Gate" and hewed out a good road, which, barring grades, should be as
good as the average turnpike. He expected of course to keep the roads in
good repair at his own expense and succeeded in getting the legislatures
of Colorado and New Mexico to grant him a charter covering the rights
and privileges of his projected toll road or turnpike.

In the spring of 1865 Uncle Tom built him a tolerably pretentious home
on the top of the mountains--the house on one side of the road and the
stables on the other and swung a gate across the road from the house to
the stables. I believe some historians say that Uncle Dick Wooten
continued to live at this place until the year of 1895, the date of his
death. But as to the veracity of this assertion I will not vouch.

The building of this road with great hillsides to cut out, ledges of
rock to blast out and to build dozens of bridges across the mountain
streams, difficult gradings, etc., was no easy task. Neither was it an
easy task to collect toll from all the travelers. People from the states
understood that they must pay toll for the privilege of traveling over a
road that had been built at the cost of time and money, but there were
other people who thought they should be as free to travel over Uncle
Dick's, well-graded roadway as they were to follow the "pig paths"
through the forest.

He had no trouble to collect tolls from the stage company, the military
authorities and American freighters, nor did he experience trouble with
the Indians who pass that way. However, the Indians who did not
understand the matter of toll generally seemed to see the consistency of
reimbursing the man who had made the road, and the chief of a band would
usually think it in order to make him a present of a buckskin or buffalo
hide or something of that sort. The Mexicans, however, held different