Review by Ed Quillen
4UR Ranch – December 1997 – Colorado Central Magazine
This Chosen Place – Finding Shangri-La on the 4UR
by Max Evans
Published in 1997 by University Press of Colorado
ISBN 0-87081-437-0
TAKE AN INTERESTING PLACE — the 4UR guest ranch near Wagon Wheel Gap close to the headwaters of the Rio Grande. Then take an interesting person, Charles H. Leavell, an El Paso man who made big money contracting and eventually got to buy his dream ranch.
The result should be an interesting book, but instead we get a turkey of such dimensions that it should be able to feed America’s homeless this Christmas.
We can start with some hot springs along Goose Creek, a Rio Grande tributary, which led to the initial development of the Wagon Wheel Guest Ranch, an ancestor of the 4UR. (Two double-U’s make four U’s, and it’s a Ranch, hence 4 U’s and R, and thus 4UR).
One owner was General William Jackson Palmer, founder of the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad, Colorado Springs, and, indirectly, Alamosa and Salida. Another was Allan Phipps, son of Sen. Lawrence Phipps (who built the mansion which hosted the Denver Summit of 8 dinner last summer). He and his brother, Gerald, kept the Broncos in Denver during some hard times in the 1960s.
The current owner, Charles Leavell, was in the major leagues of contractors: dams on several continents, demanding nuclear stuff, top-secret defense installations.
Certainly an interesting cast, but try to find out when the ranch changed hands over the years, or how much it sold for — author Max Evans apparently couldn’t be troubled to visit the Mineral County Courthouse in Creede.
His slipshod research shows throughout the book, as evidenced by the frequency of the lazy writer’s dodge of “It is said that …” Why bother to check the information, or even find out who said it, when you can just type “It is said …”?
This could have been a good history of a ranch, but it’s hard to learn much from this book about it except that people have been paying to stay there for a century or more, and that some of these people were famous, like Julia Child and Theodore Roosevelt.
We also learn that Goose Creek offers superlative trout fishing, and in describing its piscatorial pleasures, Evans waxes lyrical:
“The creek caught the light in millions of little diamond suns that sparkled an instant before disappearing and reappearing in a rhythm of light and shadow that soothed and exalted at the same time. Charles had long ago learned to listen to the endless voices of moving water. He could read the water as he did a book. He recognized the curious line of creek water that spelled out a feeding channel. He had just flicked the fly into it when a rainbow rose from underneath and took it. Charles stood his ground …”
SUCH WRITING works well enough for fishing, but when it turns to other topics, it becomes a romantic imperial style, a sort of Kipling in prose, always overstating the case. Charles Leavell may be a fine man, but Max Evans tried to turn him into the hero of an epic, a man whose sole known flaw is that he can be “demanding more than some people are capable of giving — but considering what he himself has given and overcome, this trait must be accepted…”
This heroic style continues into the descriptions of Leavell’s ranch, which Evans compares to the “sacred” Taos Mountain, the valley in Egypt with “the massive, incredible sphinx, the pyramids of wonder, and the tombs of the royals,” the Taj Mahal, and the Grand Canyon. “There is also such a place in Colorado–the 4UR Ranch.”
Note that there’s just one such place in our state — forget the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, the Maroon Bells, or the Royal Gorge. Obviously, in the author’s mind, the 4UR is more than just a ranch. He even includes a map of the “4UR Realm” and surprise, it includes Salida, Alamosa, Gunnison, Saguache, Cañon City, and Colorado Springs.
To make matters worse, the author also includes everyone who ever was anyone in this entire region — from Bat Masterson and Calamity Jane to Kit Carson and Jay Gould — as part of the history of this over-romanticized spread.
“Everyone through history seemed to know of the 4UR and its environs,” Evans contends.
But I found it more than irritating to find so much of our regional history exalted as if it were somehow the personal history — and culminating accomplishment — of Charles Leavell, the international business tycoon who now owns the 4UR.
Although the ranch may be impressive, the 4UR is not the Old Kingdom of Egypt, despite Evans’s over enthusiastic prose. (But even if it were, I think I’d still resent my inclusion in anybody’s realm; we have enough problems with our elected officials around here.)
A solid story would have been a valuable contribution to our regional lore. Instead we get sloppy research and over-exuberant writing, which is often downright confusing as it shifts back and forth from the 4UR story to the Leavell story (while trying to include Bob Ford, Soapy Smith, and a host of other famous Coloradans as somehow being a part of the 4UR legacy).
The orthography is inconsistent — Canyon City in one place, pinon in another. The accounts often digress for several pages — did this book even have an editor?
It reminded me of the biographies rich men sometimes commission in their sunset years and arrange to have privately published.
No harm in that, I suppose, but why an academic press chose to squander its limited resources and good name on some vanity project like this is a mystery to me. Unless you’re really desperate to know more — and not much more, at that — about the 4UR Ranch, your time will be better spent with almost any other book.
— Ed Quillen