# John Brisben Walker

John Brisben Walker (September 10, 1847 – July 7, 1931) was a magazine publisher and automobile entrepreneur in the United States. In his later years, he was a resident of Jefferson County, Colorado.

## Biography

Walker was born on September 10, 1847, at his parents' country house on the Monongahela River, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. On that river his grandfather owned a shipyard reputed to be where the keel boat used by the Lewis and Clark expedition was built, although this is disputed. [National Park Service Lewis and Clark Historic Trail, “Who Really Built the Leis and Clark Keelboat, Parts I and II” (January 29, 2019), nps.gov]
After a brief stint as a Georgetown College student, Walker transferred to West Point in 1865. In 1866 he was court-martialed[General Court Martial, Orders No. 109, Headquarters of the Army, Adjutant General's Office, April 20, 1866] for deserting his post as a sentinel in cadet barracks before being relieved, suspended for ten weeks and set back a semester. [The Improbable First Century of Cosmopolitan Magazine (James Landers, University of Missouri Press, 2010, at page 53.)] In 1868 he was again court-martialed, this time for stretching a seven-day New Year's leave to seventeen days. [Landers at pp. 53-54; General Court Martial, Orders No. 112, Headquarters of the Army, Adjutant General's Office, March 2, 1868]. After being convicted, he resigned from the Military Academy without graduating.
Shortly thereafter, a family connection helped him find a place accompanying the newly-named Envoy of the United States to China, which was then recovering from a devastating 14-year civil war triggered by a man who claimed to be the son of God and a brother of Jesus that ended in 1865. [Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom (Stephen R. Platt, Vintage Books, 2012)].
In China Walker found a use for his military training, but what precisely he did is opaque. Depending on the source consulted, he either served as a General in the Imperial Army [John Brisben Walker: A Man of Ideas, (Edna Fiore, Morrison Historical Society)], ], or served in the Military Department of the Imperial Government and translated into Chinese a manual of military tactics [New York Journal, August 26, 1896, p.3, col. 5 (Library of Congress, Chronicling American, loc.gov)] or, as Walker told an interviewer years later, served as an officer in the Army advising local commanders on reorganization of infantry units(Landers, at p.54). Whatever he did in China, the experience left a strong impression on Walker, prompting him to say years later that if China ever modernized its military system “it will not be long before the Yellow Dragon will be the most formidable battle ensign on earth” [The Rocky Mountain News [Denver, CO], September 12, 1894, p.12, col. 7 (coloradohistoricnewspapers.org)].
In 1870, Walker arrived in Charleston, West Virginia, founded a weekly newspaper called the Charleston Herald, and hired David Hunter Strother to be its editor (Charleston Gazette-Mail, November 2, 1913). Strother had experience as a writer and illustrator for Harpers Monthly under the name Porter Crayon (America's Successful Men of Affairs, at p. 694 [Henry Hall, editor, Tribune Press, 1895]). On April 17, 1871, in Martinsburg, Berkeley County, West Virginia, Walker married Strother's daughter, Emily (West Virginia Marriage Index, 1785-1971).
With local financial backing, Walker purchased land extending from the Elk river west to a line which ran from the Kanawha river near the end of the present Delaware Avenue to about the end of Fayette Street at West Washington Street, and extending from the Kanawha river to the present West Washington street. This he designated as the J.B. Walker addition to the City of Charleston, but it was commonly called the West End. Walker laid off this section into a town site, with streets running in one direction and avenues in another. He named the streets for West Virginia counties, and the avenues for other states. His original plans, with a few changes in names, but little other variation, are still the plans of that part of the city. He made his first fortune developing the property as a residential and industrial community, only to lose everything in the Panic of 1873 when variius railroads went bankrupt, causingf the failure of the banks that had financed them. (Walker obituaries: Charleston Daily Mail, July 8, 1931; Charleston Gazette, July 8, 1931.
After his real estate venture collapsed, Walker was asked by the editor of the Cincinnati Commercial-Gazette to do a series of articles on the mineral and manufacturing industries of the West and their future prospects. Walker travelled throughout the West to do the necessary research and the articles were well received by the reading public. Walker was then offered and accepted the job of managing editor of The Pittsburgh Telegraph, which led to him being hired in 1876 as managing editor of the Washington Daily Chronicle, the leading daily in the nation's capital. He moved his growing family to the District of Columbia and remained there until 1879 (America's Successful Men of Affairs, at p. 694 [Henry Hall, editor, Tribune Press, 1895]). when he was appointed by the United States Agriculture Department as a Commissioner tasked with determining agriculture possibilities in arid regions of the West. (obituary,Charleston Daily Mail, July 8, 1931).
Walker moved his family to Colorado and based on what he had learned as Commissioner decided to try his hand at farming. He purchased 1,600 acres in north Denver and used what he knew about irrigation to grow alfalfa as a cash crop (John Brisben Walker: A Man of Ideas [Edna Fiore, Morrison Historical Society, 2018 (https://morrisonhistory.org]). This turned out to be a lucrative business and within ten years his Berkeley Farm was the largest alfalfa grower in Colorado, harvesting nearly 3,000 tons annually and containing nearly 200 miles of main and lateral irrigation ditches. (Charleston Daily Mail, July 8, 1931). With his farming profits, he again turned to real estate development.
In 1880, Walker bought 550 lots in Denver near the Platte River and over the ensuing years developed an amusement park on this property. In 1887 more than 20,000 people came to the opening of River Front Park. It featured a racetrack, medieval castle, baseball park, toboggan slide, an exhibition hall, and a grandstand with a capacity of 5,000 people in which Walker staged Denver's first rodeo. A showboat on the river put on performances every evening during the summer, but the Sunday shows were cancelled after the manager and company were arrested and fined for violating Sunday blue laws. Walker also bought waterlogged tracts in the Platte River valley that he devised a means of reclaiming. His investment is these tracts was said to be $100,000 and they were bought by railroads for a price reputed to be $1,000,000. (America's Successful Men of Affairs, at p. 694. [Henry Hall, editor, Tribune Press, 1895]; Charleston Gazette, July 8, 1931).
In 1888, Walker returned to his journalistic pursuits. He sold his Berkeley Farm to a group of investors and In 1889 used part of the proceeds to buy for $360,000 The Cosmopolitan, an insolvent monthly magazine with a circulation of 16,000 (Charleston Gazette, July 8, 1931). To undertake direct management of the magazine he moved himself and his family back East, to Orange, New Jersey.
Shortly after buying the magazine, Walker, on a ferry on his way to his office, read in The World that its star reporter Nelly Bly was about to embark on a round-the-world trip in an attempt to complete it in less time that the 80 days in had taken the hero of Jules Verne's popular novel published 16 years earlier. Six hours after Walker arrived at his office, his 28-year-old literary editor, Elizabeth Bisland, was on a train to San Francisco to begin a race around the world in the opposite direction of Bly. The race between Bisland and Bly was covered by newspapers across the United States and a boon to the country's gambling houses. Both completed their journey in under 80 days. Bly won by four days, finishing in 72, but the race achieved the object of giving a boost to circulation of The Cosmopolitan. (Matthew Goodman, Elizabeth Bisland's Race Around the World, publicdomain.com).
In 1893 Walker increased his wealth by selling River Front Park to the City of Denver, shortly before the Panic of 1893 that might have lost him his fortune for a second time. [The magnificent John Brisben Walker, father of Denver's Entertainment Industry, (Rosemary Fetter, Colorado Gambler, May 19, 2010) (coloradogambler.com)].
In 1894, Walker and his family moved to Irvington, New York, a village on the shores of the Hudson River about 15 miles north of Manhattan that then had many of the wealthiest people in the country as residents. He promptly commissioned the construction of a new headquarters for his now thriving magazine. The three-story stone Neo-Classical revival building remains the largest building in Irvington.
The following year he had Cosmopolitan sponsor the second automobile race ever held in the United States. The magazine offered an aggregate of $3,000 in prizes to whomever first completed the 52-mile round trip from City Hall, Manhattan, to the Ardsley County Club on the shore of the Hudson River in Irvington, and back. On May 30, 1895, then called Decoration Day, six cars started up Broadway behind riders on horseback who cleared the road of pedestrians and onlookers for them. One rider was arrested mid-race for knocking a bicyclist off his bike. Only three cars made it out of Manhattan and only two of them could make it up the hill by the Club under their own power; all had to be pushed by spectators. The two did manage to finish the race back at City Hall. (New York Times, May 1, 1910, p. 67; Auto Racing, Encyclopedia of Recreation and Leisure (2004)(Encyclopedia.com); Cutting Edge Technology in Hastings: The Automobile [Hastings Historical Society, [Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.], August 31, 2009 [http://hastingshistoricalsociety.blogspot.com]).
Walker became enamored with the possibilities of the automobile, particularly steam powered vehicles made by the Stanley Brothers, one of whose cars had set a new speed record of 27.4 miles per hour in November 1898. (The Stanley Brothers - Two Heads Are Better Than One [Jim Hinckley, Legends of America, Oct. 2012] http://www.legendsofamerica.com/jh-stanleybrothers.html)
In early summer 1899, Walker succeeded in buying the Stanley Brothers company and patents for $250,000. He partnered with Alonzo Barber, a fellow Irvington resident who made his fortune making and selling asphalt used to pave roads around the country, including Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. The partnership was very short-lived, dissolving on July 18, 1899. In the split-up, Barber got the factory in Watertown, MA, that the Stanley Brothers company had built, together with most of the steamers under production. He sold the cars as “Locomobiles”. Walker wound up with the rights to produce steamers and a piece of undeveloped land in Tarrytown, New York, on which he built a factory to build steamers to be sold as “Mobiles”, but it wasn't until March 1900 that the first Mobile was ready for sale. (Len Larson, Dreams to Automobiles, pp. 384-386 [Xlibris Corporation, 2008]).
Walker, accompanied by his 8-year-old son Justin, displayed the hill climbing prowess of autos (presumably a Mobile, although the exact make was not reported) on September 8, 1900 by driving one up Pike's Peak to a height of 11,000 feet, reported to be highest altitude ever reached by an auto. (New York Times, September 10, 1900, p.3.) In August the following year one of his cars, driven by others, did reach the top. However gasoline powered cars were being improved rapidly and Barber quickly recognized that the future belonged to them. In 1901 he sold the Locomobile factory and patents back to the Stanley Brothers. (Hinckley). Two year later Walker came to the same realization and shut down Mobile Company of America. It had produced only 600 Mobiles, as contrasted to 5,000 Locomobile. (Larsen) With some short interruptions, Walker's Tarrytown site continued to be used to build autos until June 1996, when General Motors finally stopped production of cars there and closed the facility.
In 1905, when circulation of Cosmopolitan had increased to about 400,000 copies a month, Walker sold it to William Randolph Hearst for a sum variously reported as $400,000 and $1,000,000. Not long after the sale, what seems to be a press release appeared in identical form in several newspapers around the country (See, e.g, Anaconda Standard (Anaconda, MT) January 21, 1906, p.7, col. 3; Olympia Daily Recorder (Olympia, WA), January 20, 1906, p. 2.) under the caption “Why It Was Sold”. In pertinent part, it read:
“…a sudden change in public favor from steam to the French gasoline car left the company with branch houses from Boston to San Francisco and losses exceeding $1,700,000. Mr. Walker personally assumed the indebtedness of the Mobile Company of America, and not only paid it off in full, but returned to every shareholder the amount of his investment, with interest. This action required the sale of the Cosmopolitan Magazine, Kingsland Point, and some other properties. Mr. Walker will hereafter devote his fullest energies to the building up of the Twentieth Century Magazine.” (Twentieth Century Home was a short-lived magazine that Walker started while he owned Cosmopolitan.)
After selling Cosmopolitan Walker returned to Colorado in 1906. He was accompanied by a woman named Ethel Richmond, whom he identified as his wife, who came with four children, ages four to ten, all of whom later in life regularly identified Walker as their father and used his name as their family name. However he was still married to Emily Strother. They were not divorced until July 1, 1914. (Colorado, Divorce Index 1851-1985).
Some sources say Ethel Richmond was Walker's secretary but she first may have been a nanny for Walker and Emily's family. This is suggested by the fact that in November 1890, when Walker and Emily were then living in the east, they and their 11-year-old son James Randolph Walker made a trip to Colorado Springs and Ethel, then about 23-years-old, accompanied them. (Colorado Springs Gazette, November 1, 1890, p.5, col. 2 [coloradohistoricnewspapers.org]).
On his return to Colorado with Ethel, Walker concentrated his efforts on developing real estate he earlier had accumulated around Morrison, a town not far from Denver. For the most part, he had bought undeveloped land or platted lots for speculation, eventually owning about 4,000 acres around Morrison, including both Mount Falcon and nearby Mount Morrison, which overlooks the town of Morrison and features a natural geologic amphitheater that today is known as the Red Rocks Amphitheatre. (Sally White, John Brisben Walker, the Man and Mt. Morrison, Historically Jeffco, Vol. 18, Issue 26, pp. 4-8 (2005)).
On the crest of Mount Falcon, Walker built a stone castle designed by Jacques Benedict for himself, Ethel and family. On Mount Morrison, assisted by his eldest son, John Jr., he began developing Red Rocks with the dream of making it a world-famous music venue. Road and walking paths were built and a platform constructed high up in the Rocks. On May 31, 1906, a concert by Pietro Satriano and a 25-piece brass band in the amphitheater marked the grand opening of what Walker named The Garden of the Titans. (Riots, Rock Bans and Redemption: the Lesser Known History of Red Rocks, Derek Etsler, Colorado Public Radio, May 13, 2014 [cpr.org]).
In 1909, after two years of construction, a one-mile funicular railroad to the top of Red Rocks, funded by Walker and a group of Morrison businessmen, opened as the Mount Morrison Incline Railroad, giving visitors a spectacular view of the Rocky Mountains and surrounding area. In that same year, John Jr. became Morrison's third mayor. (White, at footnote 29). Concerts in Red Rocks were a regular occurrence from 1906 to 1911. After her concert there in 1911, acclaimed opera singer Mary Garden declared that no opera house in the world had better acoustics than Red Rocks. However, although he had some early success in his desire to make Red Rocks a renowned venue, this did not become a reality until long after Walker had lost ownership of the site.
In 1909, he bought the “Swiss Cabin” in Morrison and converted it into a gambling casino. It had earlier been the Evergreen Hotel and from 1884 to 1888 the home of Sacred Heart College, a Jesuit institution. (White) Walker gave the Jesuits property in Denver as a new site for the College, which today is Regis University.
He championed the idea of creating on a ridge east of that castle a Summer White House for Presidents of the United States, and in 1911 a foundation was built and cornerstone laid, but because of American involvement in World War I and a decline in Walker's fortunes the project never progressed past that point. (Mark Harden, The failed dream of a Colorado summer White House, Denver Business Journal, July 7, 2014. [bizjournal.com])
In 1912, an idea that Walker espoused took a step toward fruition when the Denver City Council agreed to create a system of mountain parks near Morrison. In 1913, Denver Mayor Robert Speer managed to have a tax levy of one mill imposed to fund creation of the mountain parks system. (Robert W Speer, a City Builder, p.71 [The Robert W. Speer Memorial Association, 1919]).
On January 1, 1913 yet another crusade of Walker's came to a successful end when Congress ordered the United States Postal System to allow parcels weighing more than four pounds to be mailed at reasonable rates. Until then, mailing even a small package cost an exorbitant amount and forwarding of larger packages was the fiefdom of four private express companies. For years, Walker's pen had been a loud voice urging Congress to end their monopoly. An ironic twist was that Wells Fargo was one of the favored express companies, and members of the family from whom Walker bought his Irvington property had headed that company for years. [The Aid Which the Post Office Department Might Render to Commerce, The Cosmopolitan, Vol. 36, No. 4, p. 379 (Feb. 1904); A Plea for a Parcels Post, The Literary Digest, Vol. 40, Part I, p. 334 (Feb. 19, 1910); The People v. The Express Companies, Pearson's Magazine, Vol. 24, p. 56 (July 1910); 100 Years of Parcel Post, USPS Office of Inspector General, White Paper Report No. RARC-WP-14-004, footnote 6 (Dec. 20, 2013)]
Walker had envisioned Morrison as becoming a booming tourism venue, but the advent of World War I dimmed that prospect. Walker was an early peace activist, organizing a World Congress of 100 outstanding men in 1912 to try to mold public opinion against war. (Denver Post, December 29, 1912). After WW I began, he became an outspoken advocate for peace and opponent of the United States entering the War or providing assistance to combatants, serving as Chairman of the Friends of Peace, an organization supported by many German-American societies. (New York Times, August 22, 1915, p.2, col. 6; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 4, 1915, p.14).
In 1916, Ethel died and was buried by Walker at the foot of Mount Falcon (John Brisben Walker's Castle in the Sky, August 20, 2009 [arewethereyet-davisfarmmom.blogspot.com]). In April 1918, a lightning strike started a fire that destroyed the mansion Walker had built atop Mount Falcon (Colorado Transcript [Golden, CO], April 25, 1918, p.3) Six months later, on October 28, 1918, in a home he owned in Denver, Walker, then 71, married 25-year-old Iris Calderhead, a firebrand women's suffragist (Denver Post, November 9, 1918, p.6, col. 1}.
Walker's various Colorado real estate ventures were adversely affected by the War, and did not recover after it ended. The enactment of the first Federal Income Tax in 1913 might also have hurt his fortunes.
Between 1918 and 1925, a series of sales, mortgage foreclosures and tax sales of Walker's real estate holdings took place, to the extent that by 1925 more than 1,500 acres of Red Rocks Park and the Mount Morrison area had been acquired by a third party, who also took over the Casino and 180 acres surrounding it. Two years later, another 700 acres central to Red Rocks was sold to an affiliate of the earlier acquirer. (White). This parcel was condemned by the City of Denver in 1928 and acquired by it for the sum of $54,133 (Etsler).
The sorry state of Walker's finances was highlighted in 1926 when his attempt to inaugurate bus service between Denver and Mount Falcon was rebuffed by the State Public Service Commission on the grounds that he was “unable to prove he possessed financial ability to insure service” on the line (Denver Post, December 3, 1926, p.40, col. 7).
From 1924 to 1927 Walker spent time in Texas trying to promote building durable dirt roads by use of a machine he had invented for removing water from clay so it would not freeze in winter, a method he said was much less expensive than other methods (footnote in White).
On July 7, 1931, in a room in Brooklyn Heights, with Iris by his side, Walker died. He died broke but still with big dreams. At the time of his death he was pushing the idea of converting the elevated subway lines in New York City into elevated roads for buses (New York Times, July 8, 1931, p.23, col.1).
Walker's first wife, Emily, survived him by four years, dying in January 1935 (Colorado Transcript [Golden, CO], January 10, 1935). His relationship with his purported second wife, Ethel Richmond, remains a question. The 1900 Federal Census lists Ethel living in Inwood, a section of northern Manhattan, with two children, her mother and father, three servants, and a husband named John Ruthven, whom according to that Census she had married in 1891. The 1902 New York City Directory lists Ethel Ruthven as “widow of John A., home Inwood” but three years later the 1905 the New York State Census taken on June 1 has Ethel living in Inwood with Ruthven four children. The following year Ethel arrives in Colorado as Walker's “wife”.
In 1910, while Walker was still legally married to Emily, Ethel and her four children, now all designated as “Walkers”, were living in a house on Shore Road in Brooklyn, N.Y., with Walker's father. Five years later, a New York State Census lists Walker, Ethel, and four children living in Stapleton, Staten Island, N.Y.
There is no question that Ethel Ruthven and Ethel Richmond, Walker's “second wife”, are the same person. Ethel Ruthven's parents are identified in the 1910 Federal Census (Inwood-on-Hudson, N.Y. City Ward 12, N.Y.) as Charles E. and Marion Lee. The death notice of John Ruthven Walker, who died in Denver in 1943, (Denver Post, September 15, 1943, p. 26) named Ethel's three other children (Herbert Lee Walker, Ethel Walker, Nathalie W. Richmond) as his siblings, her mother as his grandmother, and her sister, Maude R. F. Valle, as his aunt. (Nathalie called herself Mrs. Richmond even though she had married a Russian immigrant named Georgi Dobrovolsky. Sibling Ethel's middle name was Richmond.)
In an interview given to a California newspaper after she celebrated her 100th birthday, Maude confirmed that after divorcing her husband she had moved to Denver “to be with her sister, who was married to the remarkable John Brisben Walker” who “had owned Cosmopolitan Magazine” (Marin Independent Journal [Marin Co. California], December 3, 1968).