In Colorado
The store in Conejos was very successful for Otto; having contracts for beef and flour from nearby Fort Garland certainly helped. He opened another store in Sagauche, Colorado where he had a 160-acre homestead planted with wheat as well as a sawmill, gristmill, even a telegraph service. One day in 1867, his wagons headed towards the goldfields of Leadville with his wheat crop tipped over on the primitive trail. As he was cleaning the wheat up, Colorado’s territorial governor William Gilpin happened to be riding by. Governor Gilpin urged Otto to get a permit to build a toll road so he could get his crops safely to markets. The governor assured Otto that he would easily earn back his construction costs from the tolls charged. Otto built that first road, from Sagauche over Poncha Pass to Nathrop and made his costs back in three months.
That was the first of Mears’ many toll roads, eventually bringing him into southwest Colorado. He built a road from Animas City to the site of the Fort Lewis military camp in 1880, just before the Denver Rio Grande Railroad started the town of Durango.