Part 545: Thomas G. Moses’ Annual Colorado Sketching Trip, 1906
In 1906, “The Oak Park Leaves” reported, “Thomas G. Moses, the artist, with his wife and daughter Lillian starts next week for Colorado, where he will do a month’s sketching. He will make colored sketches in the Garden of the Gods, Ute Pass, Ruxton’s creek, Cripple Creek, Silver Plume and Georgetown, and expects to get some brilliant studies, as the color in Colorado is said to be as strong as Arizona and New Mexico” (7 July 1906, page 20).
For those unfamiliar with this region of the United States, Garden of the Gods is located in Colorado at the foot of Pike’s Peak, west of Colorado Springs. The area is known for its massive rock formations; they appear to be bursting through the earth’s surface. It is magical to see brilliant orange-red rock against a bright blue sky. My husband and I first drove through the area with our infant daughter Isabelle during the spring of 1998. We even celebrated her first birthday in Colorado Springs. While returning from our trip to USITT in Long Beach, California, we dawdled to Colorado Springs, veering off on unpaved roads to sightsee at every opportunity. Clouds of red dust rise up when the wind sweeps through an area, enhancing the foreign appearance of the rocky outcrops. Garden of the Gods is a sacred place for many people, and has inspired artists for generations. It is the color, the light and the contrast that people want to capture. Driving along the dusty roads, we had to replace the air filter in our car by the time we reached the town with an automotive store, as the small red particles clog everything.
After Moses sketched Garden of the Gods, he continued along Ute Pass, Ruxton’s creek near Manitou, Cripple Creek, Silver Plume and Georgetown. The Ute’s name for the pass was “El Puerto del Sierra Almagre,” which means “Doorway to the Red Earth Mountains.” The buffalo trail along through the pass was initially used to transport salt from Bayou Salade, the salt valley of South Park, to trade in Santa Fe and Taos. By the 1860s, Ute trail became a wagon road to transport people and goods to mining towns, such as Leadville.
The pass skirts along the north side of Pikes Peak through Fountain Creek canyon. West of Manitou Springs, the pass climbs 3,000 feet to its summit in Divide, reaching 9,165 feet. Starting in 1888, the Colorado Midland Railway ran tracks through Ute Pass to reach the mining communities in Leadville, Aspen, and Cripple Creek. As Moses and his family toured the area, they stopped at Ruxon’s Creek, Cripple Creek, Silver Plume and Georgetown.
Of the trip, Moses wrote, “I got my annual sketching trip to Colorado with my big sketching trunk, made especially for this work, and it is very successful. Ella, Lillian and Miss Adair went with me. All details will be found in “Colorado Trip of 1906” which proved to be a fine trip.” I have been unable to locate any of Moses’ travelogues, only those published in Palete & Chisel club newsletters and Oak Park newspapers.
Moses’s first sketching trip to Colorado was in 1884 (see past installments #192-197). He published his adventure in the Palette & Chisel newsletter during 1928. His articles were called “Tom Moses’ Trips” with the first one about his trip to Breckenridge, Colorado, in 1884. That year, Moses accepted quite a bit of “night work” to fund the trip. He wrote, “John H. Young, Edward Morange, Hardesty Maratta and myself talked and planned for over a year regarding a trip to the mountains of Colorado. In our every day work of Scenic Painting we were called upon to paint all kinds of mountain scenes, and, as we had never seen a real mountain, we had to rely upon photographs or magazine cuts for our ideas. So we were, naturally, anxious to see the wonderful piles of rock and earth.”
At the time he was twenty-eight years old and had never visited the mountains before. The ages of his traveling companions were Young (26 yrs.), Morange (19 yrs.), and Maratta (20 yrs.).
Moses wrote of their first glimpse of the Rockies, “We were all up and dressed before six o’clock. We discovered a bright golden and pink object on the horizon away to the northwest. The porter informed us with a hearty laugh at our ignorance, that that was the snowcapped Pike’s Peak, one hundred and twenty-five miles away. We thought he was joking; it was simply wonderful and resembled a dish of strawberry ice-cream. The day was bright and hot, but we kept our eyes on that ice-cream… As we drew nearer to the foothills the outlook became more interesting; the ice-cream cone was becoming more blue, and the richer blues and purples were creeping in between the great opalescent distance and the golden brown of our foreground, framing a picture that was far beyond our wildest dreams of what was in store for us. We sat at the window or stood on the platform every moment we could, afraid that we would miss some of it.” As the group headed to Royal Gorge, Moses recorded, “The wonderful rock formation was beyond our wildest imagination. While we had seen many photos and magazine cuts of this exact spot, we were very much surprised by the color.” For the remainder of his life, the mountains would beckon to Moses and he would continue to paint them whenever he could.
To be continued…
