Note: The next few postings will be excerpts from what will be an attempt at corralling many of the blog stories, and a few major stories written but not included in the blog, into a book. Your opinions and suggestions are welcome.
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The building that now stands at 509 Grand Avenue, Hot Sulphur Springs, CO, whose construction date is officially noted as 1903, is comprised of four sections; two original structures and two later additions, which have been morphed into the seamless white façade of its current iteration. The original section of the building was a livery stable, constructed sometime in the1860’s, after the official founding of the town of Hot Sulphur Springs, which for the record occurred in 1860. William Byers, who was the founder, publisher and editor of the Rocky Mountain News, a Denver-based newspaper that ceased publication in 2008, the year we moved to Colorado, journeyed to Hot Sulphur and was enamored by the idea of turning the town and the healing waters of the natural sulphurous hot spring pool into a tourist Mecca, much on the order of New York’s Saratoga Springs, which Byers had visited some years earlier. Byers bought the springs from the Ute Indians, whose people had been frequenting the area for the previous thousand years, as they considered the springs to be sacred grounds, for a reported sum of $100.
While Byers vision never fully bore fruit on the level of Saratoga Springs, or other Colorado natural hot springs such as Glenwood Springs or Pagosa Springs, the little town of Hot Sulphur continued to grow, mostly due to it being the governmental seat for the county of Grand; and this in and of itself is a pretty good story.
Grand Lake, CO, some 25 miles NE of Hot Sulphur Springs as the crow flies, was founded in 1881 to support the influx of miners who descended on the area with the 1875 discovery of gold, lead, silver and copper in the surrounding mountains of the Never Summer and Indian Peak ranges of the Rocky Mountains. Those majestic peaks that now draw sightseers from all over the world were initially magnets for prospectors and independent men of commerce, the draw of the ore strong enough to pull the hardiest of men into this mostly inhabitable and most certainly inhospitable stretch of real estate. It would follow that anyone who would give up the comforts of late 19th Century city life for the brutal conditions inherent in this 9000’ elevated, isolated ice box would be greedy to a fault and tough beyond reason. This lethal combination of character traits, these traits inherent in all who would be the fashioners of our Western frontier, would make for a violent, bloody start to the birth of Grand County.
Colorado was admitted to the Union as a state in 1876; shortly thereafter, counties were drawn and county seats were established, the County of Grand and the County Seat of Grand Lake, that growing, bustling mining town in the extreme northeast corner of the county, being established in 1881. This didn’t sit well with many of the residents of Hot Sulphur Springs, a town twenty years senior to Grand Lake, situated in the middle of the county, not in the upper northeastern reaches as was Grand Lake. It’s certain that many contentious exchanges, unrecorded in the history books, went back and forth between the political powers of the two towns before the fateful day of July 4th, 1883, when the lone County Councilman from Hot Sulphur, (one of four Grand County Councilmen, the other three from Grand Lake) accompanied by the Sheriff and deputy of Grand County and three other masked residents of Hot Sulphur rode to Grand Lake with serious mischief on their minds, loaded guns on their hips.
As the July 4th County Council meeting adjourned, with the Hot Sulphur Councilman noticeably absent, the three Grand Lake Council members strode out onto the warm Main Street, and were summarily gunned down in the broad daylight as they exited the County Courthouse. One was able to fire back at the masked assailants, but at the end of the day, all three Grand Lake Council members were dead, along with the County Clerk. The Hot Sulphur Councilman was the unfortunate member of the marauding party who took the bullet from the Grand Lake bunch, dying several days later from an infection. The Sheriff from Hot Sulphur, called to investigate the killing in which he had participated, masked, committed suicide two weeks after the shooting. His deputy, also one of the masked murderers from Hot Sulphur, fled the county after the shootings and was later found dead on the Colorado/Utah border, identified only by the size of his feet, said to be unusually and notably large.
Shortly after this murderous brouhaha, the County Seat was moved to Hot Sulphur, where it has resided, unchallenged, since that violent Fourth of July in 1883.
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Now firmly ensconced as the County Seat of Grand, Hot Sulphur Springs was also roughly the half way point between Chicago, IL and San Francisco for the Union Pacific railroad, and in early 1900 the railroad made the town its major mid-way stopping point for resting the crew and refueling the trains with coal and water; Hot Sulphur was simply referred to as ‘Coal Town’ by the railroad workers and most others who knew of its existence.
The influx of railroad workers and hot springs visitors spurred about the need for food and lodging, and in 1903, The Riverside Hotel & Café was officially opened for business by Mr. Charlie Free. Charles F. Free was born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1873, and shortly after birth he immigrated to Canada with his parents. In 1890, at the tender age of 17 years, he left the family in Canada and headed south, finding his way to Denver and then the mountains beyond, working primarily as a cowhand on one of the many ranches that inhabited the lush summer grazing valleys of Middle Park. He then found work for a short while at the grocery store in Hot Sulphur Springs before signing on as a teamster, freighting goods, supplies and the occasional passenger down the Blue River Valley, thru Georgetown, on to Denver and back. That simply had to be grueling work, as driving that route back and forth today in good weather on paved roads in fancy cars can wear one to a nub.
In 1900, Charlie Free gave up the teamstering business, found a bride in Hot Sulphur and settled down for a few years, working on a ranch outside of town. One assumes he worked hard and made little, wondering how he had the wherewithal to buy the old livery stable and build the aforementioned attachment that became The Riverside in 1903 – possibly more to this story, but only one’s speculation will provide the supposed details. Charlie owned the hotel for 10 years before selling it and striking out again as a rancher, which he did until he finally hung up his spurs in 1943, at the age of 53. Apparently Charlie found the frigid outdoors, the stubborn livestock and the aroma of hay and horse manure easier to deal with than cranky hotel guests, picky diners and drunken bar customers; there were many times during my tenure as owner and proprietor of The Riverside when I could understand Charlie’s desire to be on the back of a horse instead of straddling a dishwasher or corralling a bloated, clogged toilet bowl.
In one of life’s continuing string of ‘fact is stranger than fiction’-isms, Charlie’s last known employment was that of a founder and the first president of the Middle Park Bank, located in Granby, CO, later to become Grand County Bank; Charlie Free, builder of the building we bought, founding the bank where we received our loan to buy his Riverside, ergo, Charlie founding the bank that foreclosed upon us and eventually took back his Riverside.
After living a long and successful life in Grand County, CO, Charles Free died in 1955, the year before my wife’s and my birth, and is buried next to his wife in the cemetery on the hill east of town, lying in eternal peaceful repose as he watches over the town of Hot Sulphur Springs, the magnificent Colorado River and his iconic Riverside Hotel.
To Be Continued......
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