Volcanoes, Indians, Outlaws, and Grizzlies
Twenty visitors to Badger Creek Ranch walked up the slope overlooking the ranch house at the start of a tour that promised "volcanoes, Indians, outlaws, and grizzlies." The tour was one of the highlights of the ranch’s first annual "Open Gate" day on September 29th that included demonstrations of horsemanship, refreshments, live music, and dancing.
As the tour participants looked across Badger Creek’s valley, they could see a scar on a hillside that is the site of an ancient mine where earlier inhabitants of this land — Ute Indians — dug out nodules of peridot, a bright-yellow to green, gem-quality rock that they used in jewelry. At the start of the tour, a rock the size and shape of a French baguette bread loaf that had been found recently near the peridot mine was passed around. It appeared to have been carved or pecked into a narrow streamlined shape. Striking this rock with another smaller stone caused it to ring with a bright, bell-like tone.
The ringing rock
When shown this rock, archaeologist Marilyn Martorano said it appears to be a "lithophone" — stones that native peoples have played musically for thousands of years by placing them in a row to form a kind of stone xylophone, each stone playing a different tone when struck. Quite a few of these lithophones have been found in the San Luis Valley, 20 miles to the south in New Mexico, but this is one of only a handful of such stones have been found in Colorado. One was discovered near the town of Nathrop, 15 miles west of the ranch.
looking out over A Volcanic Landscape
This unusual stone, the rock from the hillside that was mined for peridot, and the many rock outcrops on the ranch — including the windswept ridge on which the touring visitors were standing — are all the product of a titanic volcanic eruption that occurred about 37 million years ago in the Sawatch Mountains, 23 miles west of the ranch, near where Mount Aetna is today. That volcano sent lava, gases, and ash straight up into the sky, forming a fiery column that could have reached a height of 20 miles.
Looking across the valley to the peridot mine
When the eruption subsided, there was no longer enough force to support the weight of the column, causing it to collapse back onto the ground where it rushed outwards in all directions at speeds of more than 100 miles per hour. This fast-moving blanket of lava, rock, pumice, and ash was superheated to more than 1,000 degrees so that it gathered up and melted or evaporated everything in its path.
The eruption produced 240 cubic miles of this rock that geologists call the Wall Mountain Tuff. It covered more than 3,600 square miles to a depth of up to 650 feet, and can be found as far away as Castle Rock, 70 miles to the northeast of the ranch, and the Wet Mountains, 60 miles to the southeast. When it finally came to a stop and cooled, it left a layer of rocks that have been exposed by erosion in this part of South Park, forming the cliffs along Badger Creek and other rock formations and outcrops.
visiting An Ancient Hunting Ground
The tour proceeded walked along the top of a row of cliffs that stand back about a half mile from Badger Creek until they reached Antelope Gulch, where runoff during the wet season flows over the cliffs and forms a pool at their base. The pool is fed year-round by underground springs.
The pool at the base of the cliffs
Archaeologists have found evidence that indigenous people hunted and camped around this break in the cliffs for more than 8,000 years. They have found ancient hearths with fire-cracked rocks and numerous places where rock was quarried from outcrops and sculpted into tools.
Paleo-Indians, and later the Utes and Apaches who camped here, found that they could quarry high-quality stone from the Wall Mountain Tuff to make tools. Between 2008 and 2011, archaeologists have recorded more than 9,400 pieces of flaked stone or unfinished stone tools here, plus stone tools that were used to make other tools for hunting and processing kill.
Most of the tools are between 1,000 and 2,000 years old, but one spear point is between 8,800 and 10,500 years old. They included 37 spear points as well as tools for processing game including 24 scrapers, two knives, and one chopper. More than 70 percent of the projectile points and tools were made from a very dense and colorful form of quartz called jasper that is found in small deposits in the Wall Mountain Tuff.
Other tools including a drill and a graver for cutting, engraving, or perforating bones and antlers, eight hammerstones for chipping flakes off rocks, a tool for smoothing spears or arrow shafts, and 24 tools used to prepare food, including six stones for grinding or milling food (manos), 13 grinding bowls (metates), and five thin cooking slabs.
The stone tools and other artifacts that are less than 1,000 years old are likely to have been left by Ute Indians. Archaeologists also found a couple dozen potsherds that appear to be remains of two pots made by Jicarilla Apache Indians sometime between 1550 and 1750. The pots had thin walls and a flared rim that were made from coils of clay flattened with a scraping tool. They would have been fired upside down over an open fire and waterproofed with pine pitch.
From here, the tour followed a natural ramp that leads from a gap at the top of the cliffs to the pool at their base. For millennia, this would have provided a pathway for animals, including bison, elk, deer, bighorn sheep, and pronghorns, to come drink at the pool. This made it a prime hunting location, and archaeologists have found small rock walls along the clifftop, across from the pool, that appear to be hunting blinds from which hunters would have had a clear shot at game coming down to the ramp to gather at the pool. Thirteen circles of stones have been discovered at the base of these cliffs that appear to have been used to anchor the tipis that would have formed an encampment here.
Walking down the natural ramp that leads to a pool at the base of the cliffs
tales of The Wild West
The discovery of valuable minerals — concentrated near the Earth's surface in the hills above the ranch by the same forces that had triggered volcanic eruptions — caused miners to flock to this area in the 1890s. A boom town called Whitehorn sprang up almost overnight in a meadow just 1.5 miles west of the cliffs overlooking Badger Creek. Months later, another town called Turret was founded eight miles further west at the head of a canyon on the other side of the Arkansas Hills. For about a decade, both these towns had their own post offices, local newspapers, regular stage coach service, paved streets, and schools. They then quickly faded into ghost towns.
Ranching, which started here about the same time here, proved to be more sustainable. However, by the late 1800s, ranchers found that the practice of allowing their cattle to range freely made them susceptible to unscrupulous rustlers. For example, Ed Watkins, who owned a ranch further down in Badger Creek canyon, noticed that some cattle from the IM Ranch, which was located in the same valley as Badger Creek Ranch today, would wander past his place during the cold weather months to graze on south-facing slopes along the Arkansas River where the snows had melted.
This proved too big a temptation for Watkins, who found he could waylay the cattle and relatively easily change their IM to his own brand, a W inside a circle. He'd then sell the stolen cattle in Salida, avoiding the South Park ranchers who preferred to bring their steers to Cañon City.
The ranchers in this area caught on and organized a posse that found Watkins along with about 200 head of their cattle, which they took back. However, Watkins escaped to Salida so the cattlemen had the Cañon City sheriff arrest Watkins and put him in the Cañon City jail. Watkins then persuaded the sheriff to escort him up to Salida on the train so he could raise $4,000 for his bail money.
The sheriff brought Watkins back with his bail money on a train that arrived in Cañon City at 15 minutes past midnight. As they walked to the Cañon City courthouse together, the sheriff was seized by five or six masked cattlemen. The next morning the citizens of Cañon City awoke to find the sheriff tied and gagged, and Watkins’ body swinging from the timber of the 9th Street bridge across the Arkansas River, opposite the penitentiary. He had a bullet wound and may have died before he was hanged.
Although Colorado’s governor offered a reward for information leading to the arrest of the men who had stealthily assaulted the sheriff and lynched Watkins, nobody was ever arrested or tried for Watkins’ murder. "There is talk to the effect that Ed knew too much of the ins and outs of some of the Cañon City cattlemen, and that they were afraid for themselves if he were given a fair trial and allowed to tell what he knew, and that a mob was hired to dispose of him on that account," wrote the Salida Mail newspaper.
A grizzly’s last stand on the ramparts of an ancient volcano
One million years after the eruption that covered this region with the Wall Mountain Tuff, a series of volcanic vents opened up at the south end of South Park. Eventually these vents coalesced into one very big volcano that was centered near today’s town of Guffey, 17 miles to the east of the ranch. The base of this volcano measured 10 miles across from north to south, and 16 miles from east to west, thanks to prevailing winds that blew its eruption column to the east.
The volcano erupted off and on for three million years, growing into a giant pyramid-shaped mountain that towered 19,000 feet above its base — as big as any mountain in North America today. Since then, erosion has gradually worn down the mountain so that all that remains are a few sections of its base. Black Mountain, which tour participants could see 11 miles to the east, rising 2,000 feet above the surrounding lands, is a remnant of the west side of the base of that volcano.
Today, Black Mountain is a brooding, wild place where the oldest trees in the Rocky Mountains can be found beneath the mountain’s summit, wild horses once ran free, Kit Carson carved his name in a trapper’s cabin in the early 1850s, and one of Colorado’s last grizzly bears was killed in a legendary showdown. The oldest known trees in the Rocky Mountains are the bristlecone pines on Black Mountain. There are more than a dozen of these living bristlecone pines that are more than 1,600 years old, including four trees that are more than 2,100 years old. The oldest bristlecone pine on Black Mountain is 2,345 years old.
Looking east to Black Mountain from Badger Creek Ranch
A man who came to hunt on the side of Black Mountain that faces Badger Creek Ranch in the fall of 1883 encountered a grizzly who severely mauled him. His friends brought back to the IM Ranch house, and one of the IM Ranch hands set out to fetch a doctor.
He could have headed down to Salida — a distance of 20 miles — but he didn't want to chance an encounter with friends of Ed Watkins who might still be looking for an opportunity to take revenge for his hanging. So instead, he spent five hours riding 24 miles north through the frigid night to the town of Hartsel, riding one horse and leading a second horse for a doctor to ride back on.
From Hartsel, he turned west and rode another 11 miles to the Denver, South Park and Pacific railroad’s Platte River station, arriving at 4 a.m. That station sent a telegraph message to Fairplay, 18 miles further north, requesting a doctor. That message had to be relayed another six miles further north to the town of Alma a doctor lived.
The doctor from Alma then went to Fairplay where a special train took him to the Platte River station. He arrived there at 8 a.m., got on the spare horse and rode back down here to the ranch. But he was too late to save the injured man from dying, whose last words were, “Boys, don’t hunt that bear.” Today, that hunter lies in the Fairplay cemetery where his tombstone bears the inscription “Safe in the arms of Jesus.”
The story of this event contributed to an ongoing campaign to kill the last of the grizzlies in this region. As settlers came in and starting shooting grizzly bears, their range was reduced to the least populated parts of the Rocky Mountains. Their habitat continued shrinking as forests were cut down for fuel and timbers. Hunting for the mining boom towns in the region had depleted the bison, elk, and deer that bears eat. As a result, bears would occasionally kill livestock in their search for food, although more commonly they would feed on carcasses of livestock that were killed by other causes, and were blamed for the kills.
All this increased the number of human encounters with bears, and the pressure to kill grizzlies. The number of surviving grizzlies in Colorado dropped to 800 in 1880, then to 400 in 1890, and 150 in 1900.
In 1901, a man with the unfortunate name Wharton Pigg made a fortune in the gold rush in Cripple Creek and bought what was Fremont County’s largest cattle ranch at the time, the 56,000-acre Stirrup Ranch which adjoins Badger Creek Ranch and still has its headquarters on the south side of Black Mountain.
Pigg had grown up in this area. When he was 14-years-old, he had heard the story about this bear attack, and from that age he devoted some of his spare time to trying to find and kill the bear. From his home at the Stirrup Ranch he had noticed that a large grizzly liked to mosey around Black Mountain, so he named it “Old Mose.” He decided this must have been the bear that was responsible for the attack 18 years earlier, as well as a lot of other mishaps in the south end of South Park.
Actually, the bear that Pigg called Old Mose was the last remaining grizzly bear in this region, and had been born in the early 1890s from a female bear that had been killed sometime after this cub was born. In 1901, Pigg caught Old Mose in a steel trap he had set in a pond on the north side of Black Mountain. Old Mose eventually freed himself, but not before losing two toes on his left hind foot, which subsequently made it easy to identify his tracks.
Finally, in 1904, Pigg brought in a tracker from Idaho who hunted bears with dogs. They tracked Old Mose down and shot him five miles east of here. They displayed the bear's body, which was more than 10 feet long, with an arm span of 9 feet, and weighted 1,000 pounds, in Cañon City where more than 2,000 people lined up to see it. The Denver Post devoted a full page to celebrating the killing of Old Mose under a headline “The King of the Grizzlies is Dead," and wild stories circulated about the criminal bear. However, it appears that Old Mose never killed a human and his livestock kills may have been limited to just two Hereford bulls.
By 1940, Colorado had just 12 surviving grizzlies, and half that many by 1950. The last Colorado grizzly was killed in 1979 high in the southern San Juan mountains about 19 miles east of Pagosa Springs. When Adams State University in Alamosa changed the name of their athletic mascot from the Indians to the Grizzlies, they installed a 12-foot tall bronze statue of Old Mose in the center of campus that is one-and-a-half times larger than life.
The statue of Old Mose at Adams State University
As the tour participants walked back toward the ranch house, they could sense the power of the volcanic forces that shaped this land, and the spirits of the humans and other creatures who have long inhabited these lands.