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My first adventure with Internet research was rewarding. For some piece I was writing at the time, more than a decade ago, I needed the text of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which settled the Mexican War of 1846-48. Instead of trying to find it at the local library, I just entered a couple of words into one of the search engines of the era.
Bang, there it was, ready to print, even if the connection -- my brand-new hot-rod 14.4-kbps modem running over dial-up -- was painfully slow by modern standards.
Connection speeds are a lot faster now with DSL service,
but research results may not have shared in the
improvement. For instance, there's Wikipedia, the Internet
encyclopedia that just about anybody can contribute to,
which is not entirely a blessing despite what we might hear
about the wisdom of crowds.
A friend brought my attention to the Wikipedia entry on
Salida, Colorado,
where I have lived for the past 28
years.
It starts accurately: Locally, the town's name is
pronounced 'Suh-LYE-duh.
That's true. The entry adds
that In Spanish, the town's name means 'exit' and would
be pronounced 'Sah-LEE-dah.'
More truth.
But we are also informed that Salida is so named for
being the 'exit' from Browns Canyon of the Arkansas
River.
The mouth of Browns Canyon is about nine miles upstream
from Salida at a railroad siding known as, of all things,
Browns Cañon.
Don't you think that if a place
were going to be named for its site at the exit of Browns
Canyon, it would be that place, rather than a spot nine
miles downstream?
Salida's naming is pretty well documented, and it has
nothing to do with that canyon. When the Denver & Rio
Grande Railroad came through in the spring of 1880, it
named the railroad siding South Arkansas
because it
was near the junction of the South Arkansas River (locally
known as the Little River) with the main Arkansas.
However, there was already a South Arkansas post office,
near the present site of Poncha Springs, and so the post
office at the railroad South Arkansas was just Arkansas,
Colo.
This was confusing and annoying for residents and merchants, and so they asked the railroad for a new name.
Alexander Cameron Hunt, former territorial governor, was
in charge of the Rio Grande's land-development subsidiary.
He liked Spanish names. He christened other railroad
division points like Alamosa (cottonwoods) and Durango
(from Durango, Mexico, which came from Durango, Spain -- I
have been told that it comes from a Basque term meaning
thorny field,
but I do not know if that is so).
Hunt announced the new name for South Arkansas in the
summer of 1880 and told residents to pronounce it
Sah-LEE-dah,
an admonition they ignored. He turned
to a secondary definition of salida
-- an outlet --
to explain its relevance. As a major railroad junction,
Salida would be the outlet for the ores of Leadville to the
north, the Monarch and Gunnison areas to the west, and the
northern San Luis Valley to the south.
That came to pass, and then as Wikipedia correctly
states, After World War II, the railroad began pulling
back on its operations in Salida.
But then Wikipedia
tells us that The railroad pulled up its tracks in the
1970s.
The narrow-gauge line over Poncha Pass was abandoned in
1951, and over Marshall Pass in 1955. The Monarch Quarry
spur line went standard-gauge in 1956 and lasted until
1984. No tracks hereabouts were pulled up in the 1970s. The
old main line along the Arkansas River has been out of
service
for nearly a decade, since the Union Pacific
acquired the Rio Grande system in a 1996 merger, but the
tracks were still there Friday morning when I walked the
dog nearby.
So I have to wonder whether the author of that Wikipedia entry has ever been in Salida, since the railroad tracks remain quite obvious, or has even looked at a map, since the mouth of Browns Canyon remains quite distant, at least for town-naming purposes.
I know, I could write my own entry and put it on Wikipedia. And then I could see it over-written by whoever posted this drivel. There's no good way to fix that entry and keep it accurate.
Thanks to modern technology, we can now get misinformation at blinding speeds. That's some progress, isn't it?
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