When this conversation was over and Barnum had paid for all the "smallpox damage" he said, "Now, Hopkins, figure up what our company owes you; I want to pay it, too." "No," said Hopkins, "I haven't time now, I always make out my bills the first of the month." "Well," said Barnum, "you figure our bill up right now and do not include dinner for any of us, for we are leaving you right now, and will never bring a customer to this house again and never come here to get a passenger nor any one's baggage. In fact, our teams will never come down the hill again to this house, we're quittin'."
The smallpox had left old Barnum pretty weak physically, but had evidently not weakened his will. He left Hopkins in the office figuring up his account and he jumped a-straddle of a bare-backed mule and went up on the hill and rented the new 40-room house, "The Bravadere," and sub-rented enough rooms to pay the expenses of his company. He also got a porter, bus and team and sent to the landing to meet every steam boat to carry passengers and their baggage free of charge to his "new hotel" on the hill. This new hotel got to be all the rage, and the old levee hotel in the bottoms was doomed to be a "thing of the past." The old Gillis hotel on the levee was bought in by the Peet Soap Factory. The old "Bravadere" still stands in Kansas City, but boasts a new brick front.
[Illustration: "UNCLE" DICK WOOTEN.]
CHAPTER XVI.
Uncle Dick Wooten Erects a Toll Gate. Major Pendelton Carries Cash in
Coach to Pay Troops.
In August of 1864 the scenery along the route from Kansas City, Missouri, to Santa Fe, New Mexico, was grand. Kansas City at that time was a very small place. Its inhabitants may have numbered two or three thousand. Santa Fe with its narrow streets looking like alleys was built mostly of doby (mud bricks). Crowded up against the mountains, at the end of a little valley, through which runs a tributary to the Rio Grande, boasted of healthful climate. Santa Fe had a public square in the center, a house known as "the Palace." There were numerous gambling houses there and these gambling houses were considered as respectable as the merchants' store houses. The business of the place was considerable, many of the merchants being wholesale dealers for the vast territory tributary. In the money market there were no pennies,—nothing less than five-cent pieces. The old palace about which I have called your attention is an old land mark of Santa Fe and is to Santa Fe what "The Alamo" is to Texas. The postoffice at that time was a small building, 14x24, with a partition in the center. It was one-story with a dirt roof, as were all the houses of that old Spanish city at the time my narrative opens.
On my first trip from Santa Fe to Kansas City in 1864 there was little to note except that when I got up on the Raton mountain about thirty miles from Trinidad, Colorado, Uncle Dick Wooten had a large force of Mexicans building a toll road. Originally the road was almost impassable. Saddle horses and pack mules could get over the narrow rock-ribbed pass and around what was known as the "devil's gate," but it was next to impossible for the stages and other caravans to get to Trinidad. This was the natural highway to southwestern Colorado and northwestern New Mexico. Uncle Dick was a man of considerable forethought and it occurred to him that he might make some money if he bought a few pounds of dynamite and blasted the rock at "the Devil's Gate" and hewed out a good road, which, barring grades, should be as good as the average turnpike. He expected of course to keep the roads in good repair at his own expense and succeeded in getting the legislatures of Colorado and New Mexico to grant him a charter covering the rights and privileges of his projected toll road or turnpike.
In the spring of 1865 Uncle Tom built him a tolerably pretentious home on the top of the mountains—the house on one side of the road and the stables on the other and swung a gate across the road from the house to the stables. I believe some historians say that Uncle Dick Wooten continued to live at this place until the year of 1895, the date of his death. But as to the veracity of this assertion I will not vouch.
The building of this road with great hillsides to cut out, ledges of rock to blast out and to build dozens of bridges across the mountain streams, difficult gradings, etc., was no easy task. Neither was it an easy task to collect toll from all the travelers. People from the states understood that they must pay toll for the privilege of traveling over a road that had been built at the cost of time and money, but there were other people who thought they should be as free to travel over Uncle Dick's, well-graded roadway as they were to follow the "pig paths" through the forest.
He had no trouble to collect tolls from the stage company, the military authorities and American freighters, nor did he experience trouble with the Indians who pass that way. However, the Indians who did not understand the matter of toll generally seemed to see the consistency of reimbursing the man who had made the road, and the chief of a band would usually think it in order to make him a present of a buckskin or buffalo hide or something of that sort. The Mexicans, however, held different views. They were of course pleased with the road and liked to travel over it, but that toll gate was as "a dash of cold water in their faces." They called it Dick Wooten's highway robbery scheme.