The Hotel That Sold for Twenty-Five Dollars

You've eaten in some bad hotels, but I'll bet you never ordered what came first off the stove at the Canyon Hotel. Nails. January of nineteen eleven, eight thousand feet up, and forty below zero. The park's hotel company wants a grand new house by the Grand Canyon, ready for guests by June, so it's building the thing in the dead of winter. Two hundred and fifty men, seven days a week, and trained nurses on the job to thaw out their frostbitten faces. Sleds with six horses apiece grinding nearly forty miles through the drifts, ten million pounds of lumber and cement and bath tubs before they're done. A writer who came up by sleigh for the company's own booklet heard the hammers before the place came into full view, going off in the cold like muffled musketry. When the big kitchen ranges went in, the first order was hot nails, by the quart, because a carpenter's numb fingers needed them warm. The man behind it was Robert Reamer, who built Old Faithful Inn. You could walk a mile around his foundation. One room, the Lounge, ran two hundred feet, walled almost entirely in plate glass, with a stage at the end for the orchestra. And he was a modest man about it. I built it in keeping with the place where it stands, he said. Nobody could improve upon that. To try to improve upon it would be an impertinence. He died in nineteen thirty eight with his hotel still standing, and I count that a mercy. By the nineteen fifties the money was short and the foundation was going. That new village at Canyon, the one that went after Moran's painting, opened in nineteen fifty seven, and the old place was finished. Folks still liked its rooms better, and it made no difference. The superintendent called much of it beyond repair, and they condemned the largest building in the park. In the fall of nineteen fifty nine, a hotel the company had billed as half a million dollars' worth went to a salvage outfit for twenty five dollars, with nine hundred days to take it apart, board by board. The Lake Hotel took in some of the old hotel's wicker and its oak benches, the way it took in the Commodore's boiler. The old place stood for less than a year of that. In August of nineteen sixty she burned. Mysteriously, the record says, and I'll say the same. A Cheyenne newspaper gave her the finest send off any building ever got. The Great Lady was outraged, it wrote. She could not, she would not, accept the indignity of laborious, prolonged and piecemeal destruction. She chose sudden death. Horses sleep on that ground, where the orchestra played.