Archives of the Twelfth Headwaters Conference, November 2-4, 2001
Why Our Towns Sit Where They Do
by Ed Quillen
Presentation for Headwaters Conference, Nov 2-4, WSC, Gunnison
Children can ask some annoying questions that turn out to have complicated answers. You need to know the spectral scattering characteristics of various gaseous molecules to provide an answer other than "Because" when you're asked "Why is the sky blue?" To answer "Why is the sky dark at night?" requires some understanding of the Big Bang Theory for the origin of our expanding universe. There's the well-known difficulty of coming up with an appropriate answer for "Where do babies come from?"
Fortunately, it's easier to answer a somewhat similar question: "Where do our towns come from?"
The short and simple answer is that, by and large, our towns began as real-estate developments. They were commercial enterprises established by town-site companies that wanted to sell lots at a profit. Whether these enterprises succeeded or not was generally determined by transportation -- the better the connections, the greater the likelihood that the town would survive. And as new transportation technology arrived in the Headwaters Region, old settlements withered and new ones grew.
Transportation was important because of how the American West was developed -- as part of a national market economy, rather than as a group of small and somewhat self-sufficient regions on the Spanish model.
The simplest way to show the difference is to look at the San Luis Valley. Its oldest town, San Luis, was founded in 1851 by colonists from Taos who were supposed to grow their own food and make their own furniture.[1] Its dominant town, Alamosa, was founded in 1878 by the land-development subsidiary of a railroad.[2] The crops of the region were mostly for export via the railroad, and most household goods were imported on the rails.
There's another type of town development -- one where the exploitation of a nearby resource required a settlement to house and service the labor force. Leadville and Crested Butte are good examples. These towns pretty well had to be where they were, near the silver and coal veins. The transportation system came to them -- they weren't a product of the transportation system.
So, we've got three types of towns that were developed in the 19th century:
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Organic towns, like Leadville and Crested Butte. These had to sprout where they were because they sat near a resource whose exploitation required a nearby labor force. The maximum distance was about three miles, since people will seldom spend more than 45 minutes getting to work, and in pedestrian times, the maximum commuting speed was about 4 miles per hour.[3] Most of these towns faded away as soon as their veins played out, but some have survived by finding new economic functions.
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Colonial centers. These were the focal points of settlements by organized groups. San Luis is one example, but Anglos did this too, as with my birthplace of Greeley, founded in 1870 as Union Colony. It was a sort of Brook Farm on a grander scale, a planned Transcendentalist community where the temperate settlers would labor in their fields by day and discuss metaphysics in the evening. [4] Another example is Nucla on the Western Slope, a socialist experiment with orchards and a box factory. [5] And we're in another, Gunnison, founded by colonists led by Sylvester Richardson in 1874. [6] These settlements needed farmland and, as they soon learned, a reliable water supply, but beyond that, their locations were rather arbitrary.
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Artificial towns, like Alamosa and Salida. Their locations were rather arbitrary, and I'll get into the specifics later.
Note that none of these three definitions quite fits a fourth category: the Evolved Town, one that started as a crossroads trading post and just grew.
Evolved Towns are actually rather rare, and may not even exist in the Headwaters Region, although you wouldn't know that from reading Frederick Jackson Turner, who seemed to believe that all American cities were the result of slow evolution.
Turner, as you may recall, was the professor at the University of Wisconsin who in 1893 delivered a famous lecture: "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." I am not as sure whether the sport of Turner-bashing began as early as 1894 -- perhaps Dr. Limerick can give us the exact date -- but I do know that it has been popular throughout my adult lifetime, and I can assure you that I have every intention of continuing this fine sport.
But before we start bashing Turner, let's hear what he has to say about towns and transportation networks [7]:
The Indian trade pioneered the way for civilization. The buffalo trail became the Indian trail, and this became the trader's "trace;" the trails widened into roads, and the roads into turnpikes, and these in turn were transformed into railroads.... The trading posts reached by these trails were on the sites of Indian villages which had been placed in places suggested by nature.... Thus civilization in America has followed the arteries made by geology, pouring an ever richer tide through them, until at last the slender paths of aboriginal intercourse have been broadened and interwoven into the complex mazes of modern commercial lines; the wilderness has been interpenetrated by lines of civilization, growing ever more numerous. It is like the steady growth of a complex nervous system for the originally simple, inert continent. If one would understand why we are today one nation, rather than a collection of isolated states, he must study this economic and social consolidation of the country. In this progress from savage conditions lie topics for the evolutionist.
If I understand Turner correctly, our transportation networks began as Indian trails that were developed and widened over time. And our towns began as frontier trading posts which grew ever larger. Turner was in touch with the great stream of scientific thinking of his time -- gradual evolution.
So to be scientific, let's test his hypothesis by looking at the Headwaters Region, starting in about 1820 when Americans began arriving in substantial numbers. Granted, the Anasazi and Spanish civilizations were here earlier, but the Anasazi had moved on, and the Spanish never built anything in Colorado except one small fort[8]. The Utes were here, but they were a nomadic people, not a race of town-builders -- to put this another way, they had more sense than to try to stay in the mountains during the winter.
By Turner's thesis, the largest city on the Western Slope of Colorado should be Delta. That was where two St. Louis traders, Antoine and Louis Robidoux, built a trading post in 1828 and "carried on a lucrative trade with the Utahs for peltries" -- but only until 1844. [9].
This post, known to posterity as Fort Robidoux, did not evolve into a great city. It was abandoned when beaver prices fell and there was no longer any profit in trading with the Utes for pelts. The Utes may have been pleased to do business there, but they didn't put it up; it was built by St. Louis entrepreneurs to serve their purposes, and when it quit making money, they quit using it.
Consider some other early trading posts that Turner said would evolve into leading cities. There's Boggsville along the Santa Fe Trail at a good place to ford the Purgatory River, and it's not even on the state highway map now. It's close to Bent's Old Fort, the largest structure in the West in 1848 and a decaying ruin by 1870.[10] Up in the mountains, there's Hardscrabble, site of Colorado's first general store, and it's near a couple of other trading posts along the Taos Trapper's Trail, like Wetmore and Greenhorn.[11]
Between the Wet Mountains and the Sangres, there's Gardner -- a pleasant spot at the crossroads of the Trapper's Trail and the Promontory Divide route into the upper Arkansas Valley -- but hardly a leading city today. In the Upper Arkansas Valley, there's Nathrop, where Charlie Nachtrieb set up a trading post and gristmill in 1868 at the crossroads at the foot of Trout Creek Pass.[12] It still has a post office, but not much more.
Another early settlement was a favored camping spot of the Utes on account of its springs. It sat at the junction of two routes used by the Utes -- Poncha Pass, which connected the Rio Grande to the Arkansas, and Cochetopa, connecting the Rio Grande to the Western Slope. That was Saguache, and instead of growing into a great city astride major transportation routes, it's been losing population since 1940.[13]
Of all the settlements established by the early traders and trappers in this part of the world, the ones that by Turnerian logic should have evolved into major cities, only one grew into a city: Pueblo. It was Colorado's second-largest city a century ago, although now it barely makes it into the top 10.
Clearly, Turner missed something important. Our major settlements and their associated transportation networks are not the result of some evolutionary process which begins with a "place suggested by nature" where people settle and then watch their village grow into a city.
The main thing he missed, in my view at least, is that towns and cities are human inventions, built to serve various human needs and desires that range from companionship to commerce -- the latter being a major consideration in an expanding commercial country like the United States in the latter part of the 19th century. We don't have a nation of somewhat self-sufficient communities which grow or make almost everything they need; we have a nation where most of our food and goods come from other regions, just as most of what we produce goes elsewhere. To put this another way, we eat California lettuce while selling recreation to Texans.
And so we need to look at that commercial expansion, which took the form of railroads in our part of the world, to explain why our towns are where they are. Although some railroad routes follow old wagon roads, they don't always, because they demand different things from the landscape. The wagonmaster needed abundant forage and water for his oxen, horses, or mules. Although bridges were nice, he could ford the smaller streams and ferry his cargo across the larger ones. On a freight run, he could generally make only 10 to 12 miles per day, so he needed campsites with water and firewood -- bulky materials that he really didn't have the capacity to haul. He would make about the same mileage, no matter whether he was pulling a consistent grade, or going up and down across rolling terrain.[14]
That's one set of route requirements, and as those routes developed, so did settlements to serve their needs along the way -- and a settlement that sat at a junction would do better, for obvious reasons.
Now consider the needs of the railroad in locating a route between two sources of profitable traffic. The steam locomotive needed coal to refuel along the way, but the railroad could stock its coal bins with trainloads hauled in from elsewhere on the system -- its locomotives didn't need to graze on local grass.
The locomotive needed water. But it could drill wells and install pumps if necessary, or in the worst case, as with the Southern Pacific across the deserts of California, it could haul in tank cars of water for its trains.
The steam locomotive also needed frequent service, and the tracks it ran on needed continual maintenance. That meant people -- something like an army had to be deployed to keep the trains running in the 19th century.
These technological needs of the 1880s followed a pattern. With the hand tools then available -- hand cars, sledgehammers, shovels, pry bars, and the like -- a crew of men could maintain about six miles of track. These six-mile segments were known as "sections," and they were named spots along the line, with their "section houses" for the "section hands" bossed by a "section foreman." Often there was a water tank, and the section house could serve as a depot for flag stops by the local mixed train that came by once or twice a day.
Every 50 to 100 miles, the locomotive had to be fully serviced, not just watered or fueled -- steam or water leaks patched, clean the clinkers out of the firebox, replenish the sand in the dome, grease the bearings, that sort of thing. This meant a roundhouse and shop with skilled employees like machinists and boilermakers, and to get maximum use from these investments, the railroads tried to locate these at major junctions.
These stretches of track were known as "divisions," and the major terminals were "division points." [15]
Such were the technological needs of the railroads in the 1880s when this area began to fill up with Americans. But we should keep in mind that railroads were not owned and operated by philanthropists, but by joint stock corporations that were supposed to show profits. And then as now, there was good money to be made from real-estate speculation and development.
As the rails approached an area, the railroad could play existing settlements against each other. The town that came up with the best offer -- bond purchases, land donations, etc. -- got the depot, and the other town got bypassed. Since people who owned property in a town naturally wanted to protect their investments, they were usually eager to do whatever it took to get the rails.
If there was only one existing settlement in the area, the railroad might make similar demands. If they were not met, then the railroad might build its own town nearby. And often, the railroad didn't give the settlement the option -- it just bought land nearby and developed its own town. With all this in mind, let us consider the progress of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad 130 years ago as it reached south from Denver. There was a town near Pike's Peak -- old Colorado City, which had once served as territorial capital. But the president of the railroad, Gen. William Jackson Palmer, owned several thousand acres a few miles east of Colorado City. Guess where the railroad went. And now you know how and why Colorado Springs was founded.
The rails continued southward, as Palmer and his partners played Pueblo and Canon City against each other. After voting to buy $150,000 worth of bonds, as opposed to Canon's mere $50,000, Puebloans thought they were assured of a fair deal from the railroad.
But along the way, Palmer and his cronies acquired 40,000 acres of an old Mexican land grant on the south side of the Arkansas River -- the existing Pueblo settlement was on the north side. The Nolan Grant was not conveyed directly to the railroad, but to a corporate affiliate with a name I cherish: The Central Colorado Improvement Company.
As the railroad's historian recounts, just after the first train arrived from Denver on June 19, 1872, "Palmer's organization, now in possession of the Nolan Grant, decided to move the Pueblo depot across the river to a new and favored company town called South Pueblo." [16]
That should give you some idea of how the game was played by the Denver & Rio Grande. As its rails advanced south and west, the railroad needed to establish division points for servicing its trains. Those division points promised hundreds of employees with steady paychecks, thus providing a good commercial base for a town -- a town that would have good rail connections, making it attractive to manufacturers and wholesalers. This meant that real estate would command good prices -- so why should the bounty go to the people who owned lots in some existing town, when a railroad subsidiary could buy raw land and subdivide it?
Thus was the current settlement of the Headwaters Region defined -- by the land developers and their railroad in 1879 and the years immediately thereafter. The area became known as "The Narrow-Gauge Circle," although it might more properly be thought of as a rectangle with a major railroad junction, a city created by the railroad's land-development arm, at each corner. Those cities were Salida, Alamosa, Durango, and Montrose, and I will look at them in more detail -- especially Salida, of course.
The area around the junction of the main stem of the Arkansas River, which flows in from the north, and its South Arkansas tributary, which flows in from the west and south, suggests something of a "natural" crossroads, assuming that anyone is using the roads. That happened in 1860 when rich deposits of placer gold were found at Cache Creek (near present day Granite) and California Gulch (near Leadville). The news inspired merchants to come to those places to serve the miners, and it encouraged miners to go look for new deposits in the area. This meant traffic, and traffic meant wagons and stagecoaches and the U.S. mail.
Thus there were stage stations, general stores, and post offices in the area by 1875. [17] One Barlow & Sanderson stage station sat near the junction of the South Arkansas and Arkansas rivers. Its owner, William Bales, named it after his daughter Cleora (it's a pretty name, but that's the first and last time I've ever seen it as person's name).
Move forward a couple of years, and two railroads are striving to reach the rich traffic of the Leadville silver boom via the Royal Gorge of the Arkansas River: Palmer's Denver & Rio Grande, and the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe. Cleora sided with the Santa Fe, but the Rio Grande won. The Central Colorado Improvement Co. bought a ranch three miles upriver from Cleora for $10,000 and platted it with streets, alleys, and lots. Then came the announcement that the railroad would build its roundhouse there.
The people of Cleora protested. Alexander C. Hunt, former territorial governor and head of the Rio Grande's land-developments, gave them an answer: "God almighty makes townsites, not mortal men." But for some reason, that divine will didn't keep Hunt from trying to get a donation from nearby Poncha Springs, with the idea that if Ponchans came through, the railroad might find reason to build its shops in Poncha, rather than Salida. Cleora residents grumbled, but they moved their buildings to the lots they bought in Salida. The newspaper was one of the first to make the move.
Durango has a similar origin. Given the mining activity near the headwaters of the Animas River, a supply camp would appear where the river emerges from the San Juan Mountains, and by 1880 there was a duly platted town, Animas City.
"With the coming of spring 1881, Palmer's company drove on, bound for a new town called Durango, which, according to the General, had just 'sprung up.' It sprang up in the manner of a number of other towns along the line. Dr. William A. Bell, that master of municipal organization, had scouted the country in advance of construction in search of a suitable suite for further Denver & Rio Grande land speculation. After failing to come to terms with homesteaders holding land adjacent to Animas City, he made arrangements with several individuals to file claims along the Animas River, a few miles to the south, after which they sold out to the Durango Land & Coal Company ...
"The boosters of Animas City were either men of great confidence or they had not heard of Palmer's technique of building almost to an established town and then throttling it, for there seemed to be little fear of that upstart Durango posing any threat."
But, "by the end of that year a Durango paper reported that all of Animas City is coming to Durango as fast as accommodations can be secured.'" [18] As was the case with the Cleora Journal becoming Salida's Mountain Mail overnight, the Animas City newspaper was among the first to pack up and move to the new city that was backed by the railroad.
There were existing settlements in the San Luis Valley when the D&RG pushed its rails over La Veta Pass in 1878, almost by accident. The railroad's original plan was to connect Denver to El Paso, Texas, and then to the Mexican railroad system -- a sort of 19th-century NAFTA, and one that made geographic sense, but not political sense.
Our mountain ranges run north-south, and that geography would imply a north-south transportation system. But our polity, the United States, extends east-west, and our transportation system represents national priorities, rather than regional geography. The east-west systems, like the Union Pacific and the Northern Pacific, got the land-grand subsidies from the feds. About all that William Jackson Palmer's north-south road got from the government was a free right-of-way across public land -- which may explain why his company was so heavily involved in townsite development as a source of revenue. [19]
At any rate, Palmer's railroad was supposed to connect Denver to the Rio Grande, and his charter required him to reach Santa Fe, New Mexico. He had planned to go via Raton Pass, but the rival Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe got there first. So Palmer swung west from Walsenburg and over La Veta Pass to reach the Rio Grande, and eventually, Santa Fe, from the San Luis Valley. There were towns in the Valley like San Luis, and a military post at Fort Garland that could have formed the basis for a regional hub. But others would have profited from developing that real estate, and so the railroad platted its own town -- Alamosa -- and made it the hub of its activities in the Valley.
Salida, Alamosa, and Durango are three points on the circumference of what came to be known as the Denver & Rio Grande's "Narrow Gauge Circle." It was actually more of a rectangle, and the fourth corner was Montrose, a farming town and a source of traffic which was already established before the railroad arrived in 1887.
Each of these corners was designed to be a commercial hub for the region, a port that connected the interior of the Rio Grande Rectangle and the rest of the world, a consolidation center for outbound shipments and a distribution center for inbound goods. The railroad put shops and other facilities in these towns, and they became interchange points between the standard-gauge rest-of-the-world and the narrow-gauge interior of the rectangle. (The line from Durango to Farmington, N.M., was originally built standard-gauge with an eye to connecting to the Santa Fe at Gallup, N.M.)
Even though the railroad is not the factor it once was, these four towns have retained their designated roles. They're distribution centers -- for instance, each is a sectional center for the Postal Service. And they're retail hubs -- each has a super Wal-Mart.
They have retained these roles because the highway network that evolved in the 20th century has generally paralleled the railroad network that was built in the 19th century.
Introduce a new transportation network, and old towns wither while new ones thrive, just as Gardner and Saguache, creatures of the wagon days, faded in favor of Walsenburg and Salida, creatures of the railroad era.That is quite evident along the Interstate 70 corridor where places like Avon and Edwards are now thriving commercial centers, superseding the old railroad town of Minturn and the county seat at Eagle.
Our commercial geography remains generally that of the railroad. If an Interstate ever invaded with a new route -- as with Vail Pass where there was never even a wagon road before the highway came -- then we would see a new commercial geography.
The lingering influence of the railroad explains why most of our towns are where they are, and why some are bigger than others. But it doesn't explain everything. As recreation replaces commodity production, we get a new economy -- but one that still involves real-estate development and promotion.
And the towns created by this development deserve some exploration by an economic historian. Just as the railroad bypassed an existing town because it could make more money by platting and promoting its own town, ski-resort promoters appear to do the same thing: witness the new Mt. Crested Butte built close by plain old Crested Butte. Or Mountain Village a ridge away from Telluride. The profits of real-estate development in a town that starts from scratch, like Vail, are such that it apparently pays to build a town even when an existing settlement is nearby. Doubtless there are some social factors that interact with the economic ones -- it's hard to develop and sell high-end amenity-laden real-estate in a ramshackle old town that accommodates dogs and derelicts.
And if our economy continues to be based on amenity tourism, those are the sort of towns that will develop -- as has usually been the case, for the profit of investors. Our towns seldom sprout from the landscape in "places suggested by nature." They have instead resulted from calculated investments, and this process is likely to continue even as our economy shifts from commodity production to recreation.
End Notes
- Simmons SLV p. 85
- Simmons SLV p. 158
- Kotkin
- Ubbelohde/Benson/Smith p. 126-127
- Ubbelohde/Benson/Smith p. 228
- Vandenbusch p. 41-43
- Turner p. 68-69
- Carson, p. 182
- Kessler, p. 182
- Lavender, p. 391
- LeCompte
- Simmons UAV p. 73-74
- U.S. Census Bureau figures.
- Generally discussed in W.T. Jackson, p. 1-13
- Yepsen
- Athearn, p. 25
- Pasquale, p. 15-16
- Athearn, p. 104.
- McWilliams, p. vi
Bibliography
Robert G. Athearn. The Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad: Rebel of the Rockies. Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1977. (Originally published in 1967 as Rebel of the Rockies by Yale University Press).
Phil Carson. Across the Northern Frontier: Spanish Exploration in Colorado. Boulder, Johnson Books, 1998.
W. Turentine Jackson. Wagon Roads West: A Study of Federal Road Surveys and Construction in the Trans-Mississippi West, 1846-1869. Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1979 (Reprint of 1964 work).
Ron Kessler. Old Spanish Trail North Branch and its travelers. Santa Fe, Sunstone Press: 1998.
Joel Kotkin. Edge Cities.
David Lavender. Bent's Fort. Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press 1972 reprint of 1954 first edition.
Janet LeCompte. Pueblo, Hardscrabble and Greenhorn. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978.
Carey McWilliams, editor. Rocky Mountain Cities. New York: 1948.
Cynthia J. Pasquale. 100 Years in the Heart of the Rockies. Salida, Arkansas Valley Publishing, 1980.
Virginia McConnell Simmons. The San Luis Valley: Land of the Six-Armed Cross. Second edition, 1999. University Press of Colorado, Niwot.
Virginia McConnell Simmons. The Upper Arkansa: A Mountain River Valley. Boulder, Pruett, 1990.
Frederick Jackson Turner. History, Frontier, and Section: Three essays by Frederick Jackson Turner. Albuquerque,
University of New Mexico Press. 1993.
Carl Ubbelhode, Maxine Benson, and Duane A. Smith. A Colorado History. Seventh edition, 1995. Pruett, Boulder.
Duane Vanenbushe. The Gunnison Country. B&B Printers, Gunnison, 1980.
Roger Yepsen. Train Talk: An Illustrated Guide to Lights, Hand Signals, Whistles, and Other Languages of Railroading. New York, Pantheon, 1983.