In August 1917 the Denver Post announces that a young college woman from Ann Arbor is going into the new park alone for a week. The publicity is enormous, and so is the mail. Boone has both accounts of one of the stranger stunts in the park's early years, and they don't agree.
Sixty-four proposals of marriage, all in one mail sack, for a girl whose real name nobody can prove. August of nineteen seventeen. The war had page one, and the Denver Post went looking for something livelier. "Naked, Unarmed and Alone, Eve Goes Forth Into Forest," ran the headline. A twenty-year-old co-ed from Ann Arbor, Agnes Lowe, was going into this park for a week in an abbreviated leopard skin, with no food, no weapons and no matches. Nearly two thousand people turned out to wave. Enos Mills was there, the man who did more than anybody to make this park. So was the superintendent, Claude Way. The paper fed that week to the country a spoonful at a time. Messages in charcoal on slabs of bark. A song she sang to a mother bear. A fellow from Greeley in a moth-eaten bear hide, calling himself Adam the Apostle, who came to join her and had to be hauled off by two rangers. In Denver a man took to the street in nothing but cabbage leaves, bound for the wilds. She even served Mills and the superintendent a lunch of pine bark soup. And when she walked out, the Post said, she was sunburned, bitten head to foot, and a half pound heavier than she went in. A half pound. In the wilderness. On pine bark. They handed her a mail sack with sixty-four proposals in it. Trouble was waiting right beside it. With Washington fuming, the superintendent admitted a ranger had taken her to Fern Lodge, that he'd brought her back to Estes Park himself that Wednesday, and that her grand return on Sunday was staged. The Post had duped him, he said. The park's own history tells it another way, with him and the paper cooking it up together and Ranger MacCracken meeting her with her street clothes. Ranger Kennedy, who had to escort her, called it cheap and disgusting, more cabaret than wholesome advertisement. Horace Albright told the superintendent a national park was not the proper stage for this sort of thing. Then she was gone. Some sources say Agnes Lowe was really Hazel Eighmy, a receptionist at a photography studio in Denver. The man who wrote the park's history went hunting for her, or any of her people, and came back empty-handed. "I like to think she married one of these Adams," he said. So do I.
Photo: NPS Photo · Public domain