Part 5

By 1881 when George Crofutt wrote his _Grip-Sack Guide of Colorado_ he reported that Virginia City had changed its name to Tin Cup to conform with the name of the region. He added that Tin Cup was a prosperous mining town of six hundred population with twelve stores, several hostels and one smelter. (He omitted the more flagrant business emporiums.) He stressed that game was very abundant and gave the fare for the daily line of sleighs running to St. Elmo.

The Colorado Business directory puts the population figure for 1881 at five hundred, a hundred less than Crofutt. It is interesting to note on this matter of population that present-day writers have a habit of enlarging the figures enormously, especially so-called historians of ghost towns who generally add a zero to any number they encounter. If Colorado’s hundreds of mining camps had as many people living in them as is claimed by post-World War II writers, the state would have been as populous then as it is now. But it was not.

Tin Cup, despite the fact that it has had enormous publicity through Pete Smythe’s radio and TV show of the same name and through the building of an amusement park west of Denver called East Tin Cup, must be seen in the same light. It was just another mining town, although colorful in its own way, and by the late 1880’s was very much in decline.

In 1891 it had a revival and kept going fairly well through that decade. It picked up even more after the turn of the century when the gold mines put on larger crews and when dredging machinery was moved in to operate the placers. But following the usual pattern of these towns, World War I ushered in a growing paralysis, and by 1917 the Gold Cup mine, Tin Cup’s mainstay, shut down.

Tin Cup slumbered on in a complete trance except for an occasional sportsman. Little by little its quaint charm, including fire hydrants that date from 1891, attracted more people. By 1960 it was a substantial summer resort with more people taking over the many deserted cabins and buildings and telling of its unique wild past....

Gothic is reached by returning down the Taylor River to Almont and taking the road up the East River to its junction with Copper Creek. Crofutt described it in 1881 as the most important mining camp in Gunnison County with a population of nine hundred and fifty. It was established June 8, 1879, and made rapid progress, having many large stores, hotels, restaurants, saloons, shops of all kinds, a public school, a smelter (which Frank Hall says never operated), three sawmills and a weekly newspaper. Shortly its population rose to fifteen hundred.

But, as one old-timer recalled, the Gothic district was the paradise of prospectors but not of miners. It was streaked on every mountainside with protruding veins of quartz. A blind man could locate a claim. But the ore values were not high enough for exploitation. The district had only its unusual beauty amid its surrounding peaks—Treasury, Cinnamon, Galena, Baldy, Belleview and Italian—and to the north the towering Elk Mountains.

Gothic died. Only one resident remained until Dr. John C. Johnson, a former dean at the Western State College in Gunnison, saw its possibilities in 1928 for a fully accredited six-weeks summer school—the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory—and bought the two-hundred-acre town. Each year its distinguished staff of scientists invites other eminent scholars in the biological field to a conference and symposium at the end of the regular teaching session. Such topics as “The Living Balance Between Flora and Fauna” are discussed. The laboratory has brought Gothic into a national prominence never attained by its mines.

The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory with its nine hundred and five acres of primitive spruce and fir land, which sweep up the side of Baldy Mountain, made Gothic unique in 1960. It was the only ghost town that had turned into a school.

GOTHIC HAS TURNED FROM MINES TO PLANTS

Garwood Judd, variously known as “The Man Who Stayed” and “Mayor of Gothic,” lived off and on in the Town Hall until his death in 1930.

_From Lake City_

Capitol City is unique for two reasons—the odd spelling of its name and the sad ruin of one man’s dream to have his town the capital of Colorado. He was George S. Lee, a mill and smelter operator.

Frank Fossett wrote in 1880 in his _Colorado_ that Capitol City was located at the junction of the two forks of Henson Creek, nine miles west of Lake City, in a park most of which was embraced by the Lee townsite patent. The park was surrounded by rugged, towering San Juan peaks, rich in silver, lead and iron ores. Two smelters were in operation at each end of town. Fossett added:

“Right here ... where one would least expect to find it is the most elegantly furnished house in Southern Colorado. The handsome brick residence of George S. Lee and lady, distinguished for their hospitality, is a landmark of this locality.”

George Lee suffered from the same disease that characterized so many of the pioneers—a compound of boundless optimism and grandiose ambition. He pictured his remote town as the capital of the state and his home as the governor’s mansion. Perhaps it was an idea spoken in jest; perhaps it was his sincere dream. Folklore leans to the latter version—but he never campaigned for his idea nor introduced any bill into the legislature.

The name of his town is equally confusing. After Lake City was started in 1874 and platted in 1875, prospectors streamed up Henson Creek, and a town was built at its forks. The newspapers of 1876 and ’77 referred to the town as Capital City, and the Colorado Business Directory for the late 1870’s used interchangeably the two spellings of _Capital_ and _Capitol_. Yet in 1961 the Postmaster General’s office in Washington wrote that “a search of the records for 1876 and ’77 reveals that the spelling of the town referred to was Capitol City.” To confuse matters still further the Colorado State Archives office has recorded a communication, dated May 2, 1887, from the county commissioners of Hinsdale County in which they petition for permission to change the name of Galena City to Capitol City.

Why is this petition eleven years late? Poor Capitol City—the whole situation seems as confused as George Lee’s dream! And who was it did not know that “capitol” is a building, not a town?

According to the historians, Jean and Don Griswold, Capitol City had two prosperous periods when mining and smelting were booming—a silver boom in the mid-1880’s and a gold boom around the turn of the century. Two factors prevented Capitol City from attaining any major growth. Early litigation discouraged and slowed up the first business activity of the late 1870’s and early 1880’s, and later the gold deposits of the 1900’s were not very large. The population of around three hundred in 1880 became discouraged and drifted away. In 1885 there were but one hundred people residing there, and in 1900 there was the same number again.

In 1960 there were not many remaining signs of human habitation in Capitol City. Above the junction of North Henson Creek with Henson Creek there were some log cabins in what used to be the upper end of town. On the townsite proper there was only the derelict mansion which was being destroyed from every angle. Henson Creek had altered its course and was eating away the embankment on which the Lee house stood while at the same time human hands were carting away souvenirs. At the lower end of town only the foundations could be seen of the smelter on which George Lee had based his great dream.....

Continuing up Henson Creek in the direction that the stagecoach used to travel from Lake City to Ouray, the visitor will come to the ruins of Rose’s Cabin. Henson Creek was named for Henry Henson who prospected the valley in 1871 prior to the Brunot Treaty of 1873 which took the land away from the Utes. Rose’s Cabin was named for Corydon Rose who built it in 1874. It was a hotel and bar with outlying stables and shed and served as a welcome stage stop on the hard ride over Engineer Pass, the most spectacular pass in Colorado, the road now altered to another ridge to make a popular jeep ride....

Returning to Lake City the visitor will pass the Ute and Ulay mine. At one time this was such a large operation that a town grew up around its workings. The mill is disused and defunct, and the dam which supplied its water power is broken. But the superintendent’s house is occupied by a caretaker who guards the property summer and winter.

THE GRANDEUR OF CAPITOL CITY IS DUST

The elaborate layout of George S. Lee was depicted in Frank Fossett’s 1880 publication. The outlying barns, pastures and corrals are now gone. It is evident from this sketch that the course of Henson Creek must have been at the southern limit of Capitol Park. Today Henson Creek is flowing so close to the mansion that it is about to undermine the foundation. The 1960 view looks up the valley toward Rose’s Cabin.

The Ute-Ulay is now part of the holdings of the powerful Newmont Mining Company which also owns the Idarado Mining Company of Ouray and Telluride and the Resurrection Mining Company of Leadville. There is always the off chance that the price of metals will rise, and, should this be the case, many a Colorado mining property would throw off its ghostly pall and throb again with activity....

From Lake City a number of ghost towns can be seen but the most exciting one requires a jeep. This is Carson which during the years of its history was also known as Carson Camp and Carson City. Since Carson City’s population during the score or so years of its existence from the 1880’s to the early 1900’s was at no time more than fifty and generally around twenty, one is inevitably reminded by Bayard Taylor’s words:

“I only wish that the vulgar snobbish custom of attaching ‘city’ to every place of more than three houses, could be stopped. From Illinois to California it has become a general nuisance, telling only of swagger and want of taste and not of growth.”

Bayard Taylor wrote these words in 1866. The “city” that called forth his ire was Gate City, or Golden Gate City, a string of four or five cabins, at the mouth of Tucker Creek on the stagecoach road to Central City. He included these words the next year in his book _Colorado: A Summer Trip_, and I first quoted the passage in my 1943 Master’s Thesis about Central City for the University of Denver. In 1960 when I was re-visiting many ghost towns, I thought of Bayard Taylor’s wish frequently and smiled because Taylor never attained his wish. The vogue of adding “city” to the name of any little hamlet continued unabated through the whole nineteenth century and even into the twentieth.

Carson, or Carson City, deserved its appendage more than some at the time of its naming and particularly deserves it today. Of all the towns in our 1960 selection it gave the greatest feeling of being a ghost town. Its buildings have been preserved by the cold and by the fortunate fact that it is in an unusual spot which is not subject to snowslides. This aspect is very rare in the San Juans where thundering snow is man’s greatest enemy.

J. E. Carson discovered a mine in 1881 on top of the continental divide some sixteen miles southwest of Lake City on the headwaters of Wager Creek. He staked claims on both sides of the divide, the claims on the south side being at the head of Lost Trail Creek which flows south into the Rio Grande River. With the arrival of other prospectors the Carson Mining district was organized, and in 1882 a camp started. The Griswolds in their _Colorado’s Century of Cities_ have remarked that Carson was thrown like a cavalry saddle across the continental divide with one stirrup hanging on the Atlantic slope and one on the Pacific—a most apt description.

The construction of both segments of Carson is very good—all the buildings are nicely shingled and show care in their carpentry. But the Atlantic slope, or higher, section of Carson is in much greater disrepair and will not survive very long.

In the ’80’s Carson mined silver, and after the Panic of 1893 the camp mined gold. But the problem of transportation to a town which lay at various levels from 11,500 feet to 12,360 was almost insoluble. Its ore was gold, ruby silver and copper, running sometimes as high as $2,000 a ton. Despite the richness of the ore the deposits ran in pockets, occasionally as high as $40,000 in a pocket of only forty feet depth. But when a pocket was stoped out, then the ore was completely gone. Among the best mines were the Maid of Carson, Big Injun, Saint Jacob, Dunderberg and Lost Trail.

And today Carson, although it is unique in its preservation, is a place where riches are indeed a lost trail!

CARSON SNUGGLES AGAINST THE DIVIDE

This section of the town lies on the Pacific slope side of the divide and is in much better condition than the camp on the Atlantic side.

_From Creede_

Bachelor’s beginnings followed the silver rush to the Creede area in the autumn of 1890. The town was heralded by an amusing paragraph in the _Creede Candle_ for January 21, 1892, which ran:

“The latest townsite excitement is in a park on Bachelor Hill, around the Last Chance boarding house. Two saloons and a female seminary are already in operation and other business houses are expected soon. It is to be called Bachelor.”

By April the 10,500-foot-high town had a post office (Teller, because of a conflict with Bachelor, California), a theatre, eight stores, a dozen saloons and several boardinghouses, restaurants and hotels. A number of two-story buildings were being erected. By June the town had been incorporated and was holding an election of officers. By December it had a new opera house which was packed when the Bachelor City Dramatic Club presented the drama _Wild Irishman_, interspersed with several divertissements and followed by a dance, in an effort to raise money for a Catholic church.

But the efforts of the better people failed. The character of Bachelor remained tough. At the height of its population of around twelve hundred, two hundred residents were prostitutes. It was a nightly custom for patronage of the soiled doves to include not only the local boys, but miners from Creede, North Creede and Weaver, who tipped the hoistmen of the Last Chance and Commodore to lift them up to the wild, brawling and drunken delights of Bachelor.

The crash of silver in 1893 affected the whole Creede area. The population of Bachelor (according to the Colorado Business Directory) was down to eight hundred in 1896 and one hundred and fifty by 1910.

BACHELOR WAS FULL OF BRAWLING “BATCHERS”

The mining camp was already declining when this picture was taken. Its population had fallen from twelve hundred to one hundred and fifty.

Still Bachelor hung on as a town after that for a number of years. But the winters were so harsh, and transportation over the two-and-a-half mile road that climbed nearly two thousand feet up was so difficult that in the ’teens the last residents gave up. They moved down to Creede.

In 1960 there were only three cabins left standing on what was formerly Bachelor’s residential street and a few remnants of the boardwalk on its main street. Among the trees on the east side of the meadow, where Bachelor once lay, was a narrow picket-fenced grave, shaded by trees. A local story says that three bodies are buried there, one on top of the other, because of the difficulty of digging in the frozen ground the day after the tragedy that claimed all three.

It seems that a reforming minister, determined to alter the town’s ways, moved to Bachelor at the height of its wickedness. He was a widower with a sixteen-year-old daughter. Hardly had they become settled in their cabin, than the girl caught bronchitis, and the minister was called down to Del Norte to conduct a funeral. As he left, the father cautioned the daughter to stay in the cabin, keep warm and admit no one, since he was afraid of the town’s violent riff-raff.

When the minister returned three nights later, he was alarmed to see a saddle horse tied outside their door. He rushed inside and found a strange young man bending over his daughter who lay in bed. Whipping out a gun, the minister shot and killed the stranger. His daughter screamed and explained that the man was a doctor who had come to tend her. In her father’s absence her bronchitis had deepened into pneumonia. Worn out by the effort of speaking, the girl fell back on her pillow and died shortly after. In remorse the minister turned the gun on himself. The three bodies were found together the next morning and buried amid swirling snow.

Bachelor’s site is still tossed by storms. You can leave Creede with the top of your jeep down and the world bathed in sunshine to arrive in Bachelor forty-five minutes later beneath racing clouds and pelting rain. But its location has probably the most magnificent view of our selected ghost towns. It looks out across the Rio Grande Valley to Snowshoe Mountain and down the river to Wagon Wheel Gap. From here the gap shows more pictorially than from any other angle. On the return trip there is a perpendicular sight of Creede and a view of the continental divide with its mountains around Wolf Creek Pass and Summitville. This is a breathtaking experience when the autumn colors are at their height. Yes, you will find Bachelor unique for its view....

Spar City’s location may also be seen on the Bachelor trip. It lies on the south side of the Rio Grande River up Lime Creek, about fourteen miles from Creede. It was originally named Fisher City after John Fisher who went prospecting in June, 1892, and found a rich float of silver and lead by climbing up Palo Alto Creek to the lower reaches of Fisher Mountain. The news electrified the latecomers to Creede, and a rush ensued. By August the boomers had changed the original name to Spar City because of quantities of spar (or feldspar) in the area.

MAIN STREET

This photo was taken fairly late in the afternoon and shows what is left of the main street—just a few timbers of the boardwalk. No matter what time of day you are in Bachelor you run the danger of bad weather.

REMNANTS

These two houses used to ornament the residential street which ran parallel to the main street. The one in the rear has a covered walkway to the attached privy, a porch to the well, finely mortised and plastered walls and real flooring.

The population was between five hundred and one thousand, and cabins were going up fast. On September 24, the _Spar City Spark_ started publication, and on October 29 a preliminary meeting of the town council was held. Six grocery stores, two restaurants, three livery stables, four saloons, two dance halls, a post office, a school and an assay office, besides the newspaper, were all going full tilt on the promise of great things to come. But the promise was never fulfilled. The Emma’s ore proved too lean in values to ship. By the following year the Silver Panic cast a pall over all mining camps dependent on the white metal. Spar City lasted only through 1894 with people departing as hurriedly as they came. The editor of the _Spar City Spark_ fled, leaving his fonts of type and issues of the paper. By 1895 the town’s population mustered only twenty.

One of the prospectors who lingered on was Charles Brandt. On November 20, 1899, he filed on a homestead covering the entire townsite, and for a number of years Brandt was the sole owner. In 1908 backed by Charles King of Hutchinson, Kansas, he started the Bird Creek mine. Some ore was taken out; but it was the Emma’s story over again. The ore was not rich enough for profitable operation.

On August 14, 1913, Charles King and other Kansas friends took over the townsite as a club for summer residents. They hired a caretaker for the property and set up rules for its thirty-five members. In 1955 the club, with its same limited membership, was changed to a corporation. Now a share of the stock goes with the sale of a cabin although the rules remain the same. No new cabins are permitted, and to buy an old cabin you must be passed on by the board of directors.

Spar City has a charming location with a view to the northwest of Bristol Head and beyond to the continental divide. It has three fishing and boating ponds and a community hall made from the old hotel. Here the annual banquet for members is held. The place is a going concern, aided by an informative history of the club, written by S. Horace Jones of Lyons, Kansas, designed to keep Spar City’s traditions straight through the years of progress.

Some of the older members, like Dorothy Ruehling and Dr. O. W. Longwood, preserved copies of the _Spar City Spark_, the minutes of the town council, and other historical mementoes which were graciously shown to visitors interested in the town’s development.

In 1960 Spar City was the least ghostly of our ghost towns despite the fact that once it had been a genuine ghost town for some fifteen years. Yet it found a place in our booklet on two counts—a mining town that never shipped a ton of ore and a boom camp that metamorphosed into a sedate well-ordered club. In each instance no stranger dispensation of fate could be imagined.

(_Photos of Spar City on following two pages_)

ODD GRAVE

In this quiet, pretty spot three bodies are said to lie, buried on top of each other as the result of an early tragedy. In the woods off to the left, or east, the old dump of the Last Chance mine shows alternating hues of amethysts and gold.

SPAR CITY HAS A CHARMING MAIN STREET

These views are both taken looking north toward the continental divide. The old hotel may plainly be seen as the only two-story structure of the group. Many of these original cabins have been added to but the members of the club are required to keep the additions in the style of the original architecture. The lower photo shows one of the three fishing and boating ponds and a pony for the children, curious and alert.

ITS OLD HOTEL AND JAIL ARE CHERISHED

The main street was actually named North Street. The _Spar City Spark_ for May 27, 1893 reported that the Free Coinage Hotel was being built and would have furniture from Denver. When it was changed into a Community Hall, bedroom doors on the second floor were removed which read “Rose—$1.00; Marie—$1.50; Ruth—$3.00,” etc. The owner of the old jail has kept its original bars intact over one of the windows.

_From Del Norte_

Summitville was next to the earliest of the San Juan mining camps. Yet gold is still tenaciously being mined there, and for that reason the town is unique.

In 1870 James L. Wightman went prospecting and placering up the Alamosa River from the San Luis Valley. When he came to rugged Wightman Fork Creek, he staked placer claims along its tumbling six-and-a-half mile length to Summitville, and then spent a snow-bound winter there at 11,000 feet altitude. From 1872 to ’74 Summitville experienced a rush, and many lode claims were found on South Mountain. In 1875 the first amalgamation mill was erected and spearheaded decades of activity. By the late 1890’s there were twelve separate stamp mills pounding noisily on Summitville ore.