Fewer gunfights and gulch dwellers
Our mountains were and are urban based
“Welcome to Gilpin County, A Rural Mountain Community” That’s what the sign at the Gilpin County line says. A look at our history though shows that we may not be so “rural” after all.
The “community” part is pretty much right. There is lots of sense of community here. Anyone who attended the county fair last weekend knows that. But, just how rural are we, or have we ever been? From time to time we have celebrations that feature gunfights, surely a rural mountain event. We had one in Rollinsville on August 1st. We also love to cherish our back-woods Zeke (old-timer Gilpin ZK license plates) gulch-dwellers who get their water from the spring and have no electricity. Those folks still live here too. We often say we’re here to escape the big city. Are we really that rural and that far from the big city?
Escaping the “big city”
We love to say that we live “in the woods.” There’s some truth to that. Many of us live here because we do hate cities. We hate the traffic and the fast pace of the urban life. Many a Zeke tells me he’d like to get back to living in a one room cabin back up in some gulch. But, like it or not, our mountains were and are part of the urban grid. The myth of the west with its gunfights, loners, and mountain Jacks and Janes just rarely happened.
Not many old miners or gun fighters either
The fact is, only a very few individuals ever successfully lived alone in some gulch. We’ve had a few and I’ve celebrated them here in this column. Solitary gulch dwellers like Henry Niccum were real. But they were pretty rare. Also rare were gun fights of any kind. During the big boom in the 1860s and 70s there were a couple of recorded shootings, but in reality were very few. These were hardly gun fights either. Rather they were what we’d today call bar room drunks shooting wildly at one another. The myth of the mountain man was mostly a myth too. Rather than being solitary, the earliest Zekes clustered together and seemed to mainly name their habitations “city.” Central City is called a city and so is Black Hawk. They were probably never “big cities” in our sense of the word, but it is interesting that the earlier inhabitants liked the name. Actually, from the start, we were part of Denver’s infrastructure grid.
Governor Gilpin Predicted Denver
In his 1860 book The CentralGold Region: The Grain Pastoral and Gold Region of North America, William Gilpin developed his geopolitical theory. In it he postulated Denver as the queen city of the west. To Denver would come the railroads. To Denver would come the grain handling infrastructure. Denver would suck up what he called the “lands of luxuriant fertility” west of the 100th meridian. Of course he sometimes waxed a little too ecstatic, especially about areas where he had investments. He did indeed call the San Luis Valley “a new Vale of Kashmir” and waxed eloquent about the central gold belt the buckle of which was Central City, and yes, even the soon to be Rollinsville. Much as Gilpin loved our mountains, he saw us as getting and giving nourishment in a reciprocal pattern with Denver. Denver was, in his words, “an expanded bowl to receive and fuse into harmony whatsoever enters within its rim.”
We are part of the Rocky Mountain Empire
We certainly do live on Denver’s rim. Each morning cars stream to Nederland and down Boulder Canyon. Another stream goes down Golden Gate Canyon, and still another stream goes up the switchbacks to Wondervu and then down to Denver, while even more cars head down Clear Creek Canyon and Interstate 70. These are commuters who depend on Denver for sustenance. Then in the evening long streams of fun seekers come up to Black Hawk and Central City for perhaps the opera, but much more likely for the casinos. The masthead of the old Rocky Mountain News used to proclaim it to be the voice of the Rocky Mountain Empire. Denver was the capital of that empire. In political terms it’s not surprising that the next Governor of Colorado is very likely to be the present mayor of Denver. A startling fact is that 80% of our full-time population lives (at least according to some demographers) in the large cities of the wider eastern slope. Like it or not, the Denver metroplex dominates the state.
Protecting our Rural Mountain Community
Perhaps the best way to protect our rural mountain community is to come to grips with the fact that nearly all of the west is part of an urban complex and we’re no exception. That means the need for transportation, such as a high speed rail system along I-70. That means paying our dues to DRCOG and the other planning associations. Yes, even better bicycle access must be included in the mix. Isolation from the metroplex would hardly make sense. In fact such isolation doesn’t even seem possible anymore. Consider Ouray County.
Isolation won’t protect us any more than Ouray County was protected. Originally Ouray was a mixed mining and cattle raising based county. Then in the 1980′s we read in the Denver Post that Ralph Laurent had moved to Ouray! Soon the water rights once going to ranches went to big second homes and golf courses. Today Ouray county commissioners note that half the income in the county comes from various types of dividend income. They also estimate that over a third of the homes in the county are second homes occupied only a small part of the year. It’s hard to develop community in that sort of a situation. Ouray is much more isolated than we are, and yet the financial life of that county is part of the urban metroplex.
Fewer guns and cattle than we thought
The history of the west has been largely the history of western cities. Like it or not, the health of the cities defined the health of the rural areas. Territorial Governor Alexander Hunt named many of our Colorado cities. He worked for the Western Development Corporation, a subsidiary of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad. He argued that only with cities would Colorado succeed. If he was right, we should be boosting Denver as much as boosting Rollinsville. We are in many ways a rural mountain community. And in many ways we’re part of that Denver Governor Gilpin predicted we would be. Those are the facts we have to deal with.