As editor Bowles of the Springfield Republican made his way through Colorado’s parks and mountains during his memorable 1868 visit and recorded his impressions, the comparison he repeatedly made was to the Swiss Alps. “We saw enough of it in our stage ride across the Continent in 1865,” he wrote in his preface, “to suggest that it would become the Switzerland of America … ; and now, after a new visit … we find our original enthusiasm more than rekindled, or original thought confirmed.” Not surprisingly, such a prediction struck a responsive chord in the popular imagination of the nation...

As those braving the uncertain weather to attend the dedication ceremonies were well aware, the afternoon of September 4, 1915, was a watershed event in the life of Estes Park. Rocky Mountain National Park was at last a reality. With the passage of the park bill, signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson on January 26, 1915, came significant changes to town and region, including the continuing presence of the federal government. Although the size and impact of that presence were at first small, both would inexorably grow, and the history of Estes Park would be shaped accordingly.

Despite the...

As Pangborn suggests, Colorado towns tended to spring up quickly. An unplanned assortment of houses and commercial structures claimed the vacant land, and seemingly overnight—“asparagus-like”—a community had put down roots. Such was the case with the village of Estes Park. In little more than a decade, the town had established a visible footprint that would be recognizable to visitors returning fifty or seventy-five years later. Further growth and change came slowly and incrementally, scarcely disrupting the face of the known and familiar, and giving residents and returning visitors alike a reassuring sense of stability and permanence. Aesthetics scarcely...

F.O. Stanley’s dramatic and unexpected arrival in Estes Park on the morning of June 30, 1903, gave notice of a man with every intention of leaving his mark upon the place. From Billy Welch’s hotel-resort on the North St. Vrain above Lyons, where he had spent the night, Stanley drove his small steam automobile up the narrow, rutted wagon road to Estes Park, a trip of nearly twenty miles. He did so alone. According to legend the Oxford-educated Welch was so skeptical of the undertaking that he declined to loan Stanley a companion for the trip. If true, Welch clearly...

With the building out of the village of Estes Park in the years after 1905 came a slow but steady expansion in the number of residents. Between 1890 and 1900 the year-round population increased from 125 to 218. By 1910 the population of Estes Park had grown to 396; a decade later in 1920 it reached 539.¹ In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, this population had been widely dispersed among outlying ranches and resorts. Now it was geographically centered in and around a village of clustered homes and businesses whose inhabitants found themselves bound together not only by economic...

Even before the official dedication ceremonies in Horseshoe Park the new national park had begun to organize itself under acting supervisor Charles Russell Trowbridge (1865–1937).¹ Like many other early superintendents, Trowbridge, a native of New York, had a military background. A veteran of the Philippine insurrection during the Spanish-American War, Trowbridge had chosen a career in government. For some years he worked with the Secret Service and then, in 1913, became one of eight “inspectors” assigned by the Department of the Interior to keep an eye on its far-flung activities, including the nation’s thirteen parks. Trowbridge arrived in Estes...

“If the Hon. Stephen T. Mather of Chicago were in the movie-picture business instead of the department of the interior,” the Rocky Mountain News editorialized on July 14, 1916, “we would suspect him of press-agenting work of the ‘circusing’ variety.” The News’s concern was not the widely circulated National Parks Portfolio, a handsome clothbound view-book put together by Mather’s publicist Robert Sterling Yard and issued to coincide with the introduction of the bill creating the National Park Service. Rather, what provoked the editorial was the release of a publicity photo article, presumably approved by Yard, titled “Bandit Holds Up Stage...

At 9:00 a.m. on Wednesday, August 16, 1919, Enos Mills phoned L. C. Way from Longs Peak Inn to inform him that he had dispatched one of his two touring cars on a sightseeing trip into Rocky Mountain National Park. The car’s destination, he told Way, was the end of the not-yet-completed Fall River Road. It is unlikely that Mills’s driver, Edward Catlett, or his paying passengers, three tourists from Illinois on holiday, knew about the phone call. But Catlett knew the trip was illegal and in direct violation of the park’s new policy that for the past two months...

L.C. Way’S successor, Roger Wescott Toll (1883–1936), was superbly qualified for his assignment. A member of the first generation of Stephen Mather’s Park Service, he was among the remarkable group of rising professionals whose sense of pride and purpose would mark them forever as “Mather’s Men.” Of equal, if not greater, importance, Toll was a Coloradan, the son of a wealthy and socially prominent Denver family with long-standing ties to the Estes Park region and to Rocky Mountain National Park.¹

Mountains and mountaineering were Roger Toll’s first loves. “A climb in the mountains,” Toll would later write in an...

Between 1919—when the panoramic photograph was taken from Prospect Mountain—and 1926 the growth and development of Estes Park continued. Our understanding of how the village looked in that year rests on firm ground. Thanks to Sanborn fire insurance maps created from a survey completed in May and June 1926, we have a set of scaled drawings that provides us with an exact footprint of Estes Park, showing every hotel, residence, structure, and water line within the town limits and in much of the surrounding area as well.¹ Of additional help to historians are two volumes of insurance records...

For many in Colorado, the Great Depression of the 1930s seemed like more of the same, only worse. Mining and agriculture, the state’s first and third sources of income, after prospering during the World War I, limped through the 1920s when commodity prices fell. Manufacturing and trade, Colorado’s other economic mainstays, did better, but not well enough to compensate for the poor performance of the other two. As a consequence, Colorado entered the Depression after a decade of stagnation during which its growth rate lagged that of the nation for the first time since the 1860s. Conditions continued to deteriorate....

Succeeding Roger Toll was not an easy assignment. Toll was the only park superintendent to have a memorial and a mountain named in his honor and his departure for Yellowstone in 1929 concluded a period of considerable activity climaxed by the successful resolution of the controversy over road jurisdiction that had clouded the park’s existence for a decade. Ironically, however, it was during the Great Depression of the 1930s after Roger Toll’s departure that Rocky Mountain National Park enjoyed its greatest growth and development. Edmund Rogers, Thomas Allen, and David Canfield may well have lacked the polished presence, political adroitness,...

The 1941 tourist season throughout Colorado had been the best since 1929. Estes Park’s hotels and resorts were filled to capacity in July and August, and Rocky Mountain National Park welcomed 685,593 visitors traveling in 208,398 automobiles, nearly 64 percent from out of state. Although the average stay of tourists was somewhat shorter than in the past, their willingness to spend had run far ahead of recent seasons, suggesting that the discouraging days of the Great Depression were finally over. The two-day “Rooftop Roundup” rodeo in August, when Patti Moomaw, daughter of ranger Jack Moomaw, was installed as queen, attracted...