"Made by Toile"? Tourism, Labor, and the Construction of the Colorado Landscape, 1858-1917

Abstract

Once we begin to speak of men mixing their labour with the earth, we are in a whole world of new relations between man and nature, and to separate natural history from social history becomes extremely problematic. —Raymond Williams, “Ideas of Nature,” 1980 It takes work to erase labor from a landscape. John Watt knew this cruel irony not only in the synapses of his mind but also in the sinews of his body. Bent and almost broken, struggling to avoid the ignominy of a pauper's death, the old man contemplated the past from his quarters on the Pueblo County, Colorado, poor farm in the late winter of 1917. The frontier to which Watt had ventured as a young railroad builder some forty—seven years earlier had become a modern place rife with modern contradictions. At once a paragon of natural splendor, a major battleground between labor and capital, and an epicenter of mineral-intensive industrialization, Colorado expressed in microcosm the emerging contradictions between forces whose power stretched far beyond the mountains and plains. Looking back on a life forged by and amid those tensions, Watt struggled to figure out how and why he had disappeared from both the history he had helped make and the landscapes his toil had helped construct.1