˛2´1◊ilmnop1W1WCHAPTER ONE
EARLY HISTORY OF THE ELKHEAD COMMUNITY
Elkhead, Colorado is located in Routt county, in the dry, northwestern corner of the state. Before anyone tried to practice agriculture in this region, the Ute Indians lived in camps and hunted up and down the Yampa River. They occasionally went into the nearby mountains, but game was plentiful along the river. In the winter, they followed the Yampa and the migrating herds of deer and elk to the deserts in western Colorado and eastern Utah.
Sometime in the mid-1800s trappers began hunting beaver in the area. A few of these men appear to have settled and claimed land which they later sold after the land was ceded from Mexico in 1848. The western half of Colorado was known as Grand County until 1887 when Routt and a host of smaller counties were formed. Routt County encompassed an area 150 wide by 75 miles long and contained approximately 5 million acres until it was divided in 1911 and the westernmost two-fifths of the area became Moffat County. Because of its inaccessibility and harsh climate, the western side of Colorado was not definitively surveyed until 1878. Many cattlemen, however, had already claimed parts of the area. Routt County was considered good summer range for herds of cattle that were wintered in Arizona and New Mexico, and sold in Nebraska and Kansas.
A few ranch families like the Dawsons, the Carys, and the Norvells built headquarters in Routt County. These were the successors to the very large cattle barons who during the mid-nineteenth century had controlled almost all of the range in the West and Midwest. The influx of homesteaders into the Midwest after the passage of the Homesteading Act in 1862 and the changing economics of raising beef, caused the cattle barons to withdraw gradually from the Midwest and drastically cut their operations. A few of these cattlemen snatched the last pieces of good rangeland in undeveloped pockets of the Dakotas, Wyoming, Idaho, and Colorado. Some of the smaller cattle companies claimed land and water in the remote sections of Routt county. In Elkhead, for example, all the most productive land was claimed by the late 1880s.
The families who owned these cattle companies became the county's aristocracy. They had money. Whether it was from their inheritance, English investments, or their earnings in the cattle business, was always a matter of speculation and rumor. A few of them built fine houses with fireplaces, mahogany bannisters, and great sweeping porches. They took pictures of themselves in fur ruffs and fancy carriages. Some of them were British, but more often they spoke with what local people, unaccustomed to New Englanders, thought was an English accent.
Until the railroad came to western Colorado, the fattened cattle from these large operations were shipped from stops on the transcontinental railroad, such as Wamsutter and Rawlins, Wyoming. When the railroad reached Steamboat in 1908, the town quickly became the largest shipping point for cattle in the United States.
Routt county was surveyed for homesteading in 1890. There was not a great deal of interest in the area until a Denver banker and entrepreneur named David Moffat announced plans to build a railroad from Denver to Salt Lake City that would pass through Steamboat and Hayden. Speculation, always a bustling activity in the county, began in earnest. The town of Hayden was laid out in plots and there were plans for hotels, restaurants, and bars.
After much delay and expense the railroad reached Steamboat Springs in 1908. It was another five years before the tracks progressed another twenty five miles to Hayden. Moffat completely ran out of money and support for his project soon after the trains reached Hayden, and the tracks were only extended to Craig, another twenty miles west--hundreds of miles short of Salt Lake City. Hayden, contrary to expectations, did not become the midpoint of a major shipping railroad; it was just a small town near the end of a long spur line. The railroad, however, did link Routt county with Denver, and the pace of development quickened.
The same financiers who backed Moffat's railroad were naturally the county's most enthusiastic promoters. The Denver Post, a newspaper with statewide distribution and published by a wealthy businessman, Frederick Bonfils, touted Routt County as the last Mecca and the last chance for free land.
Homesteaders began arriving in boxcars with their wagons and milk cows, part of the railroad's promotional scheme to move entire farms with ease. They were often met at the station by men eager to sell them a claim or show them a plot. Homesteading communities grew quickly in the rural areas on both sides of the Yampa River. Each area wanted to attract as many homesteaders as possible. A community's success in some measure depended on its size; larger settlements could get better roads, a telephone line, a post office, and a school district.
Most of Elkhead's early settlers came from the midwestern and southern states. They were often children of homesteaders and small farmers who, on becoming adults, moved west looking for their own land. A group of families came from Silver Springs, Missouri in 1908, another group came from Medicine Bow, Kansas a few years later. From the beginning, however, young white men formed a large group among the homesteaders in Elkhead as they did in many parts of the West. Some of the men had full-time ranch jobs and only homesteaded to get more free land. Others were claim jumpers: ranch hands who contested a homesteader's claim or who filed on land for the sole reason of getting more land for their bosses. Another group of men were veterans of the Spanish-American War who were allowed to take two years off the Homestead Act's five year residency requirement. There were a few unmarried brothers and cousins who followed the married member of their family to Elkhead and homesteaded nearby. There are many other unexplained men, drifters who found a spot they liked, tried farming for a while and left. Only few of them were successful and stayed.
The group that settled in Elkhead knew that they were among the last homesteaders anywhere. They thought that they had found an ignored piece of beautiful arable land. It is true that most of the areas away from the Yampa River were not surveyed or opened for homesteading until quite late; there was little pressure to do so. The land was hilly and had been thoroughly overgrazed by the cattlemen's herds of free-roaming cattle. Even in the best years the land looked like desert to most people's eyes. There is very little water in Elkhead. Only one very small creek is even listed as year-round on government survey maps. There are a few springs. All the best land, agriculturally, had been taken before the homesteaders arrived. A trapper named William McKinley had claimed all of the meadows along the one year-round stream, and the one fertile mesa above it. His claim is recorded in 1888 as a preemptive claim, meaning that he successfully proved that he had lived and worked on the land prior to the survey and was therefore entitled to the entire four square mile ranch.
New settlers in Elkhead first looked for water. There was no sense dreaming of a ranch, and corrals full of well-fed cattle, unless there was a reliable source of water nearby. Walking and riding horseback through the hills, a few settlers were able to locate small but steady springs. Others settled for patches of damp or spongy ground where they could develop into springs or wells. Everyone seemed to think that they would have irrigated meadows, stock ponds, and plenty of water for their house and garden. After even the intermittent streams and dry creek beds had been homesteaded, some people kept coming and claiming land, hoping that somehow they would make a living. None of the homesteaders came from areas as arid as this section of Colorado. Places like Silver Springs or Medicine Bow have average annual rainfalls of about 30 to 40 inches. Few records have ever been kept in Elkhead, but current rainfall patterns show an average of seventeen inches of water, with some years as low as fourteen. What makes these statistics even more grim is that over half the rainfall figure is counted in snow. When the snow melts in the spring the clay soil tends to become saturated quickly and much of the water leaves the land in gullies. There is too much water one month and not nearly enough the next. Even if all the rainfall came at just the right times, it would hardly be sufficient to support the kind of agriculture envisioned by the settlers.
The thrill of free land and a fresh start was an irresistible combination. A homesteader's daughter who was old enough at the time to remember her father's adventure, said her father went down through Moffat county with the team and wagon, camping out and looking for pieces of land and finally he came back to Hayden and heard about the Elkhead country and went up there. Father thought he wanted to raise stock and when he waded around in that knee-high vegetation it appealed to him so that was where he decided he wanted to locate a homestead.
Small towns like Hayden that furnished supplies, made loans, and provided professional services to the rural areas, thrived as the homesteaders rushed in. Hayden became a trade center, selling groceries, tools, and seeds, and buying the grains and livestock the homesteaders produced. As in most areas of the West, the people who owned and worked on farms and ranches in Routt county lived on their land. The people who lived in town were the merchants, salespeople, and bankers.
Both groups, though they stayed socially apart, exhibited a common restlessness that was probably borne out of the speculative nature of their lives. Many people were constantly on the move: from one piece of land to another, from a job in the nearby coal mines to a job loading hay, or from one business venture to another. New people were arriving almost everyday from the East and Midwest, and other people, who had tried homesteading for a few years, were giving up and leaving. The county land records are filled with names that no one can remember or even recognize.
The population of Routt county, nevertheless, grew steadily and quickly in the 1900s and 1910s. By 1915, there were forty-four communities in Routt county and each had its own school district. Although these communities were dependent on the towns and the county government for supplies and services, and on the federal government for countless privileges, services, and forms of protection (not to mention the opportunity to acquire land for free), the people tended to think of themselves as part of independent communities, autonomous and self-sufficient. In the most basic political sense they were independent. In these forty-four school districts, and in over two hundred thousand districts like them in every part of the United States, the citizens met to decide on the education of their children and on the community events they would sponsor. They elected their officers, levied their own local taxes, built the schoolhouses, hired the teachers, established the length of the school term, and determined the curriculum.
Frederic Athearn, An Isolated Empire: A History of Northwestern Colorado (Denver: Bureau of Land Management, 1982) pp. 69-74.
Ernest Osgood, The Day of the Cattlemen (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1929.
John Rolphe Burroughs, Steamboat in the Rockies (Fort Collins,CO: Army Press, 1974), p. 160.
Athearn, pp. 91-96. Edward T. Bollinger, Rails that Climb: The Story of the Moffat Road (Golden, CO: Colorado Railroad Museum, 1979).
Harold Boner, The Giant's Ladder: David H. Moffat and His Railroad (Milwaukee: Kalmbach, 1962).
Leila Ferguson Ault, interview with the author, Yampa, Colorado, July 16, 1973. [Material from the collection of interviews done for this project will quoted in italics; all other sources, primary and secondary will be quoted using the standard quotation marks.]
Lawrence Lee's study of homesteading communities in Kansas found a similar pattern of speculation and transience. Many of the people he studied moved on west after becoming dissatisfied with their life in the Midwest. In the same way, many of the early inhabitants of Routt County left to go further west to California, Oregon and Idaho. See, Lawrence Lee. Kansas and the Homestead Act 1862-1905. (New York: Arno Press, 1979).
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