Road Trip 7 -- Santa Fe, New Mexico to Limon, Colorado

 Road Trip 7 – Santa Fe, New Mexico to Limon, Colorado

1.

Nineteen degrees at 6:15 am.  Santa Fe to Wagon Mound on Interstate 25.  Hokusai painted low-lying clouds as white glove-shaped apparitions, tendrils obscuring what lay below palm and outstretched fingers.  I have always thought these clouds heavily stylized, abstract, and unrealistic.  But north of Wagon Mound, among the Sangre de Cristo foothills, I see ground fog of this kind, hand-shaped white mist reaching between the slopes and extending up into the blue-green canyons, dense enough to blot out the landscape over which it hangs.  As the air brightens, I see serrated white peaks on the west horizon, trapping pink dawn on their heights.  The freeway surges across steppe, a Tibetan plateau that is entirely treeless, unformed and empty.  A snow report on the radio says that the Arizona Snow Bowl, the ski hill at Flagstaff, boasts a new ten inches of powder snow on its runs.  

Raton occupies several parallel ridges each slightly more elevated than the one before.  The town looks poor but there are white mansions clinging to the barn-shaped buttes above the town.  This town is important to me as my first experience of actual mountains, crossing the pass to the north into Colorado when I was 14 or 15 on a family trip embarked from Dallas (Richardson to be more exact -- a north suburb to the city).  Nearby, there are volcanic cinder cones.  The freeway is lifted upward by big swells in the topography, climbing a barren height and, then, the shadows on the steep slopes give way to a vista of vast space: at the crest of the pass, the Spanish Peaks are visible to the west, companionable twin pyramids heavy with snow, rising over highlands carpeted with green forests.  Other more remote ranges of mountains, reduced by distance to saw-toothed sunlit ridges, run north and south, the front ranges of the Rocky Mountains.  On the radio, I’m listening to Paul Simon’s melancholy “Slip-sliding away.”  But, then, crossing in Colorado, without adjusting the station, the music snaps off to be replaced by a “God is Great” pledge fundraiser complete with prayerful petitions for cash and matching challenge grants.  Under a canopy of hymns, I drive down from the high country.  The high plains are dusted with snow out to a horizon that is the color of willow-ware china, a faint icy blue.  

North of Raton Pass, the freeway passes through Trinidad, a mountain town that seems crowded into a gulch below the freeway.  Some old towers with a vaguely Italianate cast rise over the scrabble of streets – I think they are churches and, perhaps, a courthouse dome.  This was coal-mining country and many of the workers were immigrants from eastern Europe and some onion domes of orthodox churches are reminders of that history.  A more disturbing trace of the mining operations in this sector of the Front Ranges is at Ludlow, 14 miles north on the Interstate.  I have some vague recollection that an event called the “Ludlow massacre” happened near Trinidad, although I can’t exactly recall the details.  At the second exit north of Trinidad, I pull off the freeway, consult my smart-phone, and learn that the Ludlow Massacre site is nearby, indeed, accessed by the next exit northbound.

The foothills of the mountains reach to the prairie on the edge of the freeway.  Valleys rimmed by wooded bluffs, silvery with aspen on their crests, gently slope downward from the summits of the long north-south running ridges.  From this vantage close to the first high edge to the mountains, the big snow-clad peaks are not visible, concealed behind the steep, forested slopes.  The historic site lies at the outlet of one of these long, broad valleys descending through the foothills.  The nearby heights are rounded, marked with faint traces of mining activity – green-gray scree under low cliffs – but the landscape is no longer industrial: it has reverted to a park-like aspect.  Vegetation on the lower knolls is spotty.  This terrain is arid and layered veins of rock show through the sparse brush.  

The access road is badly shattered asphalt, winding in big, capricious curves toward the head of the Ludlow valley.  Although a coal company town was located near here, Ludlow, probably where the east-west siding to the mines intersected the north-south line between Denver and Trinidad, no trace remains today.  The monument to the massacre is on the bare prairie, eight-hundred yards from the bluffs at the valley’s outlet.  There is an old bright yellow (daisy-yellow) Dodge ram truck parked in the gravel lot adjacent to the historical site.  The truck is edged with melting snow like whipped cream.  The site is really picnic ground managed by International Mine Workers Union.  A chain-link fence encloses a half-acre locked-off this morning in which there are several picnic tables, a bench, a marble cenotaph with life-size sculptures of a miner with mourning mother and child on its base, and a white-lathe shed with a bent, shingled roof and big counter-openings on its sides, apparently an amenity housing some kind of kitchen or other facility from which food and, I suppose, beer could be distributed.   The shed is sealed up, inaccessible in any event, behind the chain-link fence with its padlocked gate.  The Union has erected several informational markers along the chain-link perimeter.  A couple of shade trees, dripping with wet snow, stand over the picnic tables.  At the edge of the parking lot, an abandoned railroad right-of-way cuts diagonally across the site.  The cracked asphalt road is silent.  No one is around.  One of the explanatory markers is disfigured by an I. W. W. decal, Wobbly propaganda showing a scary-looking black cat that looks like it is being electrocuted, fur inflamed within a yellow nimbus.  

Silence except for the faint trickle of melt-water off the links in the fence, the yellow Dodge ram, the markers pasty with sticky, droopy snow, the head of the mourning mother in front of the memorial cenotaph capped with a bonnet of snow that has melted to mark her strangely featureless, abstract face – it’s like an eroded Modigliani – with black lines like tears.

2.

When I was a boy, my father urged me to read the poetry of Carl Sandburg.  We had an old book containing Sandburg’s Chicago and slaughterhouse poems.  In that volume, there was a poem about the Ludlow massacre.  I didn’t understand Sandburg’s popularism at that time, the inflections of the ideology of the Communist party and Eugene Debs in his verse.  But the poem about the killings at Ludlow affected me strongly.  I read it many times when I was a teenager and, when I went to the University, I was sad, even, disturbed to learn that none of my professors thought much of Sandburg – he was, they averred, a sort of third-rate imitator of Walt Whitman.

Today, I have looked up Sandburg’s poem.  It is called “Memoir of a Proud Boy” and, as it turns out, is only incidentally about the tragedy at Ludlow.  (“Memoir of a Proud Boy” was published in 1918 in Sandburg’s second collection after his 1916 Chicago Poems.  Cornhuskers, that book, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.)  The titular “proud boy” is Don Macgregor, a historical figure who worked as a journalist for the Denver Express.  The Express, a pro-union newspaper, sent Macgregor to cover the strike at the coalfields around Trinidad and Pueblo, Colorado.  Macgregor sent dispatches from the field, describing the violence around the tent cities of striking workers and the mines.  He writes in a style that seems proto-Hemingway, terse, concrete, and muscular.  As the poem explains, Macgregor was present when the union militia (‘gunthugs’ as they are called in his columns) attacked the tent colony near Ludlow.  Some people were killed and a fire ignited that suffocated a number of women and children sheltering in a pit inside the encampment.  Macgregor’s dispatches had been published under a lithographic logo showing a miner’s wife, her long hair and ankle-length dress dangling down under the bayonet on which is impaled.  Macgregor and his paper didn’t make any pretense toward journalistic objectivity and the massacre caused the writer to take up arms himself, substituting a rifle for his pen.  

“Out of Ludlow and coal towns in Colorado,” Sandberg says, “sprang a vengeance of Slav miners, Italians, Scots, Cornishmen, Yanks / Killings ran under the spoken commands of this boy / With eighty men and rifles on a hogback mountain.”  Macgregor, “this boy” in the poem, led aggrieved miners, largely Greeks, in guerilla attacks on the coal fields and railroad lines along the front range. There was open war fought with machine guns and dynamite for ten days. Ultimately, Macgregor’s men engaged the Colorado National Guard at Walsenburg taking high ground along “a hogback mountain.”  The National Guardsmen were conflicted and many refused to fire their weapons based on their sympathy for the striking miners. Macgregor, Sandburg tells us: “...wrote a Denver paper / Of picket silhouettes on a mountain line / “All I want is room enough to stand / And shake my fist at the enemies of the human race.”  After several days of sporadic gun battles, the fighting ended.  In December 1914, President Woodrow Wilson called in the army to quell the disturbances and, later, Grand Juries indicted 400 strikers, including Macgregor who was accused of homicide.  (It was largely futile; juries wouldn’t convict and there was only one striker ultimately imprisoned for his conduct –none of the strikebreakers were even arraigned, let alone convicted.)  Macgregor wasn’t about to surrender to federal authorities and, so, he fled to Chihuahua, Mexico to report on the revolution there.  He ran afoul of the Villistas in Mexico and was shot down “on the main street of an inland town. / A boy sat near all day throwing stones / To keep pigs away.”

Sandburg says “The Villa men buried him in a pit / With twenty Carranzistas.”  The poet summarizes the story: “There is drama in that point ... / ... the boy and the pigs. / Griffith would make a movie of it to fetch sobs.... ‘And the muchaco sat there all day throwing stones / To keep the pigs away,’ wrote Gibbons to the Tribune... Somewhere in Chihuahua or Colorado / Is a leather bag of poems and short stories.”  

When you research this story, the internet directs you to more recent Proud Boys, the militia that stormed the capitol on January 6, 2022.  

3.

The markers at the Ludlow massacre site are terse, with colorful descriptions and maps showing various features in the landscape involved in the fighting.  The UMWA (United Mine Workers of America), of course, don’t have space on these panels of information to fully explain the Colorado Coalfield War.  In fact, the story is very complex and travelers who pull off the freeway to visit the site will either know enough about the event to not require a lot of background information or will know so little that their encounter with the monument, the picnic grounds, and the plaques along the chain-link fence will be essentially meaningless.  However, some additional information is, perhaps, helpful.

The coal in the Front Ranges in this region is located in veins a few miles to the west of the canyon inlets leading to the high country.  The ore was discovered in 1867 but mining had to wait for the freight trains.  The mining companies built towns for their workers near the mouths of the canyons and equipped those villages with company stores.  (In some cases, miners were paid in scrip that could only be redeemed at the approved company store in the village.)  Work in the mines was dangerous, with seven fatalities per 1000 miners annually – the pits were far more dangerous than corresponding coal mines in the East.  At the height of mining activity in the Front Range, about 17,000 miners worked in the collieries.  Beginning in 1910, the United Mine Workers of America began efforts to unionize the Colorado work force.  By 1913, enough miners had joined the Union that their representatives could present a list of demands to management.  These demands required the companies to accept the UMWA as the collective bargaining agent for the workers, required adherence to safety standards, increased pay rates, and prevented employers from requiring workers to live in company towns or use company stores.  The coal mine operators rejected these demands out-of-hand, triggering a strike.  Workers who went on strike found themselves immediately evicted from their company-owned homes.  This was in October and November 1913, as the Winter was approaching.  The Union set up tent cities near the railroad lines, building wood platforms for the white canvas tents, and supplying workers with cast-iron stoves for cooking and heating their dwellings.  Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency was hired to protect scab (non-union) workers imported to work in the mines.  The tent cities were located along the main routes to the mines and there were confrontations between strikers and scabs resulting in several fatalities.  Baldwin-Felts commissioned the construction of an iron-clad personnel carrier, plates of metal protecting the chassis of a big touring sedan.  This vehicle, called the “Death Special”, was brought to locations overlooking the tent cities, including the encampment at Ludlow, and equipped with machine guns.  The strikers, largely Greeks, engaged in long-range sniper duels with the Detectives (“gunthugs”).  A number of killings occurred and the strikers blew up several company stores and tried to dynamite the entrances to some of the coal pits.  Due to sniper fire, the miners excavated deep pits under some of the tents where women and children could shelter during skirmishes.  Effectively, a state of war existed along the front range.

Mother Jones led parades of miner’s wives in Trinidad.  Difficult conditions led to some children dying in the tent camps.  During a funeral for two babies, the anti-union militia opened fire on the mourners.  This led to retaliation by the strikers.  Several of the detectives were ambushed and killed on the railroad tracks.  On April 20, 1914, the day after Eastern Orthodox Easter celebrated by the Greeks at the Ludlow tent camp, three National Guardsmen appeared at the village demanding the release of a hostage that the authorities claimed that the strikers had abducted.  Louis Tikas, the “smiling Greek” in Sandburg’s poem, chased the guardsmen out of the camp.  By this point, the Death Special was on a ridge overlooking the tent encampment and several machine-gun nests were also set up overlooking the village.  When the miners left their shelters to surge forward toward the ridge, the detective and guardsmen sprayed them with machine-gun fire.  A fire-fight ensued in which the tents ignited.  A wall of flame swept over the encampment and a number of women and children huddling in a crater dug beneath a tent died in the fire.  (Accounts say that the small children’s fingers were burned-off as they tried to claw their way out of the so-called “Death Pit.”) It would have been worse except for a locomotive driven along the railroad siding to protect the tent encampment from direct machine gun fire.  (The locomotive was moved into this protective location to serve as a shield by workers friendly to the strike employed by the Colorado and Southern Railroad.)  

After several hours of fighting, the anti-union militia stormed the burning encampment, looted it, and captured some of the leaders including Louis Tikas.  Tikas was beaten to death and two of his lieutenants were shot dead.  Their bodies were left lying near the Colorado and Southern Railroad spur-line for three days.  As always with events of this sort, the number of casualties are disputed.  Management claimed that three of its militia-men were murdered – in fact, only one name was mentioned, a man shot through the neck during the fighting.  For its part, the Union claimed upwards of 35 women and children killed in the affray, with a dozen strikers as well.  People actually identified as killed in the fighting include nine children and four women who were suffocated and burned to death in the pit.  Another seven or eight miners were gunned down and died in the fighting.  

For the next ten days after the massacre, gangs of miners roamed the front ranges ambushing militia-men and killing them.  Equipment and mines were dynamited.  Probably another fifty or so guardsman and detectives died in the fighting.  The National Guard was deployed across the front ranges and, on December 10, 1914, the UMWA ended the strike – the union had run out of money to support the strikers whose families were now starving.  The workers’ demands were not met and those who had participated in the strike were replaced.  

The snow-caked plaques at the massacre site point out the location of the railroad siding, the locomotive that shielded the encampment from direct fire, and the ridge on which the Death Special was located.  The so-called Death Pit where the women and children were asphyxiated is under the monument where a rigidly upright and doughty-looking miner sculpted from marble looks out at the visitor, a woman and her crying child embracing at his side.  The miner seems oblivious to the suffering woman and her little girl.  

4. 

The persistence of certain memories is a curious thing.  I recall our family vacation, departing from Dallas, in which my father drove the family stationwagon over Raton Pass in 1968, I think, during a wet summer. (I was in the backseat, entrusted with reading the map.)  The mountain heights were shrouded in rain and mist and a cold drizzle persisted as we crossed the barren prairie under the Front Ranges.  I have a false memory of stopping at Ludlow, but this is based, I think, on a visit we made to a ghost town high in the Rockies near Silverton.  A ragged white stream chattered and gasped as it flowed over gravel and broken lathe reclining on heaps of brick marked the town site that was spectral with grey icy mist falling like drapery from the naked hillsides all scarred with decaying mining mills and big ramp-shaped heaps of spoil.  You could imagine tents replacing the vanished houses and shacks, tents fashioned from fog hanging over the craters of basement cellars.  This is the image I have of Ludlow, but, in fact, it bears no relationship to what I saw at the actual massacre site which is merely meadows and pastures and a picnic ground with cooking shack on the prairie.  The fact is that historical events, even the most tragic and consequential, leave little mark on the landscape and it’s impossible for me to imagine what happened at these places.

Not so, however, my memories of Pueblo from almost sixty years ago.  The rain persisted and we passed through the city on the freeway.  The town looked poor and seemed to shiver in the drizzle and some sort of foundry, mostly in ruins stood directly adjacent to the Interstate, a big hulking building with empty sockets for windows and acres of smaller structures crumbling into windrows of broken bricks scattered around the central structure.  And, in 2025, I’m surprised to see that this precinct of ruins has somehow survived, that it is, even, flourishing in its weird hopeless way.  The carcass of the foundry is still within a stone’s throw of the freeway, still dismal and charred, a whale’s cadaver washed up on the beach and the labyrinth of enclosed brickyards and shacks still surrounds the structure.  Big-bellied ovens cast, it seems, from wrought iron crouch along edges of the shell of the foundry.  It’s as if a curse has somehow preserved this industrial site, held it in suspension for contemplation by the bemused traveler.  Of course, the whole thing billows up suddenly and, then, is in the rear-view mirror.  But, under these sunny cold skies, the experience of that rainy morning in 1968 revives for me.  Perhaps, this foundry was where Colorado Fuel and Coal Company fabricated the sheets of iron used to fortify the Death Special.

At the time of my transit through Pueblo, I didn’t know that the ruins and blast furnaces have been preserved as a historical site and, indeed, are the remains of the Minnequa works, the headquarters of Colorado Fuel and Iron (CFI), a corporation that was financed and, in effect, owned by Jay Gould and John D. Rockefeller.  In fact, the Death Special was built on these premises and the colossal corpse of the foundry and its outbuildings is, in fact, a museum to Steelworkers of the West.  A sprawling Mission-style complex with a small oriental-looking dome, a structure that I took to be a church of some kind, is in fact the main offices for Minnequa Steel Works, the flagship of CFI, currently under renovation as a part of the museum.   

I should have stopped to visit the site but continued north on the freeway on the road to Colorado Springs.

5.

About 35 miles separates grim Pueblo from the mansions and feathery cascades at Colorado Springs.  The brutal industry at Pueblo is offset by the tourist attractions and luxury resorts at Colorado Springs.  Pueblo works; Colorado Springs plays.  

The vast hogback of Cheyenne Mountain, a granite dome, walls off the west and south part of town and, high overhead, Pikes Peak swathed in snow rises like an immense white throne into the blue sky.  The day is clear, a little chilly, but there are traces of warmth in the sunshine.  

I exit the freeway at an exit where all the roads east of the interstate dead-end at a giant refinery enclosed by high chain-link fences.  Beyond the gates, there are sinister checkpoints.  My GPS guides me to the old sector of Colorado Springs, an enclave of commercial buildings tightly packed together in a 12 block square.  This is old Colorado City, the original town where railroad lines crossed under the big sky-spectacle of Pikes Peak.  Colorado City began as mine-shafts and tents in 1858, but by the turn of the 20th century it was grid of four-story brick commercial buildings about 12 blocks square and flanked by a small park to the east facing the little sylvan temple of a Carnegie Library.  The precinct was tough, full of rot-gut saloons, brothels, and, even, opium dens.  Higher in the hills, millionaires built lavish mansions financed by the gold and silver mines and there were palatial hotels such as the old Broadmoor at the lenitive hot springs gushing out of the cistern of a box canyon.  The Air Force Academy, a row of wing-shaped silver pinnacles was erected against a backdrop of pine-clad mountains and the City Fathers developed hiking trails and a visitor center at the iconic red rocks of the Garden of the Gods.  In the nuclear-bombproof core of Cheyenne Mountain, the Strategic Air Command played war games and imagined doomsday scenarios.  But, of course, the mines played out and the railroad spurs at Colorado City became inactive and the decaying heaps of red brick became a slum until the mid-1970's when someone realized that the corpse of old Colorado City could be made charming, as it were, a precinct for upscale bars and restaurants in the restored flophouses and brothels.  Investment came to old Colorado City and the place revived.  It’s now got coffee-shops, sushi places, and galleries featuring Western art, fern bars and expensive boutiques and, the reason for my visit, the ineffably weird Michael Garman Museum.

6.

In many ways, the Garman Museum is a tribute to the old disreputable Colorado City neighborhood where it is located.  The museum doesn’t spend any time on preliminaries.  You enter from the street, pay your ten dollar admission fee, and, then, without any orientation, without biographical information about the place’s creator who is now deceased, without any preliminaries at all, you are plunged into the dimly lit warren of corridors occupied by the museum’s one and only exhibit, the installation called “Magic Town”.  “Magic Town” is a replica of the now gentrified old Colorado City. There are no postcards, no guidebooks, no souvenirs for sale – you can buy a Garman figurine of a doughty-looking firefighter or cop in blue, modeled at 1 to 16 scale, but it’s not a purchase conceived as a mere souvenir, but rather the acquisition of an artwork, albeit patriotic in character, that will set you back $250 dollars.  The college girl who takes your money seems detached, maybe partly stoned – she’s wearing what seems to be pajamas.  She asks you if you are interested in the “scavenger hunt.”  “Why not?”  I reply.  And, so, she hand me a pink slip, the sort of scrap of paper on which secretaries used to write phone messages with call-back numbers when I began the practice of law in 1979 – who recalls these things now, long since made obsolete by the computers sitting on everyone’s desk?  The little slip of pink paper is entitled “BASIC SCAVENGER HUNT #11" and it directs me to search the exhibit: “Where are the ‘Gone with the Wind’ Posters?”, “What is the ‘Bullit’?”  “What is the Soup of the Day?” and, then, a bonus question: “Where is the sign with the martini glass?”  The girl has round granny glasses.  She hands me the sort of pencil that golfers use to score their games.  I am entirely alone – there are no other visitors to the museum.  

“Magic Town” is a scale-model skid-row, populated with drifters, floozies, beggars, stray dogs.  Four or five story tenements line mean streets and alleys where garbage cans crammed with lovingly detailed detritus (beer bottles, scraps of paper, soup cans) stand under greasy brick walls or are illumined by corroding street lamps.  There are billiard halls, saloons, some scary transient hotels, nickel-and-dime greasy spoons, a movie theater advertising Casablanca, brownstone walk-ups dimly lit from within – a sort of hushed twilight pervades these cityscapes standing along the shadowy corridors of the museum.  Mirrors set at angles to the alleys and streets expand this grimy universe out to the ends of the room – the actual dimensions of the neighborhood are indefinable, obscure, everything fading into a brick-colored fog.  Dismal, taciturn married couples sit in diners that look like something modeled on the art of Edward Hopper.  It must hot in this imagined slum because many of the women are lounging around in dirty yellow-stained shifts.  A half-naked woman in a garret studio poses for an artist.  We crouch and bend to peek through windows in the brick facades.  The artist in his filthy tee-shirt is wielding a brush like a meat cleaver.  Through an adjacent window, we can glimpse a porcelain bathtub and a wooden chair on which the woman’s dress and hat and shoes are located – apparently, she disrobed in this bathroom.  A mentally retarded man grimaces at us on the top floor of another building.  He is standing in front of a room marked in a paint scrawl: MENS.  In the water-closet, toilets and basins squat under white cabinets, apparently reservoirs, from which chains hang down.  There’s a gymnasium with some pugs battering each other while a couple of hookers are watching them.  Crowds of drifters, dressed like bums and scavengers in forties film noir, stand in desolate little groups on street corners or under lamp posts in the alleys.  Scrawny dogs are underfoot.  An old lady carrying a paper bag trudges down a dark sidewalk.  Men are leaning from window-sills staring out at us while we stoop to peer into the windows of the apartments: long empty hallways, scenes of domestic disputes with men and women in their underwear gesturing at one another, unmade beds, chamber pots, trash cans and newspapers, complete with banner headlines, strewn across floors.  On a street corner, a preacher who looks like a derelict prizefighter waves a bible at a group of bums; a couple of floozies hurry up steps leading into a hotel.  In the lobby of the flop house, some men sit alone, contemplating murder or suicide and there are mournful potted plants and an alcoholic night clerk behind a polished wood counter.  Scattered among the isolates, the lonely, hollow men staggering through the twilight there are a couple of African-Americans wearing stocking caps, a swarthy man tending a fruit cart in the box canyon of a dead-end alley, even a couple of hippies, circa 1970 sitting at a bus stop.  In some of the corridors and airless rooms that you can survey by window-peeping, ghostly figures projected as holograms make robotic gestures over and over again, tricks of light manipulate mirror images which slip and slide and are fleeting, a man suddenly appearing or a woman in her undergarments, an old lady who is slipping out of her panties supplanted by a messenger boy dressed like a street organ-grinder’s monkey, a gum-shoe serving a warrant or subpoena.  In one narrow corridor, a man in a tee-shirt whispers over and over again: “It’s a vision, it’s a path...” – he raises his arms as if in supplication, projected somehow on a dusty, tilted pane of glass.  In Garman’s ‘Magic Town’,there are no cops, no rescuers, no children or mothers, no one is coming to save the denizens of this wretched place.  The town runs by its own obscure laws.  The slum has no edge, no outside surface or landscape – it comprises the entire world.  The whole display is cut from the same cloth – it has a crazy integrity, the same ciphers over and over again.  The level of detail is astonishing.  The garments are all distinct and individually imagined and the figures have detailed features, physiognomies modeled, it seems, on the artist’s friends and associates – battered faces grimace at you and most of the men seem variants on a haggard, heroin-addicted Marlboro man; the women all look a bit like Edward Hopper’s wife, Jo, females figurines with long, ropy bodies and shanks of blonde hair and hardened features with bony jaws.  Within the range of these types, however, each apparition in the ‘Magic Town’ has his or her own destiny, his or her own tragedy or scar or wound; although these personages interact, they all preserve the dignity of their essential solitude.  The effect on the viewer is disheartening: peeping through the toy windows, you feel somehow ashamed.

An element of obsession or madness lurks in the display.  In a documentary, the great underground comix artist, Robert Crumb, observes that he sketches from life – not people, since he can invent at will imaginary personages to inhabit his pictures, but rather details of infrastructure: junction boxes, electrical transformers and connections, ventilation (HVAC) on roofs, cooling coils, pallets, and wheeled carts, all the quotidian apparatus that is invisible to us until it somehow fails.  This is the stuff, Crumb asserts, that you have to observe and sketch because it can’t be invented, to some degree, can’t even be precisely imagined.  Garman’s world is full of these tiny details; things like fuse boxes, the shabby wheels on street vendors carts, coffee pots and bottles in saloons.  There are no blank or blurry spots in Garman’s dioramas – it’s all precisely delineated in hallucinated detail and, so, for this reason the entire tableaux seems a blur, too much detail to be appreciated or seen.  You are peering into some kind of lovingly imagined abyss.

7.

I don’t know much about Michael Garman.  Information in his obituary and tributes in Colorado Springs papers (and TV broadcasts) tell me that Garman was born in Fort Worth in1938.  In the museum, in some out-of-the-way nooks and crannies, there are pictures of the artist and some placards about his adventures.  Garman proclaimed “I vowed I would never work for a wage in my whole life.”  The artist (he called himself a “sculptor”) was a lanky handsome man, blonde, then, with silver grey hair.  He looks like the kind of steady, helpful fellow that you see on TV commercials for investments in gold or encouraging you to buy life insurance or, perhaps, touting his service record while running for public office.

As a young man, Garman had wanderlust and hiked to South America, bumming around Mexico City, then, Santiago in Chile.  (Although Garman is always described as “self-taught” as an artist, there are biographical notes that say that he attended a school of fine arts in Santiago and there was trained as a sculptor.)  A photograph from this era shows Garman dressed as a sort of desperado in a plaza in some Latin American town – he looks like one of the drifters in John Huston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the bum who tries to cadge money from an American businessman (played by Huston) not once but three times  In the sixties, Garman returned the United States and lived in several big cities before spending a few years in San Francisco.  In 1971, he moved to Manitou Springs, a tourist and resort town that is a suburb to Colorado Springs.  A few years later, he moved to Old Colorado City and, apparently, lived upstairs above his studio that was later transformed into the Garman Museum.  He was restless and apparently had a home in California as well.  Depressed by old age and illness, he killed himself on October 8, 2021 – he was 83.  

Garman was a well-known businessman and cultural institution in Colorado Springs, The museum displays photographs showing him with the president, George H. W. Bush and other celebrities, including hosts on TV morning talk shows.  In his later life, he successfully marketed figurines depicting First Responders, soldiers, saddle-tramps, police-officers –curiously, these figures are conspicuously absent from the desolate and doom-laden streets of “Magic Town.”

“Magic Town” belongs to the arcane world of eccentric or outsider art. The installation is a manifestation of a private fantasy that is deliriously detailed.  There’s a faint sexual electricity to the vast diorama; sex isn’t depicted anywhere but it tingles in the air as a pervasive possibility.  Garman seems to be obsessively reiterating an imaginary world of loneliness, lust, desperation, and freedom.  Clearly, he projects himself into the street scenes and the dismal tableaus in the flop-houses, saloons, and alleyways.  “Magic Town” is a place where anything can happen.  It’s an amalgamation of Edward Kienholz’ installations – couples having sex in cars or goons torturing a black man in some back alley, dismal, crepuscular corridors and bare rooms – and the world depicted by Henry Miller in Tropic of Cancer or George Orwell in Down and out in Paris and London.  It’s On the Bowery and The Exiles.  I’m reasonably sure that Garman didn’t know any of these sources.  He invents his shadow world out of his own fantasies about lurking in the shadows in some nameless skid row in 1941, the year Casablanca was released.  Anything can happen on these mean streets.

8.

I ask the girl if there is a catalog or souvenir book about “Magic Town”.  She shakes her head.  There aren’t even any postcards.  I hand her the pink slip on which I’ve penciled the answers to the scavenger hunt (#11) questions.  I haven’t figured out ‘What is a bullit?”  The girl tells me to go back into the exhibit and look at the fruit cart standing at the greasy outlet of one of the alleys.  I follow her instructions but still have no idea what the question means or how it could be answered from the shadowy figure at the fruit cart and his wares.  (I now think the word is misspelled: “bullet fruit” is a name for muscadine grapes.)

Returning to the counter, I tell the girl that I now know all about the “bullit” – I’m lying.  She nods and gives me a piece of stale Halloween candy to reward me for my efforts.

9.

Out on the street, Garman’s “Magic Town” has altered reality.  The old brick buildings heaped up over the alleys and streets are part of the diorama.  I see the naked windows opening into the structures, mirrors that reflect the darkening day.  The girl standing at a street corner, next to a bus stop sign, has a faintly seedy aspect.  Her jeans are torn and her hair in disarray.  A half block down the sidewalk, a busker is playing guitar and howling plaintively, some kind of cold, shivery blues.  He has Mason jar full of wrinkled dollar bills in front of him.  Some people on the street gaze at me with vaguely furtive expressions – are they washed-up gunthugs from the labor troubles?  Is the olive-skinned kid emerging from a building across the street, a miner who has lost his job to a scab?  A calico cat slinks along the curb-line and, then, vanishes into a alley.  It takes me a hike of three blocks for the impression that I am somehow confined within the diorama to evaporate.  Hovering over the street scene: the great white apparition of Pikes Peak – the light is slippery, shifting to make the mountain seem, sometimes, a serene, comforting Buddha and at other times, a monstrous, hostile presence. 

10.

At Phantom Canyon, a deep defile angling up into the Front Range at Manitou Springs, Anasazi cliff dwellings stand in a row under the curl of a rock shelter.  Unlike the structures in the Four Corners area more than 315 miles away, these ruins are readily accessible.  At Mesa Verde, the cliff dwellings are at the bottom of deep canyons or concealed in cliff-walls on grooved shelves hundreds of feet above the stony floor of the gorge.  You hike down to them on switchback-trails or descend steep ladder-like steps or, in some cases, have to clamber up wooden rungs with a vertiginous drop-off over your shoulder.  The Great Houses at Chaco Canyon are vast fields of ruins in a shallow, desolate canyon at the end of sixty miles of rutted gravel road – on the long rough road to Chaco Canyon, you will see Navajo boys on horseback and hogans in the brush.  But here, at Manitou Springs, the parking lot is conveniently located a stone’s throw from the pinkish ruins in their companionable hollow, a cavity in the low cliff that is cupped like a hand.  I can see people peeking out of small square windows in the ancient walls; a tourist is stooping to squeeze herself through a T-shaped doorway that is too small for her hips and bosom and, nearby, a man is walking a miniature white dog, the size of large squirrel, among the old flagstones and metates under a square tower that stands like a pillar rising from the base of the rock shelter to the stained black lip wrinkling over the top of the alcove.  Some handicap-accessible ramps angle up from the parking lot with its carefully delineated spaces for vehicles.  I don’t see any midden under the eighteen-foot walls, broken apart in places and perforated with small dark windows and there is certainly no spray of broken ceramics on the slope leading up to the dwellings of the ancient people.  Voices echo from within the stone cells and a couple of older women are sitting on the terrace of the museum built in the form of a Rio Grande pueblo on a stony pedestal of yellow-orange limestone; they are sipping cups of coffee. A colorful Plains Indian tipi is pitched on a little patch of green lawn next to the ruins.  

In the dank interior of the cliff dwellings, among some round towers and narrow passages between rooms, a small circular kiva is cut into the bedrock.  Visitors are invited to touch the bear skin rugs and the wall-coverings colorfully woven like Navajo quilts and, in stone alcoves, there are intact pots of various sizes.  The whole place seems old and the tourist’s feet have worn pathways into the soft stone and dust sifts down from crumbling walls and hangs in the air in pale curtains where beams of sunlight fall through windows and openings in the walls to illumine the shadowy spaces. The structures seem very ancient, dignified: clean, fragrant cells behind the half-fallen walls that smell of deodorant, sage, cologne.  This “authentic” ruin, built from adobe and limestone bricks carted from a wrecked pueblo near Cortez, Colorado 350 miles away, is completely fake, a confection intended to distract tourists to Colorado from making the six or seven hour road trip over four towering mountain passes to actual Anasazi sites on the border with Utah and New Mexico.  Why undertake the ardors of that expedition when you can see this realistic simulacrum a few miles from Colorado Springs in one of the ravines snaking upward along the flanks of Pikes Peak?  

The Manitou Springs Cliff Dwellings were built between 1896 and 1906, a ten year period in which the masonry was shipped by rail from Cortez to Colorado Springs.  The artificial ruins arose in the context of conflicts associated with the conservation of the actual Anasazi (now called Ancestral Pueblo) sites in the Four Corners.  Beginning in the 1880's, East Coast archaeologists, largely from the Smithsonian and Harvard, began to survey and excavate the pueblo sites at Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon – these were places originally discovered by Richard Wetherill, a Colorado rancher and other members of his family.  The sites in the remote high desert were huge, unguarded, and quarried extensively by looters, so-called “Pot-Hunters.” Some of this loot was displayed at the Chicago Columbian exhibition in 1892, further increasing the celebrity, and, hence, vulnerability, of the ruins in Southwest Colorado.  Rural ranching and farming communities in the Four Corners area thought that they should be responsible for protecting the sites, most of which were then privately owned.  But the East Coast archaeologists and politicians thought that scholarship would be better served by the Federal government acquiring the sites and, then, putting them under the protection of federal agencies.  A clash between western locals and the East Coast elites flared.  

Dr. Edgar Lee Hewett was an educator living with his tubercular wife in Florence, Colorado.  When his wife’s illness worsened, he moved with her to the warmer, dryer climate of Pajarito plateau northwest of Santa Fe.  There Hewett became interested in cliff dwellings in the region, particularly the ruined settlement in Frijole Canyon now part of Bandelier National Monument.  Hewett observed that pot-hunters were sometimes using dynamite to blast apart ancient walls to expose ceramics buried in these sites.  He publicized the ruins to local politicians, engaged in excavations himself, and, ultimately, worked to protect the archaeological sites by using government funds to acquire them by eminent domain.  A number of the most famous national monuments in the Southwest, including the Salinas Mission and the ruins of Montezuma Castle in the Verde Valley in Arizona, are the product of his efforts.  It was during this time that conflicts between local people and the federal government heightened.  By disposition a man of the west, Hewett sympathized with the ranchers and farmers who lived among these ruins but recognized that measures had to be taken to protect the cultural patrimony.    

Curiously, another important advocate for the cliff dwellings was the formidable Virginia Donaghe McClurg.  A native of Virginia, McClurg was a correspondent for a New York newspaper and, ultimately, moved to Colorado Springs in 1877.  She was the first White woman to visit the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde and those structures so enthralled her that they became the theme of her life.  She lectured extensively about the ancestral pueblo and their habitations both on the East Coast and Europe.  To preserve these archaeological sites, she formed the Cliff-Dweller’s Association, a women’s club that was associated with the five-thousand member Colorado Federation of Women’s Clubs.  (Because Mesa Verde National Park is largely the result of her advocacy, and that of another woman named Lucy Peabody, it is sometimes called the “Women’s Park”.)  The motto of the Cliff-Dweller’s Association was Dux Femina facti – that is, “the leadership of women has made this” (or more literally “female dukes made this.”)  McClurg (with Peabody) labored to protect and conserve the archaeological sites in the Four Corners, but urged that ultimate control of these iconic ruins remain with the pioneer communities that lived near them.  This latter objective failed and, by 1906, it was obvious that the federal government intended to exercise dictatorial control over places like Mesa Verde, Walnut Canyon, Bandelier, and Chaco Canyon.

Embittered by losing local authority over the ruins in Colorado’s far west, McClurg decided to take her revenge by making the actual archaeological sites superfluous.  Her idea was to built a perfect simulation of the Four Corners ruins at Manitou Springs, already a popular spa and resort area.  McClurg worked with Harold Aschenhurst, a Chamber of Commerce booster in Colorado Springs, to design and erect the fake cliff dwellings in Phantom Canyon.  (Aschenhurst already owned several amusement parks in the area.)  Tons of authentic brick and masonry rubble were quarried from a hilltop pueblo near Cortez and sent by rail to Colorado Springs where the replica cliff dwellings were built. From the outset, there was considerable controversy.  McClurg defused the controversy about building fake ruins in Phantom Canyon by inviting the dean of Southwestern archaeology, Dr. Edgar Hewett, into the enterprise.  After some soul-searching, Dr. Hewett gave his public blessing to the project and ordained that the ruins were truly authentic (because made with ancient masonry) and archaeologically accurate.  In his diaries, Hewett confessed that he found the entire project distasteful, but that he was motivated to participate by slights that he had suffered from the East Coast establishment and the elites at Harvard and the Smithsonian.  At the end of 1906, the Cliff Dwellings were open to the public as an “authentic Anasazi ruin.”  

When I was present, some Indian vendors were setting up booths to market pottery and jewelry and, at a small food cart, a Native man was making fry-bread.  A small amphitheater has been carved into the rocks so that spectators could watch Indian dances performed there.  In the museum, the displays of Anasazi pottery and tools are well-curated and clearly labeled.  The sort of geometric designs that you see on Navajo rugs and blankets decorate the pale yellow plaster walls.  In the ruins, everything can be touched and the walls are reinforced so that you can sit on them and, even, climb a little.  People speak in hushed voices within the cool, humid chambers.  A woman with a raccoon-sized hound on a leash encountered the man with the white squirrel-dog and the two animals greeted one another with wagging tails and excited yapping.  You have to buy a descriptive brochure to learn that the ruins aren’t original to the site and were constructed in 1906.  The text briefly explaining how the “authentic cliff-dwellings” are, in fact, fake is printed in a inconspicuous side-bar toward the back of the brochure which costs four dollars.  None of the tourists seemed to know that the cliff-dwellings had been specially built here.  Tour guides, mostly enthusiastic college kids, don’t mention the fact.  

Everything is real, I suppose, but there is no “aura”.  Walter Benjamin wrote about the “aura” or an indefinable presence that we impute to original works.  A replica may be perfect in all respects, even better than the original, but, nonetheless, will lack the “aura” that creates a halo around the original from which the copies are made.  These cliff-dwellings perfectly embody the idea of an ancestral Pueblo ruin, they are an archetype, but, of course, the real ruins are smellier, more broken, buried in dark cistern-like canyons with weird and inexplicable features.  There is nothing weird or inexplicable about the simulated cliff-dwellings – the fake ruins are clean and lucid, their manufactured decay precisely arrested.

My readers should regard this section of this writing with caution.  I didn’t go to Manitou Springs Cliff Dwellings, have not seen them with my own eyes and base my account on essays that I have read and pictures on the internet (and an interview with someone who visited the ruin, paid her admission, and left convinced that the cliff-dwellings were authentic).  This part of my essay is, in fact, a sort of hoax.

 

11.

The Garden of the Gods is a few miles to the north of the Garman museum, big red rocks like the dorsal fins of sharks emerging from a green moat running under the escarpment of the mountains.  The Visitor Center is on a hill above the thousand-yard wide moat, meadows splashed here and there with wild flowers and blossoming shrubs along a watercourse that is groomed like a water-feature on a golf course.  The facility is state-of-the-art and useless as far as I can see except for a clean and spacious toilet.  I drive across the lush green valley to the towering rocks scattered along the hillside, red as grilled salmon or slices of lox.  A one-way loop road tours the formations which rise as spires, knife-edge ridges, and domes of organ-pipe pinnacles.  You can park on small turn-outs along the narrow one-way loop and hike among the formations.  The trails are level, easy, beaten down by a million shoes and boots to trampled dust and sand or withered ribbons of asphalt.  It’s park-like but, more or less, shadeless and, although Pikes Peak, blows its cold breath down from vents in the front range, the sun is now warm.  On a hot day, you could roast meat in the oven-alcoves between the huge rock formations.  

I’ve seen a picture of Pikes Peak framed by towering parenthesis-formations of slippery red sandstone.  I spend an hour walking among the outcrops, looking for a vantage that would capture the white immensity of the mountain, all turbulent snowfields and battling torrents of cloud, offset by the mirror-smooth parabolas of red rock.  But, foot-sore, after twice circumambulating the red rocks, I conclude that the vista that I’m seeking doesn’t exist – the pictures are probably made with a telephoto lens and squashes space and makes the mountain, forty miles away, seem to rear up between the prisms of red rock.

Where the loop tightens to buckle back on itself, a dusty-looking herd of Dell sheep are grazing in a meadow adjacent to the road.  Tourists have gathered to besiege the big animals grazing among thorn bushes.  The tourists are bickering among themselves over how close it is safe to approach the sheep.  People mouth threats to one another.  I take a couple pictures from a point about sixty yards from the animals.  My phone lets me zoom in.  

12.

Colorado Springs and its suburbs stretch forty miles to the east across the high plains. It’s a big metropolitan enclave, probably well exceeding 800,000 people.  The boulevard running east out of town is lined with shopping malls and there are huge tracts of identical townhouses and apartments ranged along the rolling hills north and south of the highway.  A dozen or more stop lights complicate the road leading away from Colorado Springs.  I pass enormous churches, TV broadcast towers, a mosque with a copper dome surmounted by a star and scimitar.  I’m part of a great procession of cars and SUVs running east, away from the blue-green ranges of the mountains and the chilly cupola of Pikes Peak.  After forty minutes, I break free of the city and its environs and the highway arcs in a tight curve to the northwest across the treeless plains.  I reach Limon before five pm.  The motel is new and smells like construction, a scent of drywall, pine timber and urea formaldehyde in the counter-tops.  A large mural showing the peaks in Rocky Mountain National Park graces the wall above the desk clerk’s station.  For some reason, the key-card doesn’t work and so I have to leave my bag and backpack full of books outside the door in the empty hallway.  An old man has joined the old woman who checked me into my room.  She gives me another key.  On the TV across the lobby, the station is tuned to FOX news.  

Limon is across the freeway that slashes along the edge of town, I-70 eastbound to Salina and Topeka, Kansas.  Big trucks are zooming along the interstate.  A restaurant named Oscar’s is on a height of land overlooking the interstate built up with gas stations and several more hotels.  Neon outlines the eaves and windows of Oscar’s and the reason for the name is evident when I enter the place – its theme is movies that won the Oscar at the Academy Awards.  Big, bright posters hang on the walls and there are autographed pictures of movie stars above the booths.  The dishes are named after famous motion pictures.  A group of attractive girls with a tawdry-looking older blonde, apparently the mother of one of the young women, is seated across from me.  They are talking about some kind of competition in Denver, possibly something involving a dance-line.  Another woman comes up to the booth where the women and girls are waiting for their food.  Someone that they know is pregnant and suffering from nausea and the father, who is not a good guy, doesn’t really care about the woman’s sickness.  At least that’s what one of the older women says.  

Back at the lobby of the motel, the old woman and man are eating Chinese take-out food and still watching FOX.  On the newscast, I see that a blizzard is stalking across the northern plains, wreaking havoc wherever it goes.  Visibility is down to zero and long lines of vehicles are stalled in the choking clouds of blowing snow.  And another blizzard is approaching hot on the heels of the storm now underway.  This may complicate my trip home.