The Trail of Gold and Silver
The Trail of Gold and Silver
Timberline Books
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STEPHEN J. LEONARD AND THOMAS J. NOEL, EDITORS
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The Beast, Benjamin Barr Lindsey with Harvey J. O’Higgins
Colorado’s Japanese Americans, Bill Hosokawa
Denver: An Archaeological History, Sarah M. Nelson, K. Lynn Berry,
Richard F. Carrillo, Bonnie L. Clark, Lori E. Rhodes, and Dean Saitta
Dr. Charles David Spivak: A Jewish Immigrant and the American Tuberculosis
Movement, Jeanne E. Abrams
Ores to Metals: The Rocky Mountain Smelting Industry, James E. Fell, Jr.
A Tenderfoot in Colorado, R. B. Townshend
The Trail of Gold and Silver: Mining in Colorado, 1859–2009, Duane A. Smith
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The Trail of Gold and Silver
Mining in Colorado, 1859–2009
Duane A. Smith
For
Karen and Mark Vendl,
wonderful friends, fellow Cub fans, and mining historians.
© 2009 by the University Press of Colorado
Published by the University Press of Colorado
5589 Arapahoe Avenue, Suite 206C
Boulder, Colorado 80303
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
The University Press of Colorado is a proud member of the Association of American University Presses.
The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State College, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Mesa State College, Metropolitan State College of Denver, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, and Western State College of Colorado.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smith, Duane A.
The trail of gold and silver : mining in Colorado, 1859–2009 / Duane A. Smith.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-87081-957-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Gold mines and mining—Colorado—History.
2. Silver mines and mining—Colorado—History. 3. Colorado—Gold discoveries. 4. Colorado—
History, Local. I. Title.
F781.S64 2009
978.8—dc22
2009019215
Design by Daniel Pratt
18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Foreword by Tom Noel
Prologue
1. Pike’s Peak or Bust
2. 1859: The Year Dreams Became Reality
3. 1860–1864: “To Everything There Is a Season”
4. 1864–1869: “Good Times a-Comin”—Someday
5. 1870–1874: Bonanza! “Three Cheers and a Tiger”
6. 1875–1880: “All Roads Lead to Leadville”
7. The Silver Eighties: The Best of Times, the Worst of Times
8. “There’ll Be a Hot Time”
9. “The Everlasting Love of the Game”
Photographic Essay: Nineteenth-Century Colorado Mining
10. 1900–1929: Looking Forward into Yesterday
11. Mucking through Depression, War, and New Ideas
12. Mining on the Docket of Public Opinion: The Environmental Age
Photographic Essay: Colorado Mining in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
Epilogue: A Tale Well Told
Notes
Bibliographical Essay
Index
Foreword
Colorado’s Clio.
The Homer of the Hills.
The Sage of the Silvery San Juan.
The Monarch of Mining Historians.
Duane Allan Smith has been called many things, but no one can deny he is Colorado’s most prolific historian, surpassing even the late, great LeRoy Hafen. The Trail of Gold and Silver is Smith’s fiftieth book. The University Press of Colorado’s Timberline Books series, which features the best current work on Colorado as well as classic reprints, proudly presents this master historian’s survey of 150 years of Colorado gold and silver mining.
An outstanding teacher as well as an author, Duane has been honored by Fort Lewis College, the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities, and the Carnegie Foundation, and he was named Colorado’s Teacher of the Year by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education. Eternally wearing his crew cut and Chicago Cubs belt buckle, he bounces into the classroom, often with a revolver strapped to his hip and carrying an authentic Civil War musket used by his great-great-great-cousin on Sherman’s March to the Sea. An indefatigable lecturer, he amazes his students, who claim he never takes a breath and talks so fast they cannot take notes without a tape recorder.
Born April 20, 1937, in San Diego, Duane is the only child of Ila Bark Smith, a schoolteacher, and Stanley Westbrook Smith, a Navy dentist whose life his son recorded, including his adventures as a Japanese prisoner of war during World War II. The family vacationed in Colorado and Duane fell in love with the Highest State. He returned to complete his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in history at University of Colorado at Boulder.
His dissertation was his first book, Rocky Mountain Mining Camps: The Urban Frontier (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967). This important work focused on the urban nature of the mining West. Drawing on Richard Wade’s pathbreaking book, The Urban Frontier, Duane reshaped the way scholars approach the American West. Disagreeing with Frederick Jackson Turner’s venerable Frontier Thesis, Smith argued that the mining West was an urban frontier shaped by groups of miners and those mining the miners rather than a rural effort of rugged individuals. His second title, coauthored with Carl Ubbelohde and Maxine Benson, A Colorado History, has been through many editions and remains a widely used text, and it provides hearty competition for another text of which I am a coauthor with Carl Abbott and Steve Leonard, Colorado: A History of the Centennial State. Smith followed A Colorado History with one of his best sellers, Horace Tabor: His Life and the Legend (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1973). Probably his most important mining books are the previously mentioned Rocky Mountain Mining Camps, Rocky Mountain West: Colorado, Wyoming and Montana, 1859–1915 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992; in the prestigious History of the American Frontier series), and Mining America: The Industry and the Environment, 1800–1980 (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1993), which Duane dedicated to Colorado’s U.S. senator Gary Hart, whose La Plata County senatorial and presidential campaign Smith managed. Duane’s primary interest is Colorado mining, as he explained to Contemporary Authors: “Probably the most important motivation for research on mining camps was the desire to uncover a more realistic and honest history. I believe that history is not dull, but writers and teachers make it so. Therefore, my goal as a writer and teacher is to make history come alive, to hook people on history.”
Besides his interest in mining, Smith is also noted for his love of bears, especially the Chicago Cubs, and his love of cats. He now “owns” six but in 2007 hit a peak of nine felines. He usually works these creatures into his Colorado, Civil War, mining, and baseball history courses at Fort Lewis College in Durango. Duane has been a professor of history and Southwest Studies there since 1964, when he received his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he worked with professors Robert Athearn and Carl Ubbelohde.
Duane has also served as Preacher Smith at Durango’s First United Methodist Church, where he teaches a Sunday School class in Bibl
e baseball, a game he invented. He sings in the choir, along with his wife, Gay Woodruff Smith. They met in a history class at CU, where Gay was the top woman graduate and Duane the 180th overall in the class of 1959. Gay helped him along then, editing his work, and she has done so ever since.
Of her husband, Gay says, “Inside this well-known and knowledgeable Western historian beats the heart of an irrepressible and mischievous little boy.” Their daughter, Laralee, describes her father as “fun to be around,” even though he raised her by reading history to her, hooking her on the Little House of the Prairie series, and dragging her to historic sites—from Civil War battlefields to mining ghost towns.
An active citizen, Duane served on the La Plata County Historical Commission, which he chaired, and on Colorado’s National Register Review Board. He remains chair of the Durango Parks and Recreation Board and proudly leads walking tours along its Animas River Trail. He also served on and chaired the Durango Historic Preservation Committee.
Professionally, Smith was a 1960 founding member of the Western History Association and has attended every meeting. He is one of the six 1988 founders and the third president of the Mining History Association, which has grown into an international organization with 300 members worldwide. Smith is sheriff of the Durango Posse of Westerners, which he founded in 1976. He also co-founded the La Plata County Historical Society in 1974, and he remains an active board member. Duane was instrumental in restoring the Animas City Schoolhouse, where he delights in conducting tours for fourth- and fifth-grade Colorado history students.
Among many distinctions, Smith has been a fellow at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California; an advisory board member and historian of the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad; a Colorado centennial-bicentennial commissioner; and a member of the La Plata County Democratic Executive Committee. He worked on La Plata County political campaigns for governors Roy Romer and Richard D. Lamm, with whom he coauthored Pioneers and Politicians: Profiles of Colorado’s Governors (reprinted in 2008 by Fulcrum in Golden). For his achievements as an author, teacher, public speaker, and civic activist, the Denver Posse of Westerners awarded him its prestigious $1,000 Rosenstock Prize for Outstanding Contributions to Western History.
Smith has written the history of Fort Lewis College and served three times as its graduation commencement speaker. He is a former director of the college’s Center for Southwest Studies, which in 2000 opened a fabulous new circular stone complex of offices, classrooms, a library, and exhibit space. A jogger and athlete, Smith still plays softball. He coached the Fort Lewis girl’s basketball team in 1968–1969—the only Fort Lewis College team to be a winner that season. For this and other service to the school’s athletic program, he was inducted into the Fort Lewis College Athletic Hall of Fame in 2004.
Smith contends that mountains and mining distinguish our region. Leaving earlier Native American and Hispanic activity to other scholars, Smith focuses on English-speaking settlement. He begins with the great mining rushes and is fascinated by “the magic of the mountains.” He displays a mining man’s reservation about Colorado’s flat eastern parts and even approaches the Queen City of the Mountains and Plains with skepticism. He laments with Mark Twain the “monotonous execrableness” of the plains whose only salvation is their “mountain vistas.”
Duane Smith’s passion for primary sources and mastery of secondary sources shines once again in The Trail of Gold and Silver, a superb overview of hard-rock mining that ponders past failures as well as successes. From the bonanza at Cripple Creek to Summitville’s environmental disaster, Colorado mining has had ups and downs as high as Mount Elbert and as deep as the Royal Gorge.
As the pacesetter for other Colorado historians, Duane is forever urging us all onward and upward. Yet, I wish he would stop his annoying practice of waking us up at 6:30 A.M. with questions and suggesting we get up and start writing. I once made the mistake of coauthoring a book, Colorado: The Highest State, with this man. He had the nerve to send me his half a month later—and then asked where mine was. Such flaws notwithstanding, let us wish Duane, as he wishes all on his phone message in his own cheery, wideawake voice, “Top of the Day.” As you will find in the following pages, Duane Smith is still profitably mining Colorado’s hard-rock past.
—THOMAS J. NOEL, 2009
The Trail of Gold and Silver
GOLD! GOLD!! GOLD!!! GOLD!!!!
—KANSAS WEEKLY PRESS, SEPTEMBER 4, 1858
Prologue
“Gold! Gold in the Pike’s Peak Country,” shouted newspapers throughout the Midwest in the late summer and fall of 1858. The news spread over a country still stirred by the tremendous excitement of the California gold rush a decade earlier. Wonder of wonders, had it happened again? Trapped in the worst depression in living memory, many Americans hoped against hope that it had. It would take nearly a year to sort the rumors from the reality.
The golden saga, though, did not begin here. Rumors of mineral wealth in the area dated back almost to Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World in 1492. Teased by finding a little gold, the Spaniards in Central and South America hit the bonanza in the early sixteenth century, when they conquered the astoundingly wealthy Inca and Aztec empires. Lured by stories of even more fabulous wealth in the “Seven Cities of Cibola,” with their streets of gold and tinkling silver bells, Francisco Vazquez de Coronado led an expedition northward up the Rio Grande to the “Tierra Nueva.” This wandering, desperate search of 1540–1542 turned up neither gold nor silver, and the discouraged Spaniards eventually trudged back to Mexico.
Time eventually obscured the reality of what Coronado had seen and endured; a generation slipped away before old stories of mythical gold brought the ever-eager Spaniards back to the upper Rio Grande country. By the early 1580s, they were venturing northward, searching for “mines.” Despite reports of “extremely rich veins, all containing silver deposits,” no rich mines were found and no rush developed.
Always hopeful, despite a notable lack of success, they did not give up. Next came Juan de Oñate and, with him, permanent settlement in 1598. Except for the twelve years following the Pueblo revolt of 1680, a permanent European colony—Nueva Mexico—persisted on the lonely northern fringe of Spain’s New World empire. However, the colony struggled to survive. No new golden or silver kingdoms were found, and little evidence of precious metals was uncovered locally. Nevertheless, the dreams and stories of wealth never flickered out completely.
Sometime in the mid-seventeenth century, someone ventured across the miles—from Albuquerque or Taos or Santa Fe or places in between—toward the mountains to the north. There they apparently found deposits of placer gold in the streams, and perhaps outcroppings of minerals on the mountainsides. They also found that the indigenous inhabitants, the Utes, were not terribly happy about this incursion into their domain; the Utes posed a threat to every intruder. No frenzied media reports of gold from the isolated, scattered settlements along the Rio Grande tempted locals northward to make their fortunes. Only a few New Mexicans and Spanish officials knew about those rumors.
In contrast, the French, in the Midwest and the St. Lawrence Valley, had been hearing rumors of “rich mines” in the Rocky Mountains for years. In 1702, a party left Illinois to see mines the Indians had told them about; this venture was followed in 1723 by a report of copper and silver mines. Sometime after 1739, a group journeyed westward but apparently failed to find any treasure. A 1758 map vaguely located a purported gold mine on the Arkansas River.
Not to be outdone, the rival English claimed that the country to the west was “full of mines.” Some of these ambiguous, exaggerated reports probably rested on precariously little fact, but the ever-present hopes and rumors spawned legends of lost mines, buried gold, and a lone survivor of an Indian attack who had carried a cryptic map back to the settlements and then promptly died before furnishing any further information. These treasure tales echoed down the decades, teasing and tempting each new generati
on.
The Spanish settlers, who lived closer to the locus of the legends, had by no means abandoned their quest. Juan Maria Antonio Rivera led two 1765 expeditions into the rugged, high La Plata and San Juan mountains, searching particularly on the first one to meet a Ute to guide him to a reputed silver deposit. A Ute, Wolfhide, had appeared earlier in Santa Fe with wire silver ore, and the governor was determined to find the source. So out went Rivera—and found his prey elusive, although he skirted and perhaps probed both the San Juan and La Plata mountains. He eventually reached the Gunnison River before returning to Santa Fe. Following Rivera’s expedition, New Mexicans apparently prospected and even spent time mining in the La Plata Mountains and farther into the high San Juans. Not wishing to pay the “Royal Fifth” of all they found to a far-away king in Spain, they left no trail of records for local officials—or historians—to follow.
While Americans struggled for their independence along the Atlantic coast, the governor of New Mexico read a report from the Dominguez/Escalante expedition:
The Rio de la Plata flows through a canyon in which they say there are veins and outcroppings of metal. . . . The opinion formed previously by some persons from the accounts of various Indians and of some citizen of this kingdom that they were silver mines, caused the mountain to be called Sierra de la Plata.
On a hot August 9, 1776, Velez de Escalante jotted rumors about mining in his journal, as his party rode past the south end of those “silver” mountains. The missionaries in this group were not looking for gold or silver; rather, they were seeking “bearded Indians,” converts for their Catholic faith, and an overland route between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Monterey, capital of Spanish California. Still, any hints about precious metals were considered worth recording.