From hoof, to hook, packed on ice, railcar shipped

Monument was 'meat and potatoes' kind of place

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

In the fall, cattle ranchers around Monument would drive their herds off the range and into town to ship them on the railroads to markets in Denver and beyond.
The Denver and Rio Grande arrived in 1872 and the Santa Fe in 1892, and both railroads had stockyards in town.
Many ranchers had their cattle on government range all summer, and a fair amount of time and effort was involved in checking brands and other busy events of the fall drives.
Several days before cattle were driven in, rail companies would line up cattle cars on the sidings, and almost everyone would ship the same day.
A switch engine would move cars around as the cattle were loaded, and preservation of local meat stocks were also a part of the process.
Several hundred head of cattle, men on well trained horses, local butchers, barkeeps, and ice contractors, and railroad employees had a busy few days.
When automatic blocks became available in the 1940s, the process that went on at the two depots in Monument, Pring Station, Greenland, Palmer Lake and Husted all changed.
For several years afterward, northbound trains all ran on the old Santa Fe tracks and southbound ran on the D&RG. Santa Fe tracks were eventually torn out in the late fall of 1974.
But in the early days, Monument was a meat-eating, beef-producing, package-it-up-and-keep-it cool kind of town.
"Chas. Allis had a butcher shop on the corner of Second and Washington Streets in the 1890s," noted Lucille Lavelett. "George Betz and John Boling operated a meat market and delivered meat by wagon for several years.
“There was Paul’s Meat Market operated by Paul Close and Paul Valentine. When meat was delivered by wagon, the back of the wagon was closed in, with hooks to hang the meat on, a meat block and scales. In the summer time, large tubs were filled with ice to keep the meat cold."
That is where the local ice business came in.
Fred Lewis’ wife, Myrtle McKee Lewis, was a teacher in the Lewis Consolidated School (and namesake for Lewis-Palmer District 38). She was the brother-in-law of W.E. Doyle, and went to work for him at the ice company in 1910.
Doyle and a partner, Thomas Hanks, had leased what is now known as Monument Lake (then State Reservoir) and built the original ice house.
Doyle bought out Hanks in 1909 and improved the operation with new ice houses and a chain-operated conveyor system powered by a steam engine from an old threshing machine leased from Charlie Schubarth. Doyle continued to operate up until the early 1940s.
“A spur railroad track was put in to load ice directly into the railroad cars,” wrote Lavelett. “Harvesting at that time was done by man and horses. Power conveying the ice up in houses by horses.
“Ice harvest began in the middle of December and the cakes of ice were 24-inches thick after being planed. Twenty-thousand to 30,000 tons were harvested. Four-thousand tons were stored in the houses and the balance shipped to Pueblo and Denver.”
But the ice business was risky, subject not only changing times, but forces of weather including wind, changing climate, water — not to mention transportation and refrigeration technology modes.
Still, for a time, the floor of the butcher shop always had about three inches of clean sawdust, changed every week, to keep the ice cold and absorb any spills.
And every store, hotel, restaurant and some homes had their own ice house. As a result, Monument was a “meat and potatoes” kind of place.
But for the potatoes, that is a different story.

Photo information:

Photo 1: Betz Meat Market in Monument with Betz' chain-drive delivery truck out front.

Photo 2: Meat Market with prominent Monument meat moguls including  Chas. Allis, Mose Chandler, Dan Davidson, George Betz  and Charlie Schubarth.

Photo 3: Charlie Schubarth's steam engine used to power ice conveyors.

Photos courtesy of The Vaile Museum.

River smoothes over us hard cases

The river smoothes over us hard cases.
In the spring, it is wild and dangerous.
But summer reflects upon us cautiously.
By fall, we are weak, diminished, stagnant.
The ice of winter traps us, first at the edge.
Then, you may walk across, smooth again.

I remember the girls in the water of summer.
I forget that I was wild and dangerous.
I think of my friends in reflections of the fall.
I feel the bitter bite of the cold in the winter.
I brave the thin ice around frozen banks.

Anger wells up from the spring's runoff.
Violence in the mood of warm reflection.
Falling into pools of stagnant water.
Living on the edge where the ice forms.
But the river smoothes over us hard cases.

--- Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

All roads lead to Walter Paris

By 1873, Walter Paris was painting water color sketches in around the Pikes Peak region

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

Art and the ice business, Palmer Lake and Cripple Creek, Professor Ferdinand Hayden and the U.S. Government Geological Survey, local architecture, and Rudyard Kipling's Nobel Prize for Literature   ...  all roads lead to Paris.
Walter Paris, that is. He arrived in the Pikes Peak area in the Summer of 1873.  In his youth, Paris, an esteemed English-trained architect had been appointed assistant architect in Bombay, by the English government. He had befriended John Lockwood Kipling, who was professor at the Bombay School of Art, at the time.
"One morning December of 1865, John Kipling rushed over to Paris' bungalow to announce that his wife had given birth to a 12-pound boy. A few days later, Paris went to see the infant and held him in his arms. The infant's name was Rudyard Kipling, who grew up to be one of the most famous British writers in India and the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 1907. Paris maintained a friendship with the Kiplings and their son, and by 1899, when Rudyard Kipling was living in Vermont, Paris rightfully consider himself Kipling's oldest, friend," writes Palmer Lake historian Daniel W. Edwards in a historical paper for the Palmer Lake Historical Society in July of 2010.
By 1873, Walter Paris was painting water color sketches in around the Pikes Peak region. He continued to design buildings in Colorado, including an office building on Tejon Street in Colorado Springs, and a school in west Denver, but also set in motion plans for an Ice House near Divide Lake in northern El Paso County.
Divide Lake (later rechristened Palmer Lake) was leased from the railroad and Paris built an ice house there that could store 2,000 tons of ice to be sold in Denver, Colorado Springs and Pueblo.
Paris and W.S. Hannaford established the Fountain Ice Company and purchased existing ice houses in Colorado Springs and Manitou.
"The company's ice house at Palmer Lake was completed by the end of 1873, and there is one tantalizing reference to Paris sending carpenters to build, if not the beginnings of town, at least some houses at Divide Lake where workers at his plant could spend the winter. If Paris did construct housing facilities, it indicates there was a small settlement at the future site of Palmer Lake long before Thompson began his development efforts in 1883," writes Dan Edwards.
Paris joined the Prof. Ferdinand Hayden's U.S. Geological Survey team that documented first intoYellowstone region of Wyoming in the early 1870s was working as an artist for the survey in the fall of 1874.
"Mr. Walter Paris, who has been accompanying Professor Hayden's party in their trip northward from Colorado Springs, along the base of the mountains, has made a number of sketches of scenery in Pleasant Park and other localities along the route, and extends and invitation to our citizens to call at his studio and look them over," reported the Colorado Springs Gazette on Oct. 24, 1874.
But he became restless. In January 1875, Paris wrote to Hayden in Washington, at the time.
"I feel that a reputation is not to be gained in an out-of-the-way place like Colorado Springs, and the best plan to make one's self known is to come East and exhibit my works, and should I succeed in getting commissions to paint views of this part of country I can come West in May or June next..."
He did so by March of that year as reported in Washington papers but still had not sold all of his property in Colorado as late as 1881, when records show as owner of an ice house and nine acres of land in Colorado Springs.
Paris returned to Colorado several times in the ensuing years and sketched a number of scenes in and around Cripple Creek in 1892.
"Mr. Walter Paris has returned from Cripple Creek bringing with him some excellent sketches of the town from various points in the vicinity and two water colors of mountain scenery. He also has a very vigorous sketch the main street while the fire was in progress Wednesday night," reported the Colorado Springs paper.
Described as "a large man, broad-shoulders, well-built, and wore a mustache and full beard squarely cut," in the Dictionary of American Biography, he seemed to be well-connected here in the U.S. and his native England, in fact attending a White House reception hosted by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905. He died in Washington in November of 1906 at the age of 54 from the effects of a stroke.
"He had a dignity which verged on pomposity and was slow and heavy in movement and speech, and latter distinctly British in accent... Of his own work and attainments he held high opinion, and not infrequently frankly expressed, and he was intolerant of criticism, but this characteristic also may been only the armor worn to protect a supersensitive nature," according to the Dictionary of American Biography.

Photo caption 1: Ferdinand V. Hayden (left), who led the 1871 expedition of Yellowstone, talks with his assistant Walter Paris.
Photo caption 2: Traditional artwork of Pikes Peak and Garden of the Gods by Walter Paris.