Colorado’s first road trip
By Clay Latimer
The six-day journey from Denver to Victor created a stir all along the Front Range.
Robert Temple had been waiting for this moment from the time he started tinkering with cars. As daylight stretched over Denver on a July day, he climbed into a new car with two friends and started a 150-mile trip to Victor, by way of Colorado Springs and Ute Pass.
After driving south on Broadway through Littleton, the 29-year-old Englishman turned onto a remote country road and followed it past Larkspur, Castle Park and the rural stillness at a moderate speed, reaching the outskirts of Palmer Lake shortly before noon.
That’s when a local farmer looked up, saw a machine that seemed more imagined than real.
“Palmer Lake saw a strange spectacle this noon,” the Denver Post reported. “It was a horseless carriage coming buzzing up the Divide with three people talking animatedly of the dumbfounded conjecture of a surprised farmer who tried to shout but couldn’t get his jaws together.”
The vehicle that rolled across Colorado 113 years ago was hardly more than a wagon with a 12-horsepower engine. But Temple and his passengers—Mr. and Mrs. E.J. Cabler of Denver—drove it into history.
Facing a multi-day journey over uneven roads, with no maps or gasoline stations, in an open motorcar with no windshield, the three adventurers left Union Station on July 21, 1899, and rolled into the mining town of Victor six days later, where the streets were literally paved with low-grade gold ore.
During the days in between, the vehicle passed through dying towns and pine forests, across railroad trestles, along the edge of an unfenced precipice, and over a steep mountain pass—a feat that preceded Henry Ford’s Model T by nearly a decade.
“It is an illustration that the East is not ahead of the West,” the Post opined. “Mr. and Mrs. Cabler undertake the trip to show the automotive experts in Gotham and around the Atlantic Coast, where roads are smooth and level, that a Denver-manufactured automobile can go up a mile or two in the Rocky Mountains without any trouble whatsoever.”
In the early 1890s, the automobile was still a quirky novelty, unreliable and widely scorned. The first U.S. “horseless carriage” had been built only six years earlier and most people in America had never seen one. The first car built in Denver was the Carpenter Electric in 1895, though there is no record of it having been driven in public.
Born and educated in England, Temple moved to Denver in the 1880s, returned to England during World War I to help develop weapons systems, then moved back to Denver in 1927, where he died four years later.
Cabler, a salesman whose territory stretched from Denver to Waco, was involved in the project for business reasons.
“I will now say goodbye to the railroads,” Cabler told the Post before the trip.
Work on the car began on March 17 in Temple’s shop. Using plans drawn up by Cabler, who commissioned the job, Temple acquired a chassis, installed a gasoline motor under the floor of the wagon, and hooked up a three levers: one for slow and one for fast speed, and another for guiding the vehicle.
“The motor is what is technically known as a hydro-carbon motor, with double cylinder,” the Post article said. “Two engines coupled together in order that if one gets broken the operator can rely on the other. Each of the rear wheels ... is driven independently by the agency of a heavy steel chain, the principle being the same as that of a bicycle.”
Top speed was about 25 mph. Final cost was $2,000.
“The style is that of a good heavy road wagon. As Mr. Cabler explained, it was built more for long distance work than for speed,’’ the Post reported.
In the early summer, the car was unveiled for a series of test runs, which attracted fascinated onlookers.
“Up Colfax Avenue by the Capitol it went steadily at a slow speed of 4 miles per hour as the builder claims it can take any hill,” the Post reported. “The wagon is as handsome as it is possible to make a vehicle of that nature. Silver leaf gold, dark red and maroon on the body contrast with the yellow and brown of the solid rubber-tired wheels.”
On the eve of the trip, Temple and Cabler stacked 1,000 pounds of food, clothing and automotive supplies into the back.
After the brief pit stop in Littleton, Temple headed to a trail that paralleled the Denver & Rio Grande railroad, and continued farther beyond the city limits on the rocky terrain. The physical effort needed to shift gears and to steer the heavy wagon would’ve left Temple sore and weary. Even on smooth and level surfaces, it took both hands, both feet and both eyes to move the car down the road.
Mechanical breakdowns were a predictable part of motoring for years: engines overheated, carburetors cracked, spark plugs shorted out, tires burst on the rutted roads of the horse age. And every turn of the wheel kicked up debris that caked their bodies and got into their nostrils despite a wardrobe that included goggles, coat and gloves.
Dust and unreliability were constant traveling companions.
Colorado Springs residents eagerly awaited a glimpse of the vehicle. Once a hardscrabble frontier town, Colorado Springs had blossomed into “a city of millionaires” as a result of the gold strikes in Victor and Cripple Creek. Rows of majestic homes lined new upscale neighborhoods, stylish carriages with leather interiors cruised down gas-lit streets, and broad new avenues seemed to announce the coming of the 20th century. But the first automobile still hadn’t rolled into town.
“If all goes well with the machine,” a story in the Colorado Springs Gazette explained, “E.J. Cabler, accompanied by his wife, will arrive in Colorado Springs this afternoon or tonight.”
Temple and the Cablers didn’t made it to Colorado Springs that night. They ran out of gas and the next day received a canister of fuel to resume their journey. When the car finally chugged into town, they decided to stay an extra day to showcase the car to admirers.
“They gave an exhibition in the streets, which was in every way successful,’’ the Cripple Creek Morning Times reported.
To get to Victor, Temple navigated Ute Pass, an old wagon trail that connected the plains to the mountains. Laying in ambush were large rocks and knife-edged stones. Bumping over them might have meant losing control and plunging over the edge.
A thriving mineral district with 12,000 residents, Victor boasted three railroad lines, two trolleys, 20 doctors, six churches, 12 labor unions and 48 saloons. Assay offices were as commonplace as the wooden storefronts and tent cities that sprung up during the gold rush’s peak.
But for a few hours, the progress of the automobile gripped the town. “A gentleman who arrived this afternoon from Woodland Park reported that the automobile reached Ute Park at 10:30 this morning and was having no difficulty in overcoming the steep grades,’’ according to the Cripple Creek paper.
Before long, the vehicle reached the summit of the steep grade and pulled into one of the richest little towns in America. What happened next isn’t clear. Memories of that day almost immediately began gathering dust.
More a tinkerer than a tycoon, Temple’s car never caught on with the public and he turned to other ventures before the auto industry crept into low gear. E.J. Cable moved to Waco, where he stayed for the rest of his life. And the original Temple? The trio reportedly abandoned it in Victor.
By the turn of the century, there were roughly 20 auto manufacturers in Denver. Between 1904 and 1917, Oliver Fritchle’s company built electric cars at a factory that later became Mammoth Gardens Events Center at East Colfax Avenue and Clarkson Street.
But Temple and the Cablers earned a special niche on the bumpy road to history. Before the first highways, before the birth of suburbia, before the Eisenhower Tunnel — they departed Union Station “just as the sun was climbing over the horizon.”
Clay Latimer is a Denver-based freelance writer and children’s book author.
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