DALLAS DIVIDE — From a cabinet in her china hutch, Frances Talbert pulls out a bundle of papers that is so thick and weighty she needs both hands to lift it.
“Parts of this will always be a mystery,” says the feisty retiree as she snaps off a rubber band and begins to sift through the yellowed letters, legal forms and check stubs.
The mystery — and the attendant hard feelings that years haven’t softened — centers on a little flame-haired, bow-legged woman dead for nearly 31 years, the storied Marie Scott. When Scott died in her modest home down Colorado 62 from the Talbert place in the winter of 1979, she was a land baron without equal. But she had no immediate relatives and no shirttail kin — at least that she would claim.
In a story told and retold so often that it is worn at the edges of memories like an old book, Scott divvied up what was left of a ranching empire that once stretched for 100,000 acres from Ridgway into Utah. Scott split her estate among a dozen friends, neighbors and business associates. They were mostly hardworking people who had pleased Scott by loving the land as much as she did or by doing things for her as simple as opening gates or stringing straight, strong fence.
During her lifetime, Scott never tolerated what she termed “monkey business.” And she was often quoted as saying, “The more I know of people, the more I like my dog.” That quip may have been prescient.
What some people did as soon as Scott was laid to rest under a pine tree — some say even before — would not have pleased her.
“The phone was always ringing. There were relatives who were shocked at not getting anything. There were people claiming to be cousins and other people who said she had promised them something,” recalls David Wood. He was Scott’s banker and became the personal representative responsible for settling the estate after the original representative was ousted.
There were also hard feelings and finger-pointing within the circle of heirs. There were doubts about the validity of the will.
“It was like a bunch of chickens fighting over the wheat” is the way heir Brent Jensen remembers it. “People being people, once she was gone. . . .” That thought trails off before he adds, “I don’t think she had a clue what would happen.”
Scott’s “Dirty Dozen”
Being one of Marie Scott’s chosen came with a high price and not nearly as much payoff as expected.
“The ‘dirty dozen,’ we were called, says Ridgway rancher Denise Adams, who was barely out of her teens when Scott died and left her a 12th of her fortune. “There were a lot of other bad names and a lot of jealousy.”
That’s why all these years later some heirs and their family members are still pained when they speak about it. Eight of the heirs have died. Those surviving are guarded in what they say.
Mario Zadra is 94 and still every bit the cowboy he was when he started doing odd jobs for Scott, his “second mother,” as a youngster. He works the coils of his oxygen tank lines in his big hands like a lariat when he talks about her.
“When Marie was about to die, she said, ‘This place is going to be yours. Clean it up,’ ” Zadra recalls.
Clean it up? He won’t speculate much about that, but he thinks it may have had something to do with certain people who were then helping direct the sick woman’s business affairs.
Zadra never got to find out exactly what she meant. He had advised her over the years in sessions around campfires and at her kitchen table about how to protect her property and who should inherit or be sold parts. He bought a lot of land from her before she died. But toward the end, when the once-indefatigable Scott was too weak to get up and her eyesight had failed her, “Some people were added to the will,” Zadra believes. And those people, who he won’t name, drove a wedge between Zadra and Scott.
“I don’t know what the scoop was. I didn’t want to know,” says Zadra, who still winces over the topic.
Zadra didn’t get any land in Scott’s will. Neither did Frances Talbert’s husband, Howard Talbert. He had done many jobs for Marie. And he had the calloused hands and the dawn-to-dusk work ethic that were good measures of a person’s worth in Scott’s estimation.
Frances Talbert recalls Scott had called Howard over for one of what she always termed “business meetings” in the months before she died and told him she was going to leave him some land where he could run his cattle.
The Talberts spent the next five years sitting in courtrooms, deciphering voluminous legal documents and opening attorneys’ letters that always began, “Ladies and Gentlemen” and seldom contained great news. There was no land for Howard.
“He had worked so hard. He felt so cheated,” Frances says of her late husband’s reaction.
Adding another heir
Brent Jensen was a young Bureau of Land Management employee when Scott told him several years before she died, “I have these heirs and you are one of them.”
“You could have knocked me over with a feather,” says Jensen, who had developed a close friendship with Scott during their land dealings.
Scott was always wheeling and dealing on land and had actually sold most of her land to friends in the years before she died, thus avoiding the huge estate taxes of that time. Some of those sales were questioned by other heirs: The contracts only appeared after her death.
The IRS took upward of 70 percent of what was left — about $7 million after Scott’s remaining land was auctioned. After interest was paid on the tax bill, only about $3 million was left to be divided up from property that once was valued at $30 million.
The inheritance money came in chunks, so the heirs don’t remember exactly how much it was. After taxes, Frances Talbert estimates they were each left with about $80,000.
Some money dribbled in for more than a decade.
Frances Talbert holds up one check stub for 76 cents. The local power company owed Scott a dividend payment and that, like other assets, was split among the heirs.
The heirs themselves have split, scattered and died.
Ginny Harrington, a historian who has written extensively about Scott in a ranching history of Ouray County, has tried to keep some track of them.
Adams, who worked on Scott’s ranch alongside her father, still lives and ranches on a piece of what was once Scott’s property. Jo Waldeck, widow of Marie’s attorney and heir Bill Waldeck, still spends summers at a cabin on Scott’s ranch. Dick Swyhart, who operated heavy equipment for Scott and retained some of Scott’s ranch, died earlier this year in a house fire. The late Howard Noble was a rancher and a water commissioner who worked with Marie. His son still lives on property that was once Marie’s near Ridgway.
Zadra still owns 14,000 acres stretching from Telluride to Norwood. Some of that once was Scott’s. But he now spends most of his time with his daughter on a corn farm near Montrose, where he has pictures of Scott hanging on the walls.
Delbert Frasier, a longtime friend of Scott’s, lives down the road from Zadra. He was named an heir after working with Scott as a feed salesman.
The late Fred Richardson worked for Scott as a young man and returned to work for her in later life. He eventually became a mine watchman and lost a leg in a mine accident. He started a small chair-caning business in Montrose with his portion of the inheritance.
The late Duane Wilson was the closest thing Scott had to a ranch manager. He told friends that Scott had promised him the Victorian house she owned along Colorado 62. But that wasn’t in the will. He lived at her ranch and maintained the corrals until the land was auctioned.
Charlie Cristelli, one of the most surprising heirs, died in 1996 after living the high life with his inheritance. He was a Basque sheepherder who had spent half a century in a ratty sheep-camp trailer and had helped Scott out by opening gates and birthing lambs. He used the money to build a home near Telluride and later to finance trips to Las Vegas, where he said he had a lot of “girlfriends.”
Infighting intensifies
The late Mabel “Sally” Lewis was a lightning rod of the gang of 12. Lewis had been Scott’s closest friend in the last years of her life and worked as her bookkeeper and general caretaker.
Lewis originally was the representative charged with sorting out the property division, but the other heirs asked for her to be removed as they watched their inheritance wither away in tax interest payments while Lewis failed to take action.
She didn’t stick around to see the division of property played out in court. She and her husband bought an oceanside villa in Mexico.
Frances Talbert and other heirs and their family members had questions back then about whether Lewis left the country with more than her share of Scott’s fortune. A pink Cadillac piqued those doubts.
Scott always insisted on driving red Jeeps. But in her last year, she was being driven around in a pink Cadillac by the Lewises — something her close friends say would have horrified the Scott they knew.
Frances Talbert stood up in court on one frustrating day of sorting through property divisions and asked, “Where did the pink Cadillac go?” before the judge rapped his gavel for order.
Wood said the pink Cadillac actually belonged to the Lewises.
“A lot of people just didn’t know what was going on. And a lot of people made it their business to question what was going on,” Wood says.
Jensen saw Scott shortly before she died and says she gave no indication that she knew what kind of “monkey business” was about to erupt. He had moved out of state but came back for a visit and found her living “in a strange situation reminiscent of Howard Hughes.” He said all the furniture was covered with sheets. Scott, who was propped up in a chair in the kitchen, was draped in a sheet.
He says she was very frail but still bigger than life — a woman who could put together an empire — a woman who 30 years later is still held in such esteem by some of her heirs that they cherish rose petals from her casket. They still refer to the inheritance they have saved as “Marie’s money.” And they say, in being singled out as worthy by such a remarkable woman, they try to live by the values that she espoused.
What happened after her death, they try to forget.
“Really the payoff for me was having associated with her,” Jensen says. “For me, that was worth more than the money.”
Nancy Lofholm: 970-256-1957 or nlofholm@denverpost.com
