Colorado and the Rockies [antikvár]

First page: columbines, Colorado's state flower, (previous pages) Maroon Bells, near Aspen and (facing page) Bear Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park. It took God about 300 million years to create the Rocky Mountains and He was at his most generous in Colorado, where more than fifty-four peaks are over 14,000 feet high and 1,140 soar up more than 10,000 feet. The scenery here prompted Theodore Roosevelt, a man never at a loss for words, to say that describing it "bankrupts the English language." But in 1858, the year Roosevelt was born, gold was discovered and men began chewing up the landscape with hopes of getting rich. They left behind piles of waste and polluted streams, but for all their hard work, they really only scratched the surface and the mountains are as incredibly beautiful today as they were when Ute and Comanche Indians called them home. The prospectors also left behind memories of an era in American history as colorful as the mountains themselves. And possibly the most colorful and distinctive individual of that era was Horace Austin Warner Tabor. Tabor doesn't fit the stereotype of a mountain prospector. He wasn't a grizzled, bearded old man who spent his summers with no other companion than a mule and his winters spinning yarns about the rich ore that had slipped through his fingers. He was a squat little man with a head too large for his body and a handlebar moustache too large for his face. His movements were slow and his mind seemed even slower. They called him "Haw," which had more to do with his initials than his sense of humor, which many said was nonexistent. If he suited any stereotype at all, it was that of his native state of Vermont. Colorado was his adopted home, but the Granite State was in his soul. No one knows for sure why he went west. There was a depression raging in the East when he got married but it didn't seem to have any effect on him. His new wife was the boss' daughter and that gave him job security in his work as a stonecutter. But even before their honeymoon was over, he had convinced his bride, Augusta, to begin a new life on the Kansas prairie. It turned outtobeabad decision, but neither of them ever entertained ideas of going back to New England. By the end of their first summer, they had a child to feed and no money left, so Augusta supported them by taking in boarders. Haw decided to head for the mountains the following year. It made more sense to dig for gold than to plough fields. Augusta convinced him to take their boarders along so that the income they provided could be a hedge against possible failure. It turned out to be a smart move. Her paying guests, plus the milk from their cows and bread from their oven, kept their heads above water while Haw chased his elusive dream. She accumulated enough to allow them to spend their first winter in the comparative comfort of Denver and the following spring, when he found that his claim had been jumped, Haw led Augusta and the baby, the cows and the boarders off in the direction of Pike's Peak. Gold had been discovered in California Gulch and Haw was able to earn $5,000 there, more money than he had ever seen at any one time in his life. Being a practical man, he invested some of his time in building a log house big enough to take in more boarders. Soon he could add a general store and post office to it. By the time the town shut down for the winter, it had a population of more than 10,000 and the fancy name of Oro City. Haw and Augusta weren't becoming as fabulously rich as some of their new neighbors, but the store did well and Haw's poker winnings provided a good income, which was more than he could say for the gold mine he had staked out up the gulch. Then one day, as often happened in Colorado mining towns, the gold ran out and so did the men who had come to find it. Left with a post office with no mail to handle and a general store with no customers, the Tabors moved on to another bonanza town called Buckskin Joe. By the time the gold gave out there, they decided to forget mining and went back to Oro City to reopen their store. The town wasn't completely dead and they were able to eke out a comfortable living. Then one day, an old prospector named "Uncle Billy" Stevens and his partner A B. Wood announced that claims they had established in California Gulch were rich in silver. Within a few months it was a boom town again with a new name, Leadville. Its first mayor was the popular storekeeper-cum-postmaster, Horace Austin Warner Tabor. By then Haw's boarding house had become a four-room hotel and his store included a saloon. He himself had earned a reputation for honesty and miners who preferred not to take their valuables into the hills began leaving them is his care. As the storekeeper, he was also in a position to provide grubstakes for down-and-out prospectors. The grubstake was worth a third of any riches a miner might find, and the stashes the others had left would become Tabor's property if they didn't come