COBWEB CORNERS: The era of the dude ranches  By Mel McFarland
 We all seem to think of tourists as a fairly recent phenomenon,
but that is not the case, even here. As I read the newspapers
from a hundred years ago, tourists were already a big thing. The
tourist season was mainly summertime, but even in the winter
there were stories in the papers about ways of attracting more
of them to the area.        By the 1900s, the area around
Manitou Park had been known as a resort for tourists for almost
thirty years. In the Ute Pass area, many resorts started out as
ranches. In the 1880s, word spread that these were fun places!
Within a few years some had evolved from working ranches into
"dude" ranches. I am sure most of you have an image of what
those are. Teddy Roosevelt made the whole idea popular around
1900.        "Dudes" (Easterners, big-city folk and the like)
would come out and stay on a ranch. In the early days, some
would actually work while others just wanted to relax and get
away. The worker type