The Hotel de Hardscrabble

Before you grumble about the sheets at your next motel, consider the sheets at Squeaky Bob's. When you left, Bob Wheeler turned yours over and dusted them with talcum powder. The next guest left, and he did it again. Once a year he hauled a wagonload to Grand Lake and paid women to scrub them in the lake. That was Robert Wheeler, whose voice had gone high on him as a boy and squeaked whenever he got excited. At the foot of these switchbacks, in Phantom Valley, on the Grand River, he put up what he called the Hotel de Hardscrabble, tent cabins on log walls about three feet high. He started with four tents and added twenty by the end of the season. You got there by horseback or wagon or you didn't get there, and they came anyway. Theodore Roosevelt. Charles Evans Hughes. Otis Skinner. Stephen Mather. One historian calls Bob an immaculate housekeeper, and I'd like a word with that historian. But he could cook, and he could talk. He kept a bulldog named Jack who went up and down a ladder like a fireman, and when young Johnnie Holzwarth allowed he'd teach his own dog tricks like that, Bob set him straight. "You got to know more than a dog, to teach a dog tricks!" "They keep a-coming and a-coming," he complained one evening, "and I can't turn 'em away in this weather." You'd figure the man was rich. Turn that sheet over. A census taker came through in the summer of nineteen ten, writing down the crew of the Grand Ditch, on the mountainside above him, and there was the famous innkeeper, put down as a carpenter and a servant, most likely fixing headgates. Most years he spent half his time off his own place, working for wages. He cooked in Estes Park. He labored there. He took a job at Schnoor's saw mill. And when he went to prove up his homestead, the government came after that too. A homestead was meant to be a farm. Bob claimed a half acre of lettuce, radishes, onions and rhubarb, up around nine thousand feet. A forester named Potter got hold of Bob's own pamphlet, with its wild strawberry shortcake and its prowling mountain lions. He sent it to the land office as evidence the place was a resort, and told them to turn him down. The land office gave Bob his patent anyway. He married Allie, one of his housekeepers. Then a heart condition told him what no forester could. Get down off this mountain. The man who couldn't turn anybody away had to go himself. He sold out and went to Denver. He lost Allie a few years on. He lasted twelve more years, and they laid him beside her. Take a look at this road on a summer day, friend, cars on every switchback, up from the valley and down off the top. They keep a-coming and a-coming.