Estes Park in 1873 had only two settler families and no surveyed land

Evidence

The only settlers in the park are Griffith Evans, and a married man a mile higher up. “Mountain Jim’s” cabin is in the entrance gulch, four miles off, and there is not another cabin for eighteen miles toward the Plains. … The park is unsurveyed, and the huge tract of mountainous country beyond is almost altogether unexplored. Elk hunters occasionally come up and camp out here; but the two settlers, who, however, are only squatters, for various reasons are not disposed to encourage such visitors. When Evans, who is a very successful hunter, came here, he came on foot, and for some time after settling here he carried the flour and necessaries required by his family on his back over the mountains. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 282

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: whether Estes Park’s squatter status and total isolation shaped the later homesteading/land-grab history of Rocky Mountain National Park.
• XREF: The near-total isolation (one cabin for eighteen miles) parallels the frontier-solitude motifs in ‘A Lady’s Life’ as a whole and echoes the remote-resource dynamics in ‘A Midwife’s Tale’.