Email this article

Mancos, Colorado

A small Colorado town bucks myths and stereotypes of the Old West

By Amy Maestas

Found in: | Outside | Our Towns | Where to Go |

"It's odd. But [Mancos] is a very eclectic town. You can meet so many types of people here. "

- Mancos mayor Greg Rath

Around Town

The Bauer building was built in 1905 and is on the Colorado Historical Register. It is the only remaining evidence of Mancos’ efforts in the early 20th century to defy the Rio Grande Southern Railroad by constructing substantial commercial buildings southeast of the railroad’s siding.

A SPIN THROUGH TOWN
In spite of Mancos' struggling business economy, this small town that sits in the shadows of the ancient Mesa Verde and the La Plata Mountains, has businesses and historic buildings that are worthy of visits. In fact, if you do a walking tour of the town, you can see about 18 structures still standing today and learn about the town's history.
For nearly 30 years, the Millwood Junction has been a mainstay in dining. The rustic wood-centric restaurant has a large character to complement its savory food (which, surprisingly, has been touted as having some of the best seafood in the area). Occasionally, the Millwood hosts concerts of national singer-songwriters, among the most frequent and faithful being Patty Larkin.
Absolute Bakery is a combined diner and used bookstore - a useful and successful combination. It's a local's hangout for hearty breakfasts and lunches, yummy homemade granola and a stiff cup of coffee. It also is a place to see area artists' work. The walls always showcase pieces that are original, reasonably priced and meaningful. For an entertainment and education, browse longtime resident J. Lester Goff's written history. A copy sits in the bakery's windowsill. Goff's stories are classic: tales of the conscientious objectors who came to Mancos in the 1940s to clear Jackson Gulch to build a dam; who drank how much and what; or who was pilfering gold from the mines during the nighttime.
The Mancos Valley Art Co-Op is a collection of artists from the area who display and sell their art. Bonnie Bryant, one of the artists, says the Co-Op gets most of its business during the summer, when tourist season is high and they get the spillover from Mesa Verde. The Co-Op is in the corner space of the old Bauer Bank building, built in 1905. About 10 years ago, Mancos resident Charlie Mitchell renovated the building, uncovering and restoring much of the original architecture inside, in which remains an huge, old, heavy money vault and outside, which includes the once-popular combination of brick and sandstone. The Bauer Bank Block, as it is known, is on the state's list of historic places. George Bauer built it in an act of defiance against the Rio Grande Southern Railroad to create a commercial area on the southeast side of the railroad. Bauer's homestead sits just a block-and-a-half away. The bed and breakfast is a Victorian-era mansion that retains much of the flavor and style of one of the wealthiest men in Southwest Colorado during his time.
Nathaniel's of Colorado is owned by Nathaniel Funmaker (who, along with his wife, also owns The Tin Ceiling clothing store). Funmaker is one of only about 40 hatters in the United States. “It's a dying art,” Funmakers says. A resident of Southwest Colorado for 20 years, Funmaker learned the skill from Perry Lewis, a former Mancos hatter. He has a store front where patrons can buy hats or place orders. But mostly Funmaker's business is by word of mouth and sales at rodeos and cowboy poetry gatherings. He has clients worldwide, many of them repeat customers who value Funmaker's impeccable work and passion for being a hatter. Almost each piece of equipment in his shop is an antique, dating to the late 1890s and early 1900s. “It's old because they don't make hat-making equipment anymore. Everything is done in manufactures in mass quantity, not by hand. So I have to use old equipment. And I have to fix it myself too.” - Amy Maestas

Neighborly With Polygamists?

Mancos’ prevailing feeling about minding your own business was tested a few years ago. For a small town, national media attention — positive or negative — makes a big splash. Even more so when a famous author, Jon Krakauer, starts writing about it.
A polygamist sect purchased a couple of pieces of property north of town. Warren Jeffs, the wacky and tyrannical leader of the sect from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, reportedly dispatched one of his followers to Mancos to purchase two 60-acre parcels — combined totaling nearly $1.4 million. The sect bought the land in two different sales — one in 2003 and another in 2004. But by the time the second real-estate transaction took place, word had spread in Mancos and beyond that polygamists were coming to town. From the beginning, Jeffs’ business agent told county officials that he planned to use the land for a hunting retreat. But he had used that front before in a tiny Texas town. And once word got to Mancos, no one there was buying it.
The possibility of one of Jeffs’ outlaw sects making permanent its home in Mancos was more than trifling news to many of the town’s residents. On the one hand, residents said, anyone can buy a piece of property and do with it whatever he or she wishes — as long as it’s legal. That philosophy falls in line with Mancos’ “live-and-let-live” attitude. The land here is rural and people are typically left to their own devices. On the other hand, a polygamist enclave hardly falls in with that line of thinking. Most residents went on record as opponents of the illegal activity, especially given that these polygamists prey on minors, most often young women who are forced to marry adult men who quickly assume control over them. Child brides were not something the Mancos community wanted to be even remotely associated with.
Krakauer visited Mancos extensively to research and write about the polygamists. Since the release of his book Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith was released in 2003 — the same year the sect bought its first piece of land — Krakauer has continued to follow the polygamist communities, Jeffs in particular. He flew over the polygamist compound and described the property as having been built up with large dormitory-like homes and barns. His feelings about the polygamists and Jeffs in particular sent a chill up the Mancos community’s collective spine.
“Religious tolerance is good, and I am religiously tolerant,” he told the Cortez Journal in 2004, “but this is a really scary group. It’s (as if) the Taliban has just moved into Mancos.”
Much of the talk about polygamist sect has died down in Mancos — partly because Jeffs was arrested last year and is in jail awaiting trial. People here are hopeful that the polygamists won’t make the area its next major outlaw community, though many concede that given the sect’s furtive nature and the area’s rural makeup, it would be difficult to know what’s taking place on the property. — Amy Maestas

A half block off Grand Avenue sits Mancos' Town Hall. Official town business takes place there. But a half block in the other direction sits Absolute Bakery, where unofficial business takes place. While sipping coffee and eating the bakery's good food, Mancos residents hold the occasional town court. They catch up on gossip, weigh in on issues of the day and vent about what's bugging them. That's the morning informal town court. Midday it might be going on at P&D Grocery. At nightfall, it's at the Columbine Bar. It's typical behavior in a town with fewer than 2,000 residents - especially in a place where the majority of its residents live on rural parcels, and the few in-town businesses are often the only places to catch up on the scuttlebutt.

In many ways, Mancos isn't much different than other towns its size in the Four Corners. It's still a rough-and-tumble town of the Old West, though many here lament that characteristic is rapidly disappearing. Cattle and sheep drives through the middle of town still are predictable as the changing seasons, which is when they happen. The agricultural community comes and goes to gather tack and feed supplies for its ranches.

State Highway 160 passes through town, taking tourists to and from Durango or Cortez - the bigger towns that have the tourist traps and seasonal economies. Because Mancos sits in the middle of the two, tourists (and even skiers on their way to Telluride) tend to blow right through the controversial stoplight at the intersection of highways 160 and 184. If Mancos is lucky, some of the tourists veer to the left or right and stop for a brief while to patronize one of the town's few businesses that largely cater to locals or regional residents. There are a couple of historic inns, a few restaurants, an artist's co-op, a bar, a clothing store and a trinket shop here or there. And there's the town's newspaper, the Mancos Times, which is the oldest publishing newspaper in Colorado.

Minus the cast-off visitors to Mesa Verde or the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad, Mancos is often hauntingly quiet in the middle of the day. Speeding down Grand Avenue catches someone's attention. Today's residents don't like the dust-up - only a few of Mancos' roads are actually paved - any more than they did 100 years ago. Even a roaming journalist taking pictures at high noon causes some to do double-takes and others to ask if "everything is OK" or if they can help.

And like other Western towns, Mancos is on the cusp of enduring what could be a decades-long influx of people leaving metropolises and suburbia in their rear-view mirrors in the quest for a quieter, slower pace of life in Colorado's inimitable mountains. Mancos Mayor Greg Rath says the town is bracing for several development projects - two subdivisions that may add as many as 130 homes and one as many as 20 townhomes. For some communities, Rath says that doesn't seem like a lot of development. But in Mancos, "it's huge," he says. In recent years, Mancos has become a bedroom community to Durango. People move here to escape the nonstop development and increasing housing costs; Mancos is far more affordable than its trendier neighbor to the east. When the number of real estate agents in town grew from one to three in a matter of a half-decade, Mancos residents took notice.

"I'm watching the Western theme sadly disappear," says artist Bonnie Bryant, a resident since 1992. "I hate to see the West go away."

Her sentiments aren't isolated. New resident John Peters-Campbell, who until recently lived in McElmo Canyon outside Cortez, says Mancos' political life remains lively because of the struggle between those who want the town to be economically stable and self-sustaining and those who want everyone to leave it the hell alone.

"There are people who want to preserve it and want it to be a Wild West museum, and there are people who want to develop it," says Peters-Campbell.

Bryant, who moved from here from Louisville, Ky., when her car broke down atop Mancos Hill, says it takes a lot of will to live in Mancos. "I just had it in me to be here. I was looking for some sort of way out of Louisville. I had no clue what Mesa Verde even was. So when I broke down where I did, I saw it as a destiny." The economy is sluggish - depressed even - and businesses can easily buckle under a fickle tourist market.

"That's the hardest part," Bryant explains. "I was able to find a way to make it happen, but some people can't."

Peters-Campbell says it's not for lack of trying. "It's a town with a lot of aspirations but not enough of a population base."

Nathaniel Funmaker, a hatter who has a worldwide clientele for his custom hand-made hats, says it's a "dog-and-pony show" style of doing business that helps owners succeed. You have to be able to take on every aspect of your business.

But for all of its pastoral appeal, affordability and old West marketability, Mancos is a sociological study of opposites. What you might think you'll see in Mancos isn't always what you'll get. And forgive the tautology of the statement, but what you don't think you'll see is what you get instead.

BUCKING THE STRUCTURE

For most who hold onto stereotypes, it makes sense to believe that Mancos' Western history would product a homogeneous society - a place where if you don't fit the label, you aren't welcome. In fact, says Rath, Mancos is one of the more diverse places in the region. It's the one aspect of the town that its residents say people wouldn't expect.

"The population is just a huge variety of people," explains Peters-Campbell. "You have your outdoor education companies, people who live in yurts; you have the big trophy homes and mini-ranches, the hand-to-mouth homesteaders. And all of them have an intense kind of loyalty to the town."

Rath agrees. "It's odd. But it's a very eclectic town. You can meet so many types of people here."

When Rath passed through Mancos 13 years ago on his way to visit his parents in McElmo Canyon, Mancos had a familiar feel to him. He had grown up on a cattle ranch in Cedaredge, Colo., outside Delta, about four hours north of Mancos. So when he was living in St. Louis, the possibility of moving from a city to a tiny, out-of-the-way town held little, if any, appeal.

"I came kicking and screaming," Rath says.

He and his partner, Dean Woods, bought the Old Mancos Inn, a quaint but historic hotel that today houses rooms, a restaurant, hair salon and framing shop. Rath's intentions were to be a business owner, not a mayor who so far has been in office for seven years. At the time he ran for an elected position, Rath says Mancos' dynamic was beginning to change and he believed in offering a "guiding hand to protect it."

The fact that Rath was elected mayor is not remarkable. But the fact that Mancos residents elected an openly gay mayor is. Outsiders may look at Mancos as a time capsule in which political and social progress moves at a snail's pace, where the longtime residents would not greet, or even elect, a gay or lesbian official. That they would be closed-minded to a progressive culture. After all, the image of the Old West is one of ruggedness, rigid gender roles and a cowboy-version of Ozzy and Harriet.

But therein lies the irony, says Rath.

"Out West, the idea has always been that you stay on your side of the fence and I'll stay on my side of the fence and we'll get along fine," he says.

In other words, mind your own damn business and leave me alone. If you oblige me that, I'll return the favor.

"Many of the old-timers have been my biggest supporters," Rath says. "It's the newcomers I sometimes have problems with or who aren't supportive. They are the more conservative people who move from big cities or states and aren't as progressive as you'd assume."

The fact that Mancos has a comparatively large gay and lesbian population indicates just how much and how often stereotypes in Mancos are shattered. In a few months, Rath is leaving his post as mayor before his term expires. He and his partner are returning to St. Louis, because they miss the big-city amenities. In his place will be an openly lesbian mayor. But Rath is certain that her leadership will be like his - lacking controversy. At least when it comes to sexual orientation.

LOYALTY REMAINS

For as diverse a community as Mancos is, residents often agree that it shatters small-town myths about being unified - a collective soul, if you will. "It's not always harmonious," Peters-Campbell says.

"I think sometimes people envision it as a 'Steel Magnolias' type of a place where we all get together and dye Easter Eggs. It's not. It's fragmented. And I think it's that way because of the diversity. There are a lot of different groups and each one wants control."

But it's unfair to characterize Mancos entirely as a divisive town that had historical significance but contemporarily exists as happenstance. Among the morning chatter at Absolute or over a beer at the Columbine, residents share the opinion that even with different visions, most people living and doing business here want something more for themselves and for its visitors. One woman who was apprehensive about being identified said ego and politics are masking the underlying commonality among residents - that Mancos residents know success and sustainability rest squarely on their own shoulders. After all, historically the town was a primary commercial trading center for Montezuma County.

"There's a kind of intense loyalty to this place," Peters-Campbell says.

Amy Maestas is a contributing editor of Inside/Outside Southwest magazine.