Who Was Dean Babcock?

A kid from Illinois who never really left.

Moe and I walked through Bond Park Tuesday, crews out staking where the vendor tents go for this weekend's arts festival, and Moe wanted to know if anybody around here was doing this kind of thing before there was a festival to put it in.

One guy was. For about sixty years.

Dean Babcock showed up in this valley in 1903, fifteen years old, a summer guest at the Longs Peak Inn. Enos Mills, who ran the place, guided him up Longs Peak that same trip. Babcock went home to Illinois after that summer. He came back to Colorado for good a few years later and mostly never left again.

He wasn't a painter first. He carved. Woodblock prints, one block per color, cut by hand and pressed one on top of the other until the picture lined up.

Moe wanted to know how you get five colors out of a chunk of wood.

You don't, not out of one chunk. You cut five separate blocks, one shape carved out of each for wherever that color goes, and you run the paper through five times, lining each pass up with the one before it. Get the register wrong on block three and the whole print is ruined. Babcock did that by hand, for decades, and from what's left of his work, he mostly got it right.

How Does a Fifteen-Year-Old Kid End Up Carving Wood for a Living?

He went to Chicago first.

He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago under a teacher named John Vanderpoel, and later worked with Robert Henri in New York. In art-school terms, that's two serious teachers before he picked a technique most of his classmates weren't touching. Woodblock printing is slower than painting and a lot less forgiving. Cut a line wrong and there's no painting over it.

He came back to Estes Park anyway.

By the 1910s he was doing more than carving pictures. He drew a pocket map of Estes Park and the country around it, and the shop that sold it for close to a decade was Fred Payne Clatworthy's place on Elkhorn Avenue, the same shop Clatworthy was running cameras and film out of. Copies with a 1913 copyright still turn up. So do 1919 editions, eighteen folded panels in blue paper covers. Not one map made once. One map, sold steadily, for years, out of a shop most of this town already knew.

Moe asked if that made Babcock and Clatworthy partners.

Not partners. One guy made a thing, another guy sold it. That's most of how business worked on Elkhorn Avenue back then.

What Was He Actually Doing Up Here Besides Drawing?

Drafted, rejected, and put to work anyway.

Babcock registered for the draft in World War One and wasn't eligible to serve. So the park found him something else to do. He took a forest ranger's spot in what would become Rocky Mountain National Park, assigned to trail planning, and helped lay out a new route up Longs Peak. He held the job through September 1920.

Somewhere in that stretch he'd drawn a map too, back in 1911, and stuck a name on one of the unnamed peaks: Mount Orton, after a geology professor who'd once led him on a field trip through Wild Basin. He didn't tell the man. Ten years later, in 1921, the federal board that approves place names in this country made it official, and somebody finally let the professor know a mountain had been wearing his name for a decade without his permission.

Moe said that was a strange way to say thank you.

It's the only way Babcock seemed to work, far as I can tell. He wasn't a man who wrote letters about things like that. He named a mountain and moved on to the next block of wood.

Did He Ever Make It as a Working Artist?

Sort of, mostly by building the room instead of just standing in it.

In June 1928 Babcock was one of fifty-two artists who founded the Denver Artists Guild, the group that's now called the Colorado Artists Guild. He wasn't just a name on the roster. He helped run it. A few years later, in 1935, the record has him serving as Colorado's state director for the WPA's Federal Art Project, the New Deal program that put working artists on a government payroll during the Depression.

He kept drawing for other people's books too. If the name Dean Babcock rings a bell already, that's likely from Charles Edwin Hewes back in August, the poet who ran the inn at the foot of Longs Peak. Babcock did the drawings for both editions of Hewes' poetry, the plain 1914 printing and the fancier one in 1922.

Moe asked if the two of them were friends.

Don't know. Nobody wrote that part down either.

So Where'd He End Up?

Depends which year you trust.

Babcock died in Seattle after a stroke. The gallery that put together the most recent retrospective of his work says December 25, 1968. Nearly every short reference you'll find online says 1969 instead, with no date attached at all.

Moe wanted to know which one was right.

I don't know. Nobody's nailed it down for certain. My best guess is 1968, and here's why: the poet Thomas Hornsby Ferril wrote a tribute to Babcock in his "Childe Herald" column in the Rocky Mountain Herald, dated January 25, 1969. Somebody, somewhere down the line, likely grabbed the date off that tribute instead of the death itself, and it's been copied forward ever since.

What Ferril actually wrote holds up better than either date. He called Babcock "naturalist, topographer, artist, wood carver, astronomer, musician, navigator, philosopher, punster, and so unobtrusive about it all."

Can You Actually See Any of His Work Around Here?

Not really. That's the last good joke in this story.

The Estes Park museum doesn't have a Dean Babcock print hanging on its wall. What it has, by its own catalog, is a handful of framed newspaper pages, logged under one description: wood from Dean Babcock's house.

A man spent sixty years cutting careful pictures into wood, block by block, color by color, and what the town kept of him wasn't the pictures. It was the lumber.

Moe didn't have anything to say to that one for a minute.

Go walk the tents at Bond Park this weekend. Pottery, prints, paintings, tables of it, artists standing behind their own work same as they've always done. Nobody up there is thinking about a fifteen-year-old kid from Illinois who did the whole thing alone, one block of wood at a time, decades before the guild that runs it now even had a name.

Somebody ought to.