The Man on the Hill

Look up to your left. That sandstone bluff rising above Trinidad, the one with the white letters spelling out the town's name, that is Simpson's Rest. And the man it's named for is buried up there, which is exactly what he asked for.

George Semmes Simpson was born in St. Louis in eighteen eighteen, the son of a physician who expected him to follow medicine. He had other plans.

By his early twenties he was trapping in the Rockies alongside Old Bill Williams, trading at Bent's Fort on the Arkansas, helping found the El Pueblo settlement in eighteen forty-two. He met Kit Carson at Fort Laramie. He was, in the language of his era, a mountain man, and eventually, when the frontier grew towns, he became a civic one as well.

He settled his family in Trinidad in eighteen sixty-five and was named the first county clerk and recorder of Las Animas County when it was created the following year. Then came October of eighteen sixty-six. Ute warriors raided the Trinidad area, and Simpson was out on the plains with his daughter Isabel.

The two of them ran for the closest high ground, this butte, and hid in its craggy sandstone while the raiders passed below. Local accounts describe a close, frightening wait. Whether Simpson helped divert the raiders from the town itself is a question the historical record leaves open; the rescue legend, as told here, carries the unmistakable glow of a story that grew with the retelling.

What is documented is that Simpson was moved enough by the experience to write about it, and to make a request. He wanted to be buried on the bluff. He died on September seventh, eighteen eighty-five, at sixty-seven.

His neighbors honored the wish. His tomb is carved into the rocky mesa above you, beside an American flag, beneath those big white letters that light up every night over the valley. The frontiersman Richens Lacy Wootton, Uncle Dick, lived out his final years on this same butte after selling his famous Raton Pass toll road to the railroad in the eighteen seventies.

He operated a stage station here and died in eighteen ninety-three. Two legends of the southern Colorado frontier, sharing one sandstone hill.