Out here in the desert near Boulder Dam, Arizona (about 8 miles north of Mesquite, just off of (Interstate 15) is what’s left of the Old Spanish Trail. Me and my buddies drive by the traces of the trail on the way to various day hikes in the Beaver Mountains.
The trail was created by Spanish colonists back in the 1700’s and was used by American explorers,frontiersmen, trappers, cattlemen and Mormon settlers in the mid-1800’s.
One of the early American users of the trail was Richens Lacey Whooton, a legendary frontiersman of the early American West. “Uncle Dick”, as he was known by contemporaries, was an acquaintance of fellow mountain man, John C. Fremont, and was a lifelong friend of “Kit” Carson.
Uncle Dick was also my great-great Grandfather on my father’s side, if I can believe the family lore.
One would only have to have met my great uncle Les Enz (brother of my father’s mother) and compare to old picture of “Uncle Dick” from his University of Nebraska autobiography to see the resemblance. It is uncanny; Les was an identical look-alike.
Uncle Dick lived to a ripe old age of 77, which is amazing considering the adventurous and dangerous life that he lived. He also married five times and sired twenty children.
According to family lore, one of his wives was a Spanish lady who was related to the Dominguez clan which held a large land grant in what is now Southern California (present site of Cal State Dominguez Hills). One of their children (daughter?) presumably hooked up with an Enz (which is a Basque surname) fellow, somewhere along the way. My grandmother, on my father’s side, was Lila Mae Enz.
My father, Richard “Dick” Manning, met some of the Dominguez clan via the Enz side of the family when he was a youngster. .
Needless to say, it appears that I have some Latin blood in me, courtesy of Dick Whooton and his Spanish wife.
Anyway… old Uncle Dick Whooton had a very interesting life. At age 19, he took a job working on a wagon train, which landed him in Bent’s Fort (Colorado territory), which was the only white settlement on the Santa Fe Trail at that time.
Whooton spent several years trading with the Sioux, Ute, Cheyenne, Arapahoe, and Comanche Indians. A few years later, he led a trapping party across the Rocky Mountains, eventually reaching Vancouver, where they sold their furs, and continued south to California and Arizona. It was a 5,000 mile trip.
In the 1840’s Whooton was a buffalo hunter, a cattle and buffalo rancher, and a scout for the U.S. Military during the Spanish-American War. In 1852, Uncle Dick drove a flock of 9,000 sheep from southern Colorado to California in 107 days to feed hungry gold miners, losing only 100 sheep en-route. In 1856, he operated a freight train between Kansas City and New Mexico, each train consisting of 36 wagons pulled by 5 pair of oxen. The trip in one direction would take 100 days.
Whooton later built one of the first commercial buildings in the frontier town of Denver, Colorado. It was a general store, later to be followed by a hotel and restaurant. He wasn’t very successful at these enterprises, but was there long enough to be one of the signers of the articles of incorporation of the new city of Denver.
Later in life, Uncle Dick came to Trinidad, New Mexico with the permission of the territorial governments of Colorado and New Mexico to build a toll road over the Raton Pass, a critical bottleneck of the Santa Fe Trail. He and his Ute Indian laborers successfully completed the project, as well as a stagecoach stop at his home (where he operated an inn), and he began collecting tolls for people using the new road: $1.50 per wagon, $0.25 per horseman, Indians FREE).
This lasted for about a dozen years, until the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad (AT&SF) bought out Whooton’s right-of-way so that they could construct a rail line through the pass. The AT&SF offered Uncle Dick $50,000, but he settled for one dollar…plus a lifetime railroad pass and small pension for his wife.
The AT&SF later honored Whooton by naming one of their brand new freight locomotives “Uncle Dick”. At the time, it was the largest freight engine in the world.
(I don’t know if it is connected, but the good relationship of Whooton and the AT&SF may have paid dividends down the road. The Enz clan (offshoots of Uncle Dick’s daughter) did quite well with the AT&SF. In fact, my Dad told me that the Enz’s, their relatives and friends, were able to “get by” during the Depression because one of the Enz family members was a big shot at AT&SF headquarters in Los Angeles and was able to dole out patronage jobs at will. Les Enz, my father’s uncle who was a dead ringer for Uncle Dick, enjoyed a very long career with AT&SF, being the engineer on the Santa Fe’s “City of Las Vegas” run from Los Angeles to Vegas for decades.)
The AT&SF tracks through the Raton Pass eventually became less popular than other rail routes, and nowadays the non-toll Interstate 25 runs through Whooton’s old property near Trinidad.
Uncle Dick died in 1893, having outlived 4 of his 5 wives and all but three of his twenty children.
Thanks for the memories, Gramps!