Uncle Dick's Toll Road

by Clay Coppedge

The Goodnight-Loving Trail wasn't the longest, oldest or most heavily traveled of all the old cattle trails, but it was as drenched in legend and lore as any of them. For one thing, the trail's namesakes and their trail provided the main characters and setting for Larry McMurtry's classic "Lonesome Dove."

Named for pioneer Panhandle rancher Charles Goodnight and his best friend and partner in commerce, Oliver Loving, the train ran from Young County to the fable Horsehead Crossing on the Pecos River and north to Colorado.

Horsehead Crossing had long been a popular crossing spot for Comanche and Kiowa raiders on their way back to the Llano Estacado from pillaging and plundering forays into Mexico. The crossing was one of the few places where a cattle drive could cross the river, but the salty water of the Pecos poisoned many a horse, cow and mule. The name comes from the horse heads impaled atop mesquite trees near the crossing. Travelers and cowboys viewed such a sight (and site) as an ominous foreboding.

Loving blazed the northern extension of the trail in 1866, across the well-watered valleys of northeastern New Mexico before encountering the rugged Raton Pass. This is where Goodnight and Loving first encountered Uncle Dick Wootton, every bit as legendary a character as Goodnight.

Richens Lacey Wootton
"Uncle Dick" Wootton
Wikimedia Commons

Raton Pass was the only known route through the rugged Sangre de Cristo Mountains, but the pass was so narrow and rugged that travelers often took their chances on the arid plains of Kansas and Oklahoma, where the total lack of cover made them easy targets for Comanches and outlaws.

Wootton, a former mountain man, scout and explorer, determined that Raton was the only way through the mountains, so he secured a charter from the legislatures of New Mexico and Colorado to build a toll road through a pass between the two territories. Using Ute labor, Wootton dramatically altered the geography of the pass to build a 27-mile road that made the pass much easier to navigate. He built a road house at the site, which provided another license to print money. People claimed that he hauled barrels full of silver dollars to Trinidad for safe keeping, and there is little reason to doubt it.

When a Colorado commissioner's court deemed Wootton's toll too high, he complied with the court's wishes but raised rates on the New Mexico end to make up the difference.

J. Evetts Haley, in his classic biography of Goodnight, describes Wootton as "sly, crafty and self-sufficient, as wise in the ways of the Rockies as any Ute Indian…he ranks next to (Kit) Carson as a scout and frontiersman."

Uncle Dick, Haley noted, presided over his camp with "philosophic prudence."

And so, when Goodnight and Loving and their herd of Longhorns reached Raton Pass Goodnight and Wootton, two men not knowing for backing down, had a meeting of the minds.

Wootton wanted 10 cents apiece for every cow that used his toll road, a price that Goodnight compared, in his usual profane way, to highway robbery. Goodnight fumed that he would find another pass through the mountains, which tickled the old mountain man, who assured him there wasn't one. Goodnight paid up, but he considered the matter far from settled.

Goodnight later trailed a course some 50 miles to the east of Loving's route and forged a route through the Sangre De Cristos at Trinchera Pass. Other benefits aside, no one charged a toll on this portion of the trail.

Wootton was stubborn but he wasn't stupid. He knew he had erred, and he tried to make it up to Goodnight by offering to let his cattle pass through free of charge. He knew that other outfits followed where Goodnight led, but Goodnight took his cattle through Trinchera Pass and hundreds of other outfits followed suit.

Uncle Dick kept his toll road until 1879, when the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad bought the right of way. People might have expected him to protest or hold out, but he did no such thing. He saw the future, and it was a railroad, not a toll road.

"I just got out of the way of that locomotive," he said.

Wootton moved to Trinidad after he closed his toll road, and died there in 1893 at the age of 77. Goodnight remained his legendary self until he died in 1929 at age 93.

© Clay Coppedge
"Letters from Central Texas" May 2, 2016 column
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