John Otto

On Colorado's scenic Western Slope lies the magnificent monoliths and canyons of Colorado National Monument. Almost as legendary as the dramatic landscape itself is the memory of John Otto, the monument's founding father, its first custodian who single-handedly built its trails, and one of the West's most eccentric characters. For residents of turn-of-the-century Grand Junction, "the world's greatest radical of the safe kind" (as Otto described himself) was a lunatic. A prolific writer whose many letters to newspapers were published verbatim, Otto had a most unusual way of expressing himself - so unusual that he was arrested three times for insanity and accused of attempting to assassinate the governors of Colorado and California. John Otto was a man ahead of his time, and this definitive biography places him in the company of John Muir and Enos Mills in his importance to the early conservation movement in the West. He was an early advocate of women's rights, and his contributions to labor relations were also significant and generally not known until now.