Cobweb Express
More Cow Storys
by Mel McFarland
 After last week, I was urged to retell this one. Traffic on Santa Fe gets a bit crowded now and then, but most of the time Main Street is quiet. There is an exception when the children come to, and leave school, or when the street gets torn up.
In the early days, about a hundred years ago, quite a bit of the traffic was of the two wheeled variety. The popular name for these devices was "wheels", but we call them bicycles. Horses, and sometimes wagons were needed for most transportation, but bicycles were very popular when weather was good. More than one of the stores even used bicycles for delivery of small items. There were even regular races in the area, one of the most popular was from Colorado Springs to Fountain. Some rode their "wheels" home while others bought a dollar railroad ticket home. The railroad sometimes had extra space in the baggage car, reserved for bicycles. Trips as far as Denver and Pueblo were quite normal in the summer.
A truly adventuresome day trip was to go up to Colorado Springs, get on another train up Ute Pass on the Midland, or on the Short Line railroad, up what we now call the Gold Camp Road, and ride down on the bicycle. From the Short Line the ride down the High Drive and North Cheyenne Canyon were the favorites. Picnic lunches helped make it quite a day. A stop in Manitou for mineral water was also popular. The introduction of the automobile saw fewer bicycles, and once the inexpensive automobile came along the sport died down. The old bicyclist would have loved the trail from Palmer Lake to Fountain.
The, there were other sights on the streets of Fountain. In the Fall, even into the 1930's, cattle drives came through Fountain. Before World War One this was a big event as the years cows were brought in to town for shipping. The railroads had large loading pens along the track. You could see long lines of cattle as they were herded along country roads bound for Fountain. The herds were driven right through town. Herds of several hundred cows were driven north on Main Street and on to the streets toward the railroad. There is even one story of children spooking the cows, causing a bit of a stampede that took three days to get all of them back. It must have made for an interesting moment when a herd of cows passed the school house, plus, you'd probably not want to ride your bicycle in the street soon afterwards either.
CONTACT THE WRITER • MCMIDLAND@YAHOO.COM
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