As the town recovers from its annual Mountain Fair with this year’s theme of “Camp Bonedale,” it’s worth noting similarities to another famous gathering in the Rocky Mountains involving vendors, music, dancing, games and merriment.
Carbondale’s celebration was not the first mountain fair in Colorado. That distinction goes to a rendezvous that started in 1825, when hundreds and eventually thousands of people began gathering annually in the Rockies, as recalled in “Tales of the Old West” in the Steamboat Pilot, March 11, 1937:
The scene of the annual rendezvous where the traders, trappers and Indians gathered annually for the great mountain fair was a … shifting point usually along the Green River at some place previously designated. It might shift from Brown’s Hole in Northern Colorado to Jackson’s Hole in Wyoming.
While today we trade U.S. dollars for the wares presented at Mountain Fair, back then trading was the way merchandise changed hands. The “great mountain fair,” which came to be known as the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous, was entirely based upon supplying fur pelts, mainly beaver, to the fashion industry for hats and coats popular at the time.
The rendezvous brought together French Canadian, American and Indigenous fur trappers who came to the native Shoshone, also known as Snake Indian, territory in the central Rockies to meet the fur company buyers who made a profit selling and shipping pelts to the East. Other goods were traded as well, including clothing, saddles, tobacco and whiskey.
But the yearly event wasn’t only about commerce. James Beckwourth, who was born into slavery in Virginia and became a famous mountain man and trapper after he was freed, described the festivities in his autobiography, “The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth”:
Mirth, song, dancing, shooting, trading, running, jumping, singing, racing, target-shooting, yarns, frolic with all sort of extravagances that white men or Indians could invent were freely indulged in. The unpacking of the medicine water contributed not a little to the heightening of our festivities.
Carbondale’s rendezvous features similar activities. The Cantina supplies “the medicine water,” while wood-splitting contests, pie and cake competitions, horseshoes and sometimes tug-of-war give a nod to Colorado’s pioneer past. One fair even featured a self-styled mountain man telling “yarns.”
The Roaring Fork Valley Journal, July 17, 1980:
For those attending the Mountain Fair in Carbondale next weekend who have a yen to hear again some of the West’s most beloved stories, Richard “Old Dad” Morgan will be in attendance to regale audiences with his tall tales. “Pecos Bill,” “Paul Bunyan,” as well as gunfighter, animal and ghost stories are “Old Dad’s” bill of fare.
Native Americans have likewise been represented at our modern Mountain Fair through Indigenous artisans and musicians. For many years, Fred “Lightning Heart” Haberlain opened the fair with an Indigenous inspired blessing. And, of course, the now famous drum circle recalls and connects us to America’s ancestral communities.
The first Carbondale Mountain Fair in 1972 was inspired by a traveling musical event the year before called Chautauqua, an Iroquois name for a lake in New York state where an adult education movement started in the 1870s. Traveling Chautauqua festivals brought music, arts and culture to towns all over America. President Theodore Roosevelt called them “a source of positive strength and refreshment of mind and body … a gathering that is typically American in that it is typical of America at its best.”
Perhaps the biggest correlation between the past Rocky Mountain Rendezvous and present Mountain Fair is the fact that two very disparate communities came together for commerce and amusement. In Carbondale, there were the recent implants from the 1960s hippie culture and the local ranchers who didn’t quite know what to make of them. In the 1800s, the Indigenous trappers and white traders found common ground despite being somewhat confused by each other.
The Steamboat Pilot, March 11, 1937:
The trade with the Indians and the whites was founded on mutual contempt. The Indians regarded furs as a common article, which they derived a little sport in taking. They could not understand why the whites prized them so highly. The whites in turn considered the geegaws, the rings and beads and copper wire, the gaudy cloth and blankets they exchanged for these furs as of little worth … They considered the Indian a fool for accepting these trifles in exchange for the valuable pelts.
By the late 1830s, the west’s beaver population was decimated, forcing the fashion industry to abandon fur and turn to making silk hats. Also, the construction of permanent trading posts throughout the western territory had replaced the need for the annual Rocky Mountain Rendezvous. The last one was held in 1840, having lasted only 15 years.
So, though Carbondale’s Mountain Fair may not have been the first, at 55 years and counting it is the longest-running.
For more Carbondale Mountain Fair history visit carbondalearts.com