Randi Minetor - Historic Rocky Mountain National Park: The Stories Behind One of Americas Great Treasures

Best-selling author Randi Minetor has written more than forty books for Rowman & Littlefield, including Historic Glacier National Park and five books that tell the true stories of people who have died in national and state parks: Death on Mount Washington , Death on Katahdin , Death in Acadia National Park , Death in Glacier National Park , and Death in Zion National Park . Her work extends to birding guides, including Backyard Birding , Birding New England , and The New England Bird Lovers Garden , as well as guides to a number of national parks and historic cities and eight books on the best day hikes in New York State. Randi writes for a number of trade magazines in theater technology, medicine, municipal water management, and tourism, and she serves as a ghostwriter for executives and entrepreneurs in a wide range of fields. She is based in Rochester, New York.

A LSO IN THIS SERIES :

Historic Acadia National Park
Historic Denali National Park and Preserve
Historic Glacier National Park
Historic Redwood National and State Parks
Historic Yosemite National Park

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Minetor, Randi, author.

Title: Historic Rocky Mountain National Park : the stories behind one of Americas great treasures / Randi Minetor.

Description: Guilford, Connecticut : Lyons Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019003953 (print) | LCCN 2019004008 (ebook) | ISBN 9781493038770 (e-book) | ISBN 9781493038763 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Rocky Mountain National Park (Colo.)History. | Rocky Mountain National Park (Colo.)Biography.

Classification: LCC F782.R59 (ebook) | LCC F782.R59 M56 2019 (print) | DDC 978.8/69dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019003953

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

W HEN YOU RE CHALLENGED WITH TELLING THE STORIES THAT SHAPED a national park, its extraordinarily helpful to have a historian who takes an interest in your work. Many, many thanks to Kelly Cahill, curator at Rocky Mountain National Park, for sending me dozens of scanned documents and files, tracking down photos, and giving me lots of solid leads for the information I sought. This book would not have come together nearly as successfully without her assistance, and I am very grateful for her patience with my inquiries and her responsiveness.

Thanks also to the folks at History Colorado and the Denver Public Library for access to their photo files, and to journalist and historian Kenneth Jessen for pointing me in the right directions for these photo sources. I also thank Norma Platt for the loan of Grand Lake: The Pioneers , written by her relative Mary Lyons Cairns.

The staff at Lyons Press has once again come together to create a beautiful book. My editor, Holly Rubino, heads a team that includes production editor Meredith Dias, copy editor Helen Subbio, layout artist Jason Rock, and proofreader Roberta Monaco. I also thank my wonderful agent, Regina Ryan, who has guided my career for thirteen years and continues to make sure I get great assignments and regular paychecks.

To the friends who have been my cheering section for as long as I can remember, heres another shout out for all of your support and your tolerance of my long-winded stories about national park history: Martha and Peter Schermerhorn, Ruth Watson and John King, Ken Horowitz and Rose-Anne Moore, Lisa Jaccoma, Martin Winer, Bruce Barton, and so many others.

And to Nic, my husband and the best traveling companion a girl could want: Thank you for making sure we get where were supposed to go, get home again, and have everything we need with us for any eventuality. I still dont know whats in the three magic canvas bags in the back of the car, but they seem to hold whatever will get us out of any jam we may ever face. So far, so goodand so many more miles ahead.

W ELCOME TO THE O LD W EST.

Old has an enormous meaning in a place where the first people arrived more than ten thousand years ago and the glaciers sculpted the landscape long before that. As an entity, Rocky Mountain National Park is just over a century old, but its origins extend beyond prehistory, back some eighty million years when a series of jolts of the planets tectonic plates forced one layer of the earths crust on top of another, until they formed the highest peaks in Colorado. Launched from beneath layers of sedimentary rockwhat geologists call the Ancestral Rocky Mountainsthese new mountains began to erode as they met with repeated ages of glacial activity as well as the wind and weather of a volatile planet. Perhaps Longs Peak measured 20,000 feet above sea level at one time; now, at 14,259 feet, its still part of Colorado mountain royalty as the only fourteener within the park.

After the last of the glaciers receded about fifteen thousand years ago, and Rocky Mountains namesakes displayed marvelous formations of granite and gneiss, people began to find their way here in pursuit of some of the largest game ever to frequent these parts: woolly mammoth, mastodon, and others. They left the scarcest of signs that they were ever here at all, but wily archaeologists put together their story notwithstanding the shortage of tangible objects. Later people arrived who would stay as long as they could: Ute and Arapaho, tribal people who lived in the plains and valleys and hunted and gathered in the mountains, eventually learning an agrarian lifestyle when newcomers drove them off their own lands.

It was these new arrivals, European Americans ready to homestead on land acquired by the United States through the Louisiana Purchase, who triggered rapid change throughout the Colorado Rockies. Filing land claims sanctioned by the government, digging mines when hints of precious metals revealed themselves on the surface, and building guest lodging, dude ranches, and boomtowns, they made new homes here that would establish their dominance. In the space of a decade or so, the Colorado Front Range became the hopeful place for people looking to take their lives in a new direction. It also settled into the lawlessness we see in movies, with shootouts, land grabs, feuding ranchers, and conflicts between settlers and those who came before them.

Somehow, in this chaotic environment, a few people developed a greater vision and a higher purpose, and they invited the federal government into their front yards to create Rocky Mountain National Park. To them we owe a debt of gratitude for the transformation that took place here in what had truly been the Wild West. Park officials reclaimed the wilderness, set boundaries, made rules, and preserved this magical place for the generations to come. In turn, towns such as Estes Park and Grand Lake were transformed into tourist destinations, attracting visitors from all over the world to see the treasures this park is sworn to protect.