Otto Mears and the San Juans

Otto Mears and the San Juans is a short biography by E. F. Tucker, listed at 114 pages in our catalogue. It takes on a problem the description names at once: any biographer of Otto Mears faces an enormous organizational task.

Mears was involved in so many different businesses during his long life. The description lists trading companies, toll roads, railroads, newspapers, mines, retail stores, mills and politics. With that much going on, it is hard to know how to arrange a life story, and the description says Tucker has done a good job telling the story of the enigmatic Mr. Mears. It adds that Mears has been called eccentric, visionary and brilliant, while others called him cunning, greedy and self-serving, and that Tucker shows him as neither saint nor sinner.

Its listed subjects run from transportation and businessmen to frontier and pioneer life. The place is the San Juans, the Colorado mountains where Mears built his roads and railroads. The catalogue year is 2003, and the catalogue publisher is Western Reflections Publishing Company.

This book is for readers of San Juan history who want one man's many ventures gathered in a single short volume. Travelers who have driven the Red Mountain Pass or ridden narrow gauge track may want the story behind the roads and rails. It is biography and business history together, and at 114 pages it is meant to be read through rather than consulted.

E. F. Tucker is the author of this book, his only one in our catalogue, published in 2003. The catalogue record for Tucker gives a birth year of 1933 but nothing more, and we found no published biography of him to cite. His author page has the record.

More about E. F. Tucker →

Otto Mears lived from 1840 to 1931. Wikipedia says he was born in Courland, then part of the Russian Empire and now Latvia, and died in Pasadena, California, at age 91. Other sources differ on his exact birthplace, so treat the town as uncertain. He earned the nickname Pathfinder of the San Juans.

He built hundreds of miles of toll roads in rugged Colorado terrain, the best known being the Million Dollar Highway over Red Mountain Pass, linking Silverton and Ouray. His railroads, mostly narrow gauge, included the Rio Grande Southern, the Silverton Railroad and the Silverton Northern.

In 1873 he helped negotiate a deal with Chief Ouray under which the Utes left the Red Mountains area for a reservation elsewhere in Colorado Territory. He was one of Colorado's presidential electors in 1876 and was elected to the legislature in the 1880s. The Panic of 1893 cost him much of his property and control of his railroad holdings.

Source: Otto Mears (Wikipedia)