America's Switzerland: Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park, the Growth Years

4: Building a Community

89 Building a Community Chapter 4  Building a Community 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 fortune but, increasingly, by a strong and widely shared sense of community. Part of this feeling was the legacy of Estes Park’s pioneer days. Despite frontier conditions and the vagaries of mountain life, the park’s earliest residents quickly learned that their interests and concerns, like their livelihoods , were intimately linked to those of their neighbors. At first, what brought them together was their opposition to the attempts by Theodore Whyte and the Earl of Dunraven’s cowboys to drive them from their land; later it was by the common discovery that their futures, and the future of Estes Park, would be determined not by their success in ranching and farming but by their willingness to accommodate themselves to tourists. These 89 90 Building a Community relationships, and the identity they provided, inevitably deepened with the passage of the years, enriched by shared memories of difficulties overcome, of hard times endured, and, increasingly, by an awareness of having been part of a common story. By the turn of the century these traditions, together with a strong attachment to place, had solidified and Estes Park had its own history, some of it already elevated to the level of myth and legend. For those arriving in Estes Park in 1905 and for a number of years afterward , the closeness of village life and the knowledge of being part of a new and growing town hastened the process of community-building. That this socialization took place in a remote and still relatively isolated mountain setting among individuals who differed but little in their ethnic stock, background , education, religion, politics, and wealth created a sense of similarity and comfort that made close personal relationships both easy and inevitable. Ties of friendship were increasingly cemented by ties of marriage,2 adding through kinship yet another layer of homogeneity to a place where each year eight months of much-welcomed peace and quiet replaced the last departing tourists. As in many small towns, much of what happened in Estes Park would be determined by the strength of these relationships, by the measure of social control that accompanied them, and by the effectiveness of the organizations and institutions that they made possible and sustained. It can be surmised that an economy focused on satisfying the needs of tourists had fewer internal tensions, initially at least, than a community whose economic survival depended on residents dealing largely with one another. That most tourist activity, particularly in the early years, was decidedly seasonal provided the opportunity to build and sustain a sense of community life. “Those who live in Estes park in winter have tranquil and happy times,” the special Estes Park correspondent of the Fort Collins Weekly Courier reassured readers in February 1903: The tourists are all gone and people work quietly and enjoy life thoroughly. They read abundantly and visit to their heart’s content. The ground is generally free from snow and but a few days are extremely cold. First one family and then the other invites everybody to “come over and spend the evening and have something good to eat.” From fifteen to fifty come, and a royal social time follows.3 Although there is something almost defensive in this bucolic description of how a mountain community passes the winter, it is undoubtedly accurate. From the 1890s on, the valley papers are filled with personal items about card and dinner parties, holiday celebrations and gatherings, turkey shoots, oyster suppers on New Year’s Day hosted by the village bachelors, and the surprise serenading of newlyweds. When blacksmith Jim Boyd brought his 91 Building a Community new wife Fannie back to Estes Park after their wedding, the two were subjected to “a rousing tin pan serenade . . . by the bachelors (and a few...