06/21/2026
“Birthright”
By Norman Kolpas
Photographs by Michael Lewis
Western Styles, February 1995
For five generations the Salt Works Ranch has remained in his family's hands. Now Karl Fanning—merchant marine captain and rancher—works to preserve it for a sixth.
A bulldozer charges at a homestead house. Weathered boards snap as diesel-powered steel finishes in an instant the work almost a century of wind, sun, rain, and snow failed to complete. Part of the Old West lies destroyed forever. Throughout the West today, the scene repeats itself.
Blame progress, if you must. If you need a catchy explanation, look to the population boom that brings espresso bars and boutiques to small towns in Montana and Idaho. But maybe the surest explanation remains those two proverbial forces none of us can escape: death and taxes.
Ranchers die. Steep inheritance taxes force their heirs to sell off some or all of the land that government regulations make ever more costly to run. Or maybe developers often grow too rich to ignore. Subdivisions move in, followed by surveying crews with stakes and lines to mark ranch fences. Not for nothing does the common wisdom heard around these parts hold true: Most ranchers live poor and die rich.
But irreplaceable pieces of heritage and history pass with them—unless individuals take a stand. One person at a time, a difference can be made.
Karl Fanning might seem, at a brief glance of his biographical facts, an unlikely person to take a stand in the West. “I was born, I hate to say this, in Manhattan,” he admits. He spent his earliest years in New York City—the grandson of legendary stage actress, producer, and humanitarian Antoinette Perry, for whom Broadway’s Tony Awards are named. When his parents divorced, his mother moved young Karl and his three siblings to Denver. “In ninth or 10th grade,” he says, “I decided I wanted to go to sea”—a dream he realized by joining the merchant marines after graduating from Texas A&M in 1967. Today, he’s captain of the M/V Charlotte Lykes, spending six months a year at the huge container ship’s helm as it carries 16,000 tons of cargo between the East Coast and Europe.
But, however far he’s roamed, the West has always been in Karl Fanning’s blood. His great-great-granddad Charles Hall, “a poor young man in his early twenties looking to start a life somewhere,” came to Colorado from Iowa in 1858, on the same wagon train that brought future silver baron Horace Tabor. After four years of only moderate success at mining, Hall married Mary Nye and, near Antero Junction in the South Park area of the Rockies, they homesteaded a spread noted for its natural saltwater springs. With investors, they built an enormous salt works there, supplying the mineral to gold mines for use in the processing of ore. With the coming of the railroad bringing cheaper salt from back east, production finally halted in 1869. But Charles and Mary continued to live and raise cattle at the Salt Works Ranch—one of the first ranches established in the Colorado Territory—and built a graceful white-clapboard Victorian house there.
They left the ranch to their daughter Mildred, who in 1911 married neighboring rancher Tom McQuaid—“a tough old son of a bitch,” Karl says with admiration. A one-time president of the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association and a founder of Denver’s National Western Stock Show, McQuaid cared passionately about his land. So much so that, during the 1930s, when the state condemned some of his best hay meadows so a 10-mile stretch of Highway 285 could pass through, says Karl, “He burned their camps, shot their vehicles, and terrorized their workers. He kept ’em out for three years, and they wouldn’t dare arrest him or bring him to court. To him, this was a desecration of his land. He never cashed the check they sent him.”
McQuaid, who outlived Mildred by 20 years, passed away in 1965 at the age of 105, still childless. The ranch fell to his great-nieces Elaine and Margaret, daughters of Antoinette Perry and her husband Frank Frueauff, an officer of more than 100 utility companies throughout the West (including Denver Gas and Electric), and a man The Denver Post dubbed the “Napoleon of Light.”
So a great ranch passes down through the generations. “If I went when I was 1 year old,” Karl reminisces, “There was a picture of me in cowboy boots that came up to my crotch, with a cigar and a hat. They’d turn you loose and you’d run around and play in the haystack.” As they grew up, Karl, his sisters Toni and Clare, and his brother John would play movie roles on their visits during haying and roundup. “You’d work 10-, 12-hour days, six days a week, hard work, but it never seemed like work. Each day was sort of an adventure.” The ranch foreman and housekeeper, Red and Clara McHale, became “a second set of parents to us children. I learned a lot of my values from them, like integrity, and the value of your word.”
After settling in Texas and going to sea, Karl continued to go back to the ranch, bringing along wife Judy and their four children. Oldest daughter Leslie, now 24; twins Trevor and Travis, 18; and Toni, 15. “It was always a place,” Karl says, “to celebrate your victories, and to gather your wits after your losses.”
Indeed, the ranch began to look more and more to him like a safe haven. In 1988, watching crime rise in their Houston neighborhood, Karl and Judy decided to move their family close to the Salt Works Ranch, eventually buying a home in nearby Fairplay.
Karl took over responsibility for the ranch’s agricultural business, which includes growing hay, small-scale breeding of Tennessee Walking Horses, and a summer pasturing operation in which they buy 300 head of cattle in the spring and sell them in the fall. Still, he continues to spend six months a year at sea. “In good years we break even,” he says. “I have the good fortune to have a job that allows me to live here and support my family.” Though he’s the only one of the siblings living near the ranch, Karl is quick to point out that it remains a family concern, with one sister in charge of bookkeeping, the other overseeing taxes and leases, and his brother maintaining the Victorian house, restored by their mother. “The ranch has drawn us all closer together.”
As the fifth generation to run the ranch, making it the oldest continuously owned family operation in the state, he and his sisters and brother see first-hand the toll taken by death and taxes. Great-uncle Tom McQuaid grew the Salt Works to more than 100,000 acres. Now half deeded, half leased. Today, only 30,000 deeded acres remain, with another 7,000 or so leased.
All around them, the Fannings watch other ranches erode and fail to developers, as refugees from skyrocketing real estate prices in the ski boom of Breckenridge just half an hour away across the Continental Divide—burn up aggressively into the beautiful 9,000-foot-high meadows of the South Park area.
“Our concern—my brother, my mother, my two sisters, and myself—is to guarantee that the ranch is maintained and kept in the family for our children and our children’s children.”
He and his siblings are examining every possible solution they can. They’ve talked to several national land preservation groups about the possibility of selling them development rights—a move guaranteeing that, even if the land were sold, it would never be subdivided as a working ranch. They’ve also banded together with other area ranchers to try to preserve 100 square miles of ranchland abutting the ranch with like aims of making it a nature preserve. Rich in both the land, the plants, and the animals of the South Park area, it will include a learning center, and maybe even a herd of buffalo.
Another possible avenue for saving the Salt Works would be to establish it as a not-for-profit working ranch museum. After all, the ranch still has its original house, barn, and the old salt works buildings, along with an assortment of turn-of-the-century bunkhouses. This solution holds special appeal for Karl, a scholar of the Old West and possessor of a master’s degree in history.
Karl’s bent for scholarship led him, since the move to Colorado, to take courses in ranch management, the cattle business, land, soil conservation, water law—all those things you see and take for granted when you’re just visiting. He devours the local farm journal and any other pertinent publications he can find. “A ranch is a complex thing,” Karl says. “It takes over your whole life.”
It even finds fresh expression when he ships out. “Going to sea is a lonely life,” he explains. “When you go ashore, you seek out people you have something in common with.” All around the world, in England, Germany, Italy, Japan, when the M/V Charlotte Lykes docks, Karl puts on his Western boots and hat and heads into town to visit with Western enthusiasts. He keeps an active correspondence going with them, too, sending them books, magazines, and information: and he welcomes many as guests back home on the family ranch. “I get so much pleasure out of helping these people. They’re so wrapped up in our culture, it’s a little humbling.”
Their enthusiasm offers yet further proof that he’s got something worth preserving, worth fighting for. “I have the family history, the things I like to do, my family and my kids, and this kind of community experience. I feel so complete up here,” Karl Fanning sums up, gazing over the Salt Works Ranch as winter night descends on Rocky Mountain scenery barely changed from what his great-great-grandpa Charles Hall first saw when he settled here more than 130 years ago. “we’ve just got to try to do the best we can for our next generation.” ❤️🐂🐴🤠
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