Essay by Allen Best
Colorado – October 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
A WAVE OF NOSTALGIA for “Colorado as it used to be” has been sweeping the state during the last several years.
This trend first became evident, at least to me, in the advertising pitches of ski resorts. Starved for business, Crested Butte truthfully claimed that it was not just another congested I-70 ski resort, and with nuances, Aspen and Steamboat Springs advanced the same arguments with hopes that they could become just a little more congested.
The ski resorts make this argument because it resonates with the public. People hunger for wide-open spaces, or at least mountain vistas that haven’t been carved up and sold to the people of great wealth whom we all envy and loathe. Developers in the Winter Park-Granby area tell me that this is a strong theme of focus groups: “We want Colorado as it used to be.”
At Winter Park, Intrawest is plotting new real estate development, which purports to marry the past with the present. Colorado, says the company, was once a “tight-knit group of athletes, artists and artisans. This is what most of Colorado once was. It’s what Winter Park will always be.”
At Telluride, this intent to sell “Colorado as it used to be” is articulated by Leary O’Gorman, who directs the local convention and visitors’ bureau. “Telluride is what Colorado was 50 years ago,” O’Gorman told The Telluride Watch. “Remember the first time you drove over Loveland Pass and saw Summit County? Now you drive through the tunnel and see the strip malls of Summit County.”
In fact, only a small portion of Coloradans can recall when there was no Eisenhower Tunnel, which opened in 1973. Few of those wanting “Colorado as it used to be” actually knew Colorado as it used to be. This desired Colorado isn’t even a nostalgic remembered past, but instead a perceived – and I would argue mythological – past.
When people talk about “Colorado as it used to be” what era are they referring to? What past do they pine for? The mining past? The ranching past? The knotty-pine past of the golden age of automobile tourism?
An unruly and profligate place, the Colorado of the 19th century was primarily populated by boisterous, overly enthusiastic young men. Violence was common, prostitution was rampant, and for a time the situation got so out of hand that newspaper editorials in Chaffee County encouraged lynchings. Although the Old West makes an excellent setting for rollicking, adventure movies, the real place was too wild. In those days, both Lake and Chaffee Counties racked up murder rates that would make modern metropolises like New York City and the District of Columbia quake.
OUR STATE WAS ALSO a place of ethnic and racial tension in those early days. The Chinese were barely tolerated and were often assaulted. The Italians were regarded with deep suspicion, and often menaced by local Klansmen. Chinese and Italians routinely engaged in the most back-breaking work, but were frequently given inadequate quarters. It was not a coincidence that when snowslides busted loose on the hillsides above Silver Plume in the treacherous winter of 1899, 11 of the 12 victims were Italian immigrants or their children.
So, is this the “Colorado as it used to be” that people cherish? I am guessing not.
How about the Colorado of what I call the middle ages, referring to the time between the mining/railroading era and our current land and recreation boom. That time in Aspen was described by one book as “The Quiet Years,” and by extension I think that description applies to much of Colorado.
In a Denver Post column, Ed Quillen, described Breckenridge as a place “decaying into the wilderness” when he first encountered it in the late 1950s. Summit County lost population from 1940 to 1960, and also lost property value. So did a lot of other old mining towns.
So, there were a lot of tired-looking Victorian houses and shacks in old mining towns available for low, low prices during that era. There was also lots of mud, and it was often a long, long drive to emergency medical care. If you suffered appendicitis as you retired for the evening, the nearest doctor may very well have been in the next county. That is Colorado as it used to be.
That particular age was also thick with sawmills. Fifty years ago, loggers were cutting the forests with a new generation of tools that enabled them to more efficiently topple trees. The logs were sliced in nearby towns, and the sawdust burned in teepee-shaped burners that glowed through the night and emitted smoke that sometimes settled like a lid over mountain valleys, blotting out the morning sun.
Yes, air pollution, is Colorado as it used to be.
Water pollution is also Colorado as it used to be. The mines, of course, were big polluters, but so were people. Even when Vail was well on its way to becoming a “world-class” resort, around the corner in Minturn, privies hung out across the Eagle River. In Colorado as it used to be, you hoped the brown thing at the end of your fishing line was a trout.
COLORADO IN THE GOOD, old days frequently featured terrible coffee, the type you suspected was made from recycled grounds, and alpine restaurants tended toward assembly line sameness, with moth-eaten deer and elk heads presiding over every meal. Mountain highways were narrow and winding and seldom had adequate shoulders when you needed to pull over.
But a great deal of Colorado hasn’t changed much in the last 30 years. The high plains that occupy nearly half of the state have changed very little, except that the small places have become smaller. In many portions of Eastern Colorado, only the Wal-Marts have thrived. And within the mountains, many things haven’t changed too much, either. Walden gained a nice restaurant but lost population. Yampa still has muddy streets, and Leadville still has a short, short summer.
All of this said, I can understand the nostalgia. I recently felt sentimental at the old inn at Trappers Lake, with its thick logs and varnished-wood tables. Knotty pine pushes my triggers. As do wide-open spaces. Big empties are soothing. We will all feel poorer if we allow trophy homes and suburban-style subdivisions to gobble up too much of our open spaces.
But “Colorado as it used to be” is ultimately an illusion. It’s not truly the past that people hunger for. People want to be on the interface; on one side they want wide-open spaces, and on the other they want all of the modern amenities — the two of them linked by roads that are uncongested.
It’s a dream as old as the first suburb.
Allen Best was born and raised in Fort Morgan, much of which still resides in “Colorado as it used to be.” He now lives between Arvada and Glenwood Springs.