Bill's Views on Most Everything

Horse Drawn Wagon

Pearl Pass

It is 1887 in North Texas and Lee Willits’ ranch is not doing well.  Lee applied and got a job as a ranch foreman in Colorado.  The next thing was to make the move.  With all the ranch equipment and a horse herd, he decided to travel with wagons.  His daughter Pearl drove one of the wagons.

They travelled from Texas into New Mexico, then north into Southern Colorado and Taylor Park, where Crested Butte is located.  The task then was to get over the Elk Mountains to Aspen and down the Roaring Fork River to El Jebel Ranch north of Basalt.

The wagon road from Taylor Park to Aspen went over Pearl Pass.  At 12,700 feet high, it was steep, narrow, and rocky.  They traveled the road with more than one wagon, the horse herd, and probably with Lee on his horse.  It is a shelf road, with the mountain rising on one side of the road and a steep drop-off into a canyon on the other.  The road sloped to the outside, and was only wide enough for one wagon.  The Willits family was not familiar with mountain roads and misjudged how long it would take to get over the pass to Ashcroft, today a ghost town outside Aspen.  They got in at 11:00 PM.

Pearl drove her wagon down that mountain road in the dark.  She was a tough kid, though, at twelve years old.  She must have been terrified, as she told that story the rest of her life.  The family settled down and Lee did well, acquiring land of his own and working it as well as the big El Jebel ranch.  Pearl, her two sisters and a brother went to Basalt schools.

As Basalt was near Aspen, an important mining town, it was served by two railroads.  A spur of the Denver and Rio Grande Western came up the Roaring Fork from Glenwood Springs; and the Colorado Midland came over the Continental Divide from Leadville via Hagerman Pass, again over 12,000 feet high.  One of the railroaders on the Midland was William Shanks, my grandfather.

Will was a conductor on the Midland, assigned his own red caboose, and in charge of the train.  He lived in Leadville, a division point on the Midland.  In the morning his train went west past Turquoise Lake, over the pass, and down the scenic Frying Pan River Valley to Basalt.  At that point, another crew took the train on to Grand Junction.  Will laid over in Basalt and took another train to Leadville the next day.

There he was in Basalt two or three nights a week, and he met Pearl, by that time a mountain girl in her own right.  After a courtship they married and she lived in Leadville with Will. They had three children; all born at the ranch in Basalt, as it was much safer having babies at 6500 feet in Basalt rather than over 10,000 feet elevation in Leadville in the days before antibiotics.  The middle of the three children was Rollin, my father.