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"Made by Toile"? Tourism, Labor, and the Construction of the Colorado Landscape, 1858–1917
Thomas G. Andrews
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.
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| —Raymond Williams, "Ideas of Nature," 1980 |
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| 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 |
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Puzzling over these quandaries, this unknown manual laborer wrote a remarkable series of letters that provide clues to a riddle that historians have yet to solve: How and why did physical work and the people who performed it become increasingly invisible in a modern world constructed, maintained, and creatively destroyed by human labor? This essay attempts to unravel that paradox and its consequences for manual workers such as John Watt. Framed by Watt's letters, it explores how tourists represented labor in the Colorado landscape from the Pike's Peak gold rush of 1858–1859 through the 1910s, using this case study to examine the shifts in political economy, culture, technology, and landscape that together pushed laboring people to the margins of the American scene.2
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| John Watt experienced his marginalization as both material and ideological. When he lifted his eyes from the poor farm to take in the city of Pueblo a few miles to his west, dozens of smokestacks rooted in steel mills and smelters dominated his view. War in Europe was writing a billowing canopy of prosperity onto the skies above the industrial groves of this self-proclaimed Pittsburgh of the West. It was a truism among the region's businessmen and laboring classes alike that smoke meant work.3 For many, it did. But not for John Watt. |
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During the past half century or more, he had earned his living by the sweat of his brow. With hammer, shovel, and pick he had helped to build the Kansas Pacific, the Denver & Rio Grande (D&RG), and the Santa Fe railroads. Watt had made many marks on the landscape. No mere victim or object, it had reciprocated in kind. Watt's work on the land and the land's work on him had dulled his edges, then ground him down. By 1917 his body—and perhaps his mind—had evidently become too feeble for Watt to find or keep a job. The county sought to relieve Watt from the burdens of unemployment and poverty by setting him to work on the county farm. But the old man bristled at institutionalization. John Watt yearned to die as he had lived, a free man. And so he resolved to escape his predicament by placing his last, desperate hope in the only two tools he could still muster with their old force: a vivid memory and a way with words. |
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