Mountains
At Can(y)on City, which should have a wiggle over the “n” but often doesn’t due to sign making limitations, we pick up one of my favorite routes, highway 50. I have driven it across the Middle West to here, it follows the Arkansas River from Wichita KS. This is one of the old transcontinental highways, it begins in Ocean City MD and ends in CA, lost in the tangle of freeways west of Sacramento.
The Arkansas River has cut us a slot up into the mountains, which now loom large as we turn west and start to climb the Front Range. I still remember my first sight of the Rockies, they just are there, bam, like a towering wall, with only a suggestion of any foothills by way of an overture. Soon we are in the BigHorn Sheep Canyon, brown rocks and the teenage Arkansas merrily twisting and turning. The road does some pretty good twisting and turning too, and around every corner a new series of rock walls and slices through to views of higher peaks. To the south we get peeks of the snow covered Sangre de Cristo mountains, makes your heart jump to see them, but then you have to look back at the road before you have another kind of heart jump on a tight corner.
We pass through Cotopaxi, hardly more than an intersection on the edge of the high plateau behind the front range. Another intriguing odd name, which this time produces a good story.
Henry (Gold Tom) Thomas prospected for gold and silver hereabouts and in the Andes. He saw a peak of the Sangre de Cristos that reminded him of the great active volcano in Ecuador, Cotopaxi, so he named this place after it. The Cotopaxi Lode was eventually a biggish silver and zinc mine, and the town had a RR depot, switchyard, saloon, post office, now all gone. The RR line was the subject of a serious turf war between the Denver and Rio Grande RR and the Santa FE over who would get this lucrative run between Pueblo Co and the mine traffic up into Leadville and beyond. The Denver and Rio Grande won, but the squabble delayed settlement for a time.
Emanuel H. Saltiel gained control of Gold Tom’s claims, perhaps not legally, and since he was a little late in the mining race and other mines paid better, he had trouble finding people to work the mines, placing ads in many papers further east.
Meanwhile, far away in Russia, Jewish farmers were finding it difficult to work under the Czarist system, and began to look at immigrating to America to homestead. In 1878 Jacob Milstein, was sent over to investigate, eloping with the daughter of the man funding his trip. Since the funding abruptly ceased after that, it took him a while to run into Salteil, who promised housing and land for farms in Cotopaxi. On March 1, 1881, Czar Alexander II was assassinated and a series of pograms began, which sent thousands of Jews fleeing from Russia. This flood of refugees swamped the Jewish relief organizations in NY, and no one was able to check Cotopaxi or Saltiel’s promises out ahead of time. So in April of 1882 the twenty "family groups" began their long train journey via Kansas City, Pueblo and the Royal Gorge, to Cotopaxi. They did not have equipment and the promised housing was unfinished. They managed to get a crop in the ground which a late blizzard destroyed. After two years of trying to farm in arid, short seasoned Cotopaxi, the settlement was abandoned. Some of them did work in Salteil’s mines, but they came to farm and soon left. Many of them stayed in CO and became prosperous ranchers and businessmen.
There were other cooperative Jewish farming attempts in MI, KS and SD, none of them survived long, but have a place in agricultural history and in the history of Jewish immigrants to the US.
Up in Salida, the mountains are huge and snow covered. They seem an impenetrable fortress of rock and ice, I can’t imagine how people dared to try to cross them. They are so high and so abrupt that they give me a heady sort of feeling, maybe I imagine being on the top and looking down, and having vertigo twinges. It almost feels as though they are physically thumping on my eyes as I look up at them, and ahead is Monarch Pass.
Sooner or later, to get up into the high mountains, you have to buckle up and drive up an engineering marvel, stressing the rig and your nerves to get up it, not looking at the drop off, and then testing your braking down the other side. I’ve driven this pass three times before, the first time with a seriously overheating truck, so I am always a little nervous. All goes well, we go up slowly but in good order and come decorously down the other side. At the top, there is snow, although none on the road, and at 48 degrees it is melting fast.
Now we are really up there, the pass was 11,270 feet, we cross the Continental Divide and come into the watershed of the pacific in the form of the Gunnison River, dammed up most spectacularly at Curecanti and Blue Mesa, craggy cliffs and blue water. The road goes over two more smaller passes and finally comes to Montrose. Just as we are descending into town, we see the gloriously rugged and toothy and now snow tipped San Juan Mountains away on our left. Over there is Ouray, where I had my first workamping job, up in the mountains, up in heaven. We stop for two days at the campground that Don was workamping at that summer that we met. Montrose is on the southern side of the big Colorado Rockies, Vail and Aspen and all that are pretty much smack in the middle of the rectangle. We are a little safer from snow here, and warmer, but the snowy peaks, lovely as they are, remind us we need to keep going south before winter catches us.
The Arkansas River has cut us a slot up into the mountains, which now loom large as we turn west and start to climb the Front Range. I still remember my first sight of the Rockies, they just are there, bam, like a towering wall, with only a suggestion of any foothills by way of an overture. Soon we are in the BigHorn Sheep Canyon, brown rocks and the teenage Arkansas merrily twisting and turning. The road does some pretty good twisting and turning too, and around every corner a new series of rock walls and slices through to views of higher peaks. To the south we get peeks of the snow covered Sangre de Cristo mountains, makes your heart jump to see them, but then you have to look back at the road before you have another kind of heart jump on a tight corner.
We pass through Cotopaxi, hardly more than an intersection on the edge of the high plateau behind the front range. Another intriguing odd name, which this time produces a good story.
Henry (Gold Tom) Thomas prospected for gold and silver hereabouts and in the Andes. He saw a peak of the Sangre de Cristos that reminded him of the great active volcano in Ecuador, Cotopaxi, so he named this place after it. The Cotopaxi Lode was eventually a biggish silver and zinc mine, and the town had a RR depot, switchyard, saloon, post office, now all gone. The RR line was the subject of a serious turf war between the Denver and Rio Grande RR and the Santa FE over who would get this lucrative run between Pueblo Co and the mine traffic up into Leadville and beyond. The Denver and Rio Grande won, but the squabble delayed settlement for a time.
Emanuel H. Saltiel gained control of Gold Tom’s claims, perhaps not legally, and since he was a little late in the mining race and other mines paid better, he had trouble finding people to work the mines, placing ads in many papers further east.
Meanwhile, far away in Russia, Jewish farmers were finding it difficult to work under the Czarist system, and began to look at immigrating to America to homestead. In 1878 Jacob Milstein, was sent over to investigate, eloping with the daughter of the man funding his trip. Since the funding abruptly ceased after that, it took him a while to run into Salteil, who promised housing and land for farms in Cotopaxi. On March 1, 1881, Czar Alexander II was assassinated and a series of pograms began, which sent thousands of Jews fleeing from Russia. This flood of refugees swamped the Jewish relief organizations in NY, and no one was able to check Cotopaxi or Saltiel’s promises out ahead of time. So in April of 1882 the twenty "family groups" began their long train journey via Kansas City, Pueblo and the Royal Gorge, to Cotopaxi. They did not have equipment and the promised housing was unfinished. They managed to get a crop in the ground which a late blizzard destroyed. After two years of trying to farm in arid, short seasoned Cotopaxi, the settlement was abandoned. Some of them did work in Salteil’s mines, but they came to farm and soon left. Many of them stayed in CO and became prosperous ranchers and businessmen.
There were other cooperative Jewish farming attempts in MI, KS and SD, none of them survived long, but have a place in agricultural history and in the history of Jewish immigrants to the US.
Up in Salida, the mountains are huge and snow covered. They seem an impenetrable fortress of rock and ice, I can’t imagine how people dared to try to cross them. They are so high and so abrupt that they give me a heady sort of feeling, maybe I imagine being on the top and looking down, and having vertigo twinges. It almost feels as though they are physically thumping on my eyes as I look up at them, and ahead is Monarch Pass.
Sooner or later, to get up into the high mountains, you have to buckle up and drive up an engineering marvel, stressing the rig and your nerves to get up it, not looking at the drop off, and then testing your braking down the other side. I’ve driven this pass three times before, the first time with a seriously overheating truck, so I am always a little nervous. All goes well, we go up slowly but in good order and come decorously down the other side. At the top, there is snow, although none on the road, and at 48 degrees it is melting fast.
Now we are really up there, the pass was 11,270 feet, we cross the Continental Divide and come into the watershed of the pacific in the form of the Gunnison River, dammed up most spectacularly at Curecanti and Blue Mesa, craggy cliffs and blue water. The road goes over two more smaller passes and finally comes to Montrose. Just as we are descending into town, we see the gloriously rugged and toothy and now snow tipped San Juan Mountains away on our left. Over there is Ouray, where I had my first workamping job, up in the mountains, up in heaven. We stop for two days at the campground that Don was workamping at that summer that we met. Montrose is on the southern side of the big Colorado Rockies, Vail and Aspen and all that are pretty much smack in the middle of the rectangle. We are a little safer from snow here, and warmer, but the snowy peaks, lovely as they are, remind us we need to keep going south before winter catches us.
posted by Thistledown24 at 10:17 PM
2 Comments:
Please tell me what the context of this blog is. I read about a Saltiel who may have jumped a claim and, as I am a Saltiel interested in my family's history, I am curious about where this came from. Can you enlighten me?
http://www.cotopaxi-colony.com/
If you go to this website, you can read all about it. Click on the thesis by Flora Jane Satt, or follow other links. There is also an article by Nancy Owswald, and numerous other links relative to Mr. Saltiel and the settlement at Cotopaxi.
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