinds of open heart surgery or angioplasty or anything else.  You took nitroglycerine pills and waited to die.  Which is basically what he did.  He was starting to get heart pains and knew his time wasn’t that much longer.  There was a lot of talk in the family as to who would take over the reigns of the ranch.  My dad was the heir apparent, because he was the oldest, he was the most intelligent, but he was much more of a philosopher than he was a leader.  He was a fantastic philosopher and a scholar of life, but he was not a barn smithy and he knew it.  And so when they got down to brass tacks, they decided to break the partnership up and the plans all got scrapped.  I didn’t know about those plans until probably the year before my dad died, and then I found out.  I guess it never seemed important enough to talk about.  But they had plans to be a really major ranch.  But anyway at that time, my mom had retained title to her land.  When the partnership broke up in 1954, my dad took his share of the partnership in land.  My uncles and my aunts took theirs in money.  So he stayed and they left.  And mom combined her land with his and I’ve bought land to add to it.  So that’s a short thumb-nail sketch of how I happen to be a fair sized land owner.  I’ve got about 2800 acres, which nowadays is pretty good.  I’ve added eight or nine hundred acres since I’ve been old enough to buy land.  Sad to say, my kids, and I love them to death, but they don’t see the land as a legacy.  I don’t think they necessarily see it as a cash cow.  I’ve got three kids actually because my one boy died, but they all have their own lives and their own living. They are not waiting around for me to get old and die so they can have the money.  But I also know that they don’t have any of the continuity that I have.  My younger son from my first marriage is thirty years old and a computer whiz.  He’s a software writer; he actually makes his own software—a mini Bill Gates in a way—transcription technology for front range hospitals.  Actually they go all the way to the west coast now.  He does all this computer stuff that is binary, 0’s and 1’s; I know how it works theoretically.  If I had to do it I wouldn’t.  He’s very up front about it.  He says “Dad, I want to always to have the ranch but I don’t ever want to have to work it.”  He hates work; to him physical work is an abomination, so he doesn’t want to do it.  And my daughter and my other son are independent and they’re on their own.

 But with the tape we have left I’ll get into what has been probably one of the prime causes of the collapse of the ranching community as it was here.  Partly why this has been a community in transition for the last thirty or forty years.  Back in the twenties, in the teens and before the turn of the century, it was a given that their kids would take over and continue ranching in their footsteps, which they did.  And those kids’ kids, in large part, and if we have time on the tape I’ll talk about Jim Witcher, but when the World War II generation came along—this was my dad’s generation--when they came in, by then the some of the old established ranches that had the big water rights, they were already three generations into it.  And when those kids came back from the war—World War II—not a lot of them, but some of them had been out and seen the big wide world, and said “we don’t want to do this.”  Quite a few of them stayed, and that’s probably where things like the Santa Maria ranch got renamed because I believe that kind of initial collapse started happening with the Mills and Galloways and Chalmers because the kids—I’ll go into this in a minute—why the kids probably did it.  But then my parents generation kept the ranch again; the ones that came back from World War II. They get up into the seventies and late sixties, mid sixties, when our generation is graduating and going off to college—and most of them, myself excluded, came back and said “you’ve got to be joking, dad and mom.  There’s no way we’re going to work our fingers to the bone.”  A lot of these parents had worked their fingers to the bone, metaphorically, to keep the ranches intact so that the kids could take over and the kids didn’t want any part of it.  And at that point, that’s why in the late sixties and early seventies you saw such a mass selling off of water rights.  The water rights by then had already become very valuable.  And that was the heart of the ranch.  And mom and dad kept the ranch all those years—I can cite a specific example:  Cliff Johnson was the dad, Dixon Johnson was the son.  Cliff Johnson’s dad had the first ranch along the Tarryall.  That had passed to Cliff Johnson, who passed it to Dixon Johnson, who was saving that ranch for Cliffie Johnson and Mildred Johnson, but probably Cliffie, because it’s a male dominated thing. And when Cliffie—he graduated a year before I did—told his dad the day he graduated from high school  “don’t bother keeping this because I don’t want any part of it.”  It broke his dad’s heart.  His dad had—401K wasn’t around then—but basically their retirement was they expected to stay on the ranch, live there until they died, and the kids would come in and keep running the ranch and they would have a place to live, that was how it worked.  But it wasn’t going to work that way because Cliffie was going off to be a banker.  There’s a rest of the story to this, but there’s no tape.

There’s still another side.

Oh, well anyway, this is what happened over and over and over again, because the kids would go off to war or to college or both and come back and not want any part of what their parents were doing.  It had something to do with the sixties mentality, I suppose, it had a lot to do with the fact that they could see all of the work that these parents were doing, when there was all of this fortune in water rights and land there, and the kids wanted the money.  Now Cliffie Johnson was one of them; I’ll use him as an example because he is the poster child of what happened, a lot.  But since we have another side of the tape, I’ll go back and talk about the Chalmers and the Galloways in particular and what happened to them.  Anyway, Cliffie went off to school to be a banker, and he went off to get two years in junior and somewhere to get his economics degree.  He spent a couple years in the banking business and came back to Buena Vista to be a banker in the late sixties or early seventies.  He decided that banking wasn’t nearly as much fun as he thought it was going to be.  But by then his dad had sold the water rights and sold the ranch.  And he came up and visited his dad crying.  He said “I didn’t realize what I had, and I’ve thrown it all away.”  But his dad was wise enough he had kept the money and said “I thought you might, so what we’ll do is buy another ranch.”  So they did, and Dixon is now 88 and pretty much blind and can’t come up much to this elevation, but Cliffie runs the ranch--he’s 54or 55—down by La Junta where they bought.  So in a way they’ve managed to make it work.  But whenever I talk to Cliffie he always has this fond reminisces because it was a heritage that they threw away.  Well, that’s what happened en masse in the late sixties and early seventies.  All the baby boom generation dissed their parents and said “forget you guys, we’re going off to do our thing, do what you want to, but we want the money when you sell the ranch, of course.”  It was an unspoken thing, but sometimes it was spoken.

Second side, second tape

And that’s what happened, and after it got to a point, and a certain number of ranchers decided to sell out, it creates a kind of domino effect, A, and B, it puts the ideas in other peoples minds that gee well, maybe we can sell out and actually retire and be able to travel and so forth, and so it started forcing the issue.  But that’s what happened with a number of—that’s actually what happened to agriculture here.  And of course there were other factors came into play; there was the John Denver Colorado Rocky Mountain high; everybody comes to Colorado and it becomes a playground rather than a place to work and make a living.  And water, because everybody came into the Denver area and the Front Range area, water became increasingly valuable as land development moved along.  These are all things that are sort of currently facing us in Colorado right now and Park County in particular.  So I think it’s relevant to the history here because it all ties together.   It was sad the way a lot of it happened.  There could have been a lot of these places that could have remained family ownership but for that sort of philosophy of “hey, we’ve watched you work, but we can go out and we can be in careers and computers or computer-type things, were already becoming a reality.  I can work and do this and sit on my duff and not have to get out at three o’clock in the morning and pull calves and make three times what you’re making.  Let’s see, is there a choice?  And of course, there are people who give that all up and come and try to re-enter that life style, because it’s a life style.  It can’t all be about the money, or nobody could.

Back to the Chalmers and Galloways.  I want to use the Witchers as the example in this.  I grew up with one of the Galloways, with, let’s see, Mary Galloway was the matriarch.  And her son was Gerald, Gerald was the civil engineer and surveyor.  Gerald was a grand old man, I knew Gerry Galloway.  He was 70 years old probably in 1955—70 or 71.  And my dad, in a number of parts I told you dad was always on the fringe area of wanting to be a miner—Well the uranium boom came about—1955 was the peak of the uranium boom.  And so he and his shirttail relatives, remember I told you about the miner who set the example for why he didn’t want to be one.  Well, his cousin, who was another shirttail relative, and another guy and my dad formed this partnership to go into the uranium prospecting business, and in order to properly locate their claims, they had to have a surveyor.  Well, Gerald Galloway was the uranium surveyor in the area, and he was about grandad’s age, but he was still a spry old boy at 70, and he’d get out there and carry his old large transit with a wooden tripod over his shoulder.  And of course I’m a little kid, and I’d tag along watching old Gerald Galloway go along, and he’d set up.  He had a little bit of a Scotch brogue, even though they’d been here—I think he was born here, but because his parents were Scotch, he had a little bit of that brogue still.  And he was just a great old guy.  And he would insist on—dad would say, “Let me carry your--,” “Nobody carries my instrument!”  And he carried them up and down the hills.  He’d hike all over the place.  He surveyed the claims very well, I might add. He did some amazing surveying in the London mine, the American and London Butte, the North Star, the Hilltop, the Moose, a whole bunch of those mines up there.  He surveyed them on the ground with his transit and was incredibly accurate.  There were stacks and stacks and stacks of his survey papers and documentation of all of these mines.  He died sometime in the mid or late seventies, maybe—he was a very old man.  Mollie Galloway who was with him, lived on, for a number of years past that, till about ninety-some years old.  Gerald and Mollie raised Collin Galloway, he was three days older than I am; Collin and I grew up together.  Because Gerald’s son Gerrod was the classic ne’er do well miner who spent his days in the mine and his nights in the bar and never had a dime to show for it when he died.  But Collin spent his weekends mining with his dad, but he lived with his grandparents because his dad was incapable of raising a kid—and knew it.  And besides which, Gerald was such a great old boy I don’t blame Collin for wanting to live with him.  I first met Collin Galloway was when dad went up to see if Gerald would come out and survey the claim.  We were five years old and it was like, Wow here’s another kid that’s got kind of red hair and he’s a Scottish descent kind of guy, right—I’ve got a lot of Scottish descent in me and we….but back to the subject at hand while we still have some tape left. 

I was talking about the Galloways and the Mills and the Chalmers, but mostly wanted to use the Witchers as an example.  And the Schattingers would be another example, but the Witchers, because you know the name—I can’t remember the elder Witcher’s name, but anyway they were some of the early settlers in down there, by Sam Hartsel, and those guys came in from Missouri or somewhere.  Well, anyway they came in and, this goes back to the thing about my mom and my dad, talked about education.  Most of the people that came here came for the opportunity and very few of them had much past a fourth or an eighth grade education.  Back in that day a fourth grade was enough to put you out in the real world.  These people were the adventurers and the ones that came west, the ones that wanted to build an empire.  These guys, the elder Witchers, were a prime example of this.  I still can’t remember his name, but he, I believe, had a fourth grade education.  He then, of course there was one more generation between Jim and Stomp and that Witcher clan.  So his son, and there were probably several of them.  But again it was a very male dominated passing of the torch, and women, if they got an education it was on their own, because they were expected to marry and raise a family.  And so the elder Witcher’s sons, I may be hopping a generation, but the next generation maybe had an eighth grade education.  But that Witcher insisted that his kids get a college education.  He said, “I want you to have what I never had.”  And he was adamant about it, so Jim Witcher and Stomp Witcher and Tol, they all went off to college.  And guess what happened?  They came back from college and said, “You’ve got to be kidding!  We’re not going to work on this place”  And I heard from, actually the guy is still living, a guy named Jack Smith, and Jack may not be coherent enough to tell these stories any more.  But Jack knew the Witchers very well and he and my dad were reminiscing about a whole bunch of old-time stories about ten years ago.  And he was telling that story and it was very poignant at the time because I was really keenly aware that all of my siblings had decided not to come back.  Not my siblings, but my compatriots, my peers.  And so I had this conversation with a couple of my friends, and I was down there with dad and we were talking with Jack Smith, and he was talking about the Witchers.  And I guess old man Witcher, whatever his name was, the father of Tol and Stump, was so disillusioned by how he had worked, he actually may have lost friends?  because of that eventually, he had lost ownership of part of it, to put those kids through college, thinking that at least one of them would come back and be there.   And none of them did.  And he said it’s the worst mistake, he said,  I thought I was giving them everything, and so they’d come back and be part of the family, and that’s the other thing with the Galloways, Gerald Galloway, that was that generation of the Galloways; Gerald, I believe he had a brother, I’m not sure, and probably a sister.  And they all went off and got educated.  They did stick around the area, Gerald was here until he died, but he didn’t do the ranch because he found a better life.  So it was kind of a double-edged sword, the folks still opted to stay–I want you to have everything I didn’t have.  Well, maybe and maybe not; maybe you didn’t articulate it well enough.

The Shattingers’ son and daughter went off and came back, because it’s a lot easier to something else with a degree than to come back and work your fingers to the bone.  It’s not an eight hour day and it’s not a five-day week; no paid vacations, no paid leave.  Again its for the life style.   To make the full circle–you get folks like Leon Crane and Molle Wakum are the two I can think of right now.  Molle Wakum was French Canadian–he had a business in Quebec, he had dual citizenship because I believe he married somebody in Vermont.  So he had dual Canadian/US citizenship.  And he had some kind of a fire and safety business in Montreal and he always dreamed of owning a ranch in the west.  So he bought the place that was the first ranch off the Tarryall Dam.  Lee Wallace wound up owning that, and Olney Paige, I think it was the Paige ranch originally.  I can tell you more stories about that part of the country, the Paige’s and Lee Wallace and how he wound up with the ranch, but anyway Molle Wakum bought that ranch, now he’s made a fortune with some kind of fire safety equipment in Canada and the US combined.  But he’s come here and bought water rights; he just recently  completed a deal with the Southern Colorado Water Conservancy District to deliver those water rights to him because the second Wahl ranch, Vargas’s are selling the water.  Anyway, he arranged to get part of the water to put it back on the ranch, because he wants do the livestock.  Now here’s somebody totally disconnected, he’s getting connected with the history of the area.  But it’s somebody who aspires to live the life that the people who lived here aspired not to.  And the same with Leon Crane.   Leon Crane owns the place just to the east of 285 between Como and Jefferson down 34. He just built a big house down there.  He bought a bunch of land that had the water sold off.  But he bought some more of that same water.  But he was an executive, he was South African originally.  There may be something to this foreign idealism coming in here.  But he was born in South Africa and he married an American citizen, so he has American citizenship–he’s a full American citizen now.  But he worked for General Motors in South Africa as a high level executive. And he always wanted a little place in the West, in Colorado in particular.  So he bought this place, and he’s put water back to it.  Here’s another guy that’s kind of a strange combination.  But he’s actually trying to recreate what people who were here were ran as fast as they could to get away from.

Full circle, huh?

Full circle.  What else do you want me to talk about?

Do you know anything about the Colton Sheep Ranch?

I know a little bit.  They called it the Colton Sheep Ranch, but I think it was originally part of the Mills and Chalmers holdings.  And I did a show–we did shows all over the country for educational purposes (I’ve done lots of things besides ranch)–one of our first shows was down in Denver, in 1988.  And we were sitting there, it was a terrible show, it was a home and garden show, and it was a terrible weather time.  We were sitting there twiddling our thumbs waiting for any kind of business to come by and this old boy came by.  He was probably in his seventies, and he had worked on that Colton Sheep ranch.  And he said he was from Fairplay, Colorado, and he started asking me if I knew anything about the Wadley’s and the Galloway’s and I said yah, yah. And I launched into that because I like launching into that, so we killed a couple of hours talking.  But he told a kind of interesting story about one of the outbuildings on that ranch.  And in there, and I saw this when I was a kid but didn’t realize what I was seeing, there was a full mural painted on the wall.  I’m not sure which building it was, whether it was one of the buildings that burned down in the early sixties or not.  But it was a fantastically painted mural by some itinerant artist/cowboy/semi-drifter who went on to become quite famous.  And supposedly that was–he was known in the art circles–it was a pastoral scene and it had his signature on it, that wall was worth a hundred grand or something.  I don’t remember the guys name and I don’t remember the artist’s name.  But I remember seeing that when I was a kid, because dad went over there to buy hay. 

Somebody told me to go inside that barn to look, but I haven’t done it yet, hating to trespass.

At the time I half dismissed it–the guy was not a blowhard but I figured maybe he’s reminiscing about things that maybe didn’t happen.  But it was corroborated by somebody else totally disassociated with that situation several years later.  But that really is there because I remember seeing it.  But I’m glad it’s still there because in 1963 a haystack burned down that caught one of those barns on fire and burned it up.  And I always wondered if that was the one.  But if that’s still there, that’s cool.

Well you know Outwest Resorts owns that, but I don’t think they know what’s in there.

If you want to follow up on it, trespass over there and take a picture of it.  Take it to the Denver Art Museum and see if you can find somebody.  Because this guy, it was one of those transient experiences, that I wish I had paid more attention to.  But I didn’t get his name–I got the name of the artist but I don’t remember. 

Did you know any of the Eppersons?

Dad knew the Eppersons quite well, but I was a really little kid then.  They probably left in 1954 or 1955.  There was a guy that worked with the Eppersons that was named Earl Cooper.  If you head on west toward Antero Junction head out past the ranch we just talked about.  Maybe you took that picture of the census thing hanging on the door and the old gas station on one side of the road and an old log cabin on the other side of the road.  Well I remember when that cabin was occupied, somebody lived there, and the guy’s name was Earl Cooper.  He was a friend of my dad’s and he was also a friend of the Eppersons.  And that was a hard-scrabble place.  He was a classic cowboy, Earl Cooper was, a cartoon like cowboy.  With the Pall Mall cigarette and the hat and the cowboy boots and a little bit of a drawl.  I don’t remember now what my dad had to do with him other than they were friends.  It was about in 1955 or 1956.

I don’t remember now how long Earl was there, but he probably worked for the Hartsel ranch.

Owned by McDannald then.

He had a daughter that I thought was pretty cute.

Were you familiar with the area when it was bought by the Estates of the World.  And they started developing.

Yah, Heisslers were out there and had that little gas station. They still had the old gas pump in the early fifties.  My dad knew the guy that ran the place–the lady was the cook and the guy was the gas station attendant.  I don’t remember much else, I was only five or six years old.  I remember things better than most because I’ve been accused of always been an adult.  But I remember the lady as a haggard lady who cooked really greasy food.  Dad was friends with them too.

The Heisslers lived up on the other side of the road.  That would have been all of the area Estates of the World chopped up in all the sculptured incarnations that they bought inadvertently in a tax sale.  But a lot of that ground up there was Heisslers.  They were homesteaders who came in there and actually made good on the ranch as well.  I don’t know how much they did in the timber business.  They came in an actually made it to a certain degree in ranching.  I don’t know a lot about the Heisslers except granddad bought a whole herd of cattle from Heisslers in 1935 or so, before World War II.  Heisslers managed to hang on until the seventies.  That’s that old ranch building just on the other side of Glentivar.  Sometime probably in the late fifties or early sixties a “mysterious” fire burned down both the restaurant and the repair shop.  The building that’s left is the side building.  When you turn to go down to Spinney, that building sits there.  At one time there was a post office there.  Getting back to the homesteaders, they claimed certain areas.  If you had a homestead over by Schoolmarm Mountain at the edge of the hills over there.  As a matter of fact my uncle married a homestead girl from over there.  They actually got their mail at Glentivar.

There was another one that I knew absolutely nothing about, other than the fact that it was a town site at one time down the Tarryall partway.  Of course there’s Bordenville.  But there’s a place called Orm maybe Orme.  It was on the map.  It was on the Colorado road maps as late as the mid sixties.  It was beyond Bordenville, but maybe off the road a little ways.  There was a CB craze in the mid sixties.  Well I got myself a CB.  And back then it was all formal, you had to get your CB license and everything had to be done right.  Being a bit suspicious of government then too, they wanted to know what the closest town was to your location, and I thought well, I’m not going to say Fairplay and I’m not going to say Como.  But I got out a road map and found a place called Orm, Colorado, and that’s what I used. 

End of tape