William Currence, known as Miner Bill, fences off a stretch of the old Fall River Road and starts charging motorists to use it. The Park Service objects, for years. Boone tells a funny and finally rueful tale of a stubborn man and what he left behind on the mountain.
You paid your way into this park at the gate. In nineteen twenty, on the old Fall River Road just north of this ridge, you might have paid again, to a man with a fence. William Currence, Miner Bill, had claims up there and two cabins by the road, Snowshoe and Hackmandy, the Snowshoe eight-sided, with a flat rock on its peak. Some of those claims turned out to be void. The government ejected him for building on federal land. He was back by September. Then he was arrested for fencing off a stretch of road and charging motorists to camp and to use it. A deputy marshal took him to Fort Collins, then Denver, and what came of all that law? A deal. He could come home if he kept to his two upper claims. "He only had squatters rights," said Ranger Jack Moomaw, "but he defied the National Park Service and got away with it," clear to the end of his days. Not quite, and I wish it was. In time, as one man remembered it, the people of Estes Park decided he'd grown too eccentric and sent him to the mental institution in Pueblo. He found it better than anything he'd known in years. When they brought him to Estes Park for a hearing, what he feared was that they wouldn't let him return to Pueblo. They let him. As near as anybody can tell, he ended his days there. He wasn't much of a miner. An assay rated his ore at two dollars a ton. What he could do was lay a retaining wall, and he likely spent more time on his walls than digging for gold. His low walls are still out there on the old road, out of sight from here. The government got its road back, and Bill's still holding up that hill.
Photo: Brian C. Grogan, Historic American Engineering Record, Library of Congress (HAER CO-73, photo 12) · Public domain (U.S. government work, no known restrictions)