Uncle Dick Wootton
"Uncle Dick" Wootton: Frontiersman
ITCHING for adventure, Richens Lacy Wootton left his home in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, in 1836, and headed west. He hired on as a muleskinner to drive a wagon of supplies into a land that was still largely unknown to most Americans. Over the course of his life, Wootton trapped beaver, hunted buffalo, and fought Indians. He was a guide, a rancher, a farmer, and a storekeeper, and at the end of his life, he
operated a toll road. But on this spring day, at the age of twenty, Wootton knew little of what lay ahead. He never returned to the home of his youth, and he never saw his family again.
With the Bents
Once in the West, Wootton found work as a hunter for William Bent at Bent's Fort on the Arkansas River. He also drove a supply train into the northern territories for Bent to trade with the Sioux Indians. The wagons were loaded with blankets, beads, trinkets, hunting knives, guns, gunpowder, and bullets. They also carried coffee, sugar, and flour. All these things he traded for buffalo hides, buckskins, and ponies.
Roaming the Rockies
Two years after he arrived at Bent's Fort, Wootton joined nineteen other men who intended to trap beaver throughout the Rocky Mountains. He was now a full-fledged mountain man, setting traps in the mountains of what would become the states of Oregon, California, Arizona, and New
Mexico. The men were gone two long years, and returned to bad news. They learned that beaver pelts, used to make top hats, were being replaced by silk. The demand for fur was no longer great, and the price dropped too low to make a good living at this trade.
From Beaver to Buffalo
For the next several years, Wootton worked to provide meat for Bent's Fort. Mostly, he hunted buffaloes, since so many of these animals roamed the plains. Sometimes he would bring in as many as thirty buffaloes in one day. He even decided to raise buffalo to sell, but decided that the scheme wasn't such a good idea. It was just as easy to go out and shoot a buffalo as it was to buy one from Wootton's ranch. In the end, he sold his buffalo to a showman in New York, and some were even put in the Central Park Zoo.
On the Ranch
In 1853, Wootton moved his family from Taos, New Mexico, to a settlement near Pueblo on the Arkansas River. He built his new home as a stockade to protect against the local Ute Indians. A large house, blacksmith shop, wagon shed, and trading room surrounded an open square, or placita. Pointed pickets surrounded the outside of the house. On Christmas day in 1854, Utes attacked local residents. Many people in the
area fled to safer areas, but Wootton's wife was about to give birth, so they stayed. After she died in childbirth, though, Wootton realized how dangerous the area was, and he took his children to live with their grandparents in Taos.
Hauling Supplies
After giving up the ranch, Wootton found new employment by hauling supplies once more. He first hired out his services to the government,
delivering goods from Kansas City to New Mexico and to Fort Union. In 1858, he loaded his new family, along with trade goods, onto a wagon. He headed to Kentucky to visit his family, but stopped on the way in Denver City and Auraria. It was Christmas of 1858, and Wootton felt
generous. He broke open two barrels of "Taos Lightning" whiskey, and offered it free to any takers. By the end of the evening, he was so popular with the locals he had earned the nickname, "Uncle Dick." The people of the town talked him into staying and he opening a general store.
Wootton and his family lived in Denver until 1861. The first meeting for Colorado to become a state was even held in the second story of his store.
The Gatekeeper
Later in life, Dick Wootton moved to Trinidad, Colorado, and built a toll road over Raton Pass. It was April of 1865 when he opened the twenty-seven mile road from Trinidad to Willow Springs, New Mexico. He charged everyone except Indians and law officers to go over the pass at Raton, and made a very good living at it. In fact, the Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe Railway offered him $50,000 to buy the road in 1878, but he turned them down. Instead, he asked that the railroad give his wife groceries and a pass to ride the train for life. They agreed
and signed the deal with a handshake.
Retirement
Wootton spent his last years watching the steam engines from the veranda of his home. Over his life he had had four wives and twenty children. He had seen the disappearance of the mountain man's lifestyle, the removal of the Indians, the demise of the buffalo, the coming of the
railroad, and the growth of cities in the West. When he died at the age of seventy-seven in 1893, his wife was thirty-eight years old. True to their word, the Santa Fe Railroad officials took good care of her. They made sure she had groceries and a free ride on the train whenever she wanted until her death forty-two years later. They even found one of Wootton's daughters who was an invalid and paid for her care until her
death in 1957. Dick Wootton's adventuresome and unpredictable life concluded remarkably well.
BY ALTA ANN WEST, Colorado Historical Society
Further reading:
David F. Halaas. "'Uncle Dick' Wootton,"
Colorado History NOW, January 2000.
Colorado Historical Society. Colorado Families:
A Territorial Heritage, 1981.
Wootton, Richens. As told to Howard Louis
Conard. Uncle Dick Wootton: The Pioneer
Frontiersman of the Rocky Mountains, 1957.
Wooten Family Website
