The time Colorado's most iconic national park became a British lord's private hunting ground
Estes Park, the Earl of Dunraven and the West's forgotten history of aristocrat land grabs
park, n. — from the French parc, probably from the Medieval Latin parricus, “fence”: an enclosure of land. A word whose usage has been flipped on its head by the advent of modern egalitarianism; it referred originally to a private hunting ground reserved for the exclusive use of a monarch or lord. Now, of course, the word is understood around the world to mean something like its feudal-era opposite, the commons, land publicly owned for the benefit of all.
It was somewhere in the middle of this shift that park acquired another meaning…