Meeker's First Automobile

“The first automobile to make its appearance in this valley arrived Tuesday evening, the distance between Rifle and Meeker having been covered in three and one-half hours, including stops and one slight breakdown. Mr. W.W. Price and Dr. C.E. Smith were the passengers The machine was given a box stall at Simp Harp’s livery, and ‘Salty’ was on hand with a new fifty-foot rope and a pair of hobbles to secure the thing. All the horses in the barn talked it over that night, and concluded that when the roads were bad it would be the same old thing- double up and get up in the collar. It will not prove as destructible on the range ‘as sheep’.

Meeker is one of the principal cattle markets of this section of the west and cowboys are always riding about its street. When the auto and its passengers came down the main street several of the boys got out their lassoes and tried to put the rope around one of its wheels. After Mr. Price had put it up at Simp Harp’s, a party of the range-riders entered the stable and went through the ceremony of branding it as a maverick. The motor was the first of its kind to go through the Grand River Canyon, and for many miles passed over a highway, which has been blasted out of the solid rock by the state. The road is only wide enough to allow one vehicle to pass, and on either side the walls in some places reach a height of a thousand feet.”

Courtesy of the Meeker Herald