Shortfall

by Alice Echols

  Of course, more than anything Colorado Springs owed its success and its preciousness to the exploitation of the land in the Cripple Creek mining district. Cripple Creek’s gold proved difficult to reach; it required industrial methods and legions of miners who toiled underground and for a wage. It was labor and time intensive, and, unsurprisingly, it took money to bring it off.22 Although there were some exceptions—most notably Winfield Stratton, an enterprising carpenter who became Cripple Creek’s first millionaire—a number of the men who made their fortunes in Cripple Creek hailed from wealthy or at least influential families.

  Still, there were differences in mine owners’ class backgrounds and political allegiances, and they were not negligible. Despite their physical proximity, with many of them living clustered together in the North End of the Springs, the area’s mining moguls did not always stand united. At opposite ends of the pole were the aforementioned W.S. Stratton, who retained a strong identification with the working class, and a group of younger, mostly Eastern-born men—Charles Tutt, Albert E. Carlton, Charles MacNeill, and Spencer Penrose, whose brother Boies was the very powerful U.S. senator from Pennsylvania. Their privileged backgrounds earned them the sobriquet “the Socialites.”

  Despite his outsized wealth, which by the turn of the century stood at $16 million, W.S. Stratton had no truck with the Colorado Springs millionaires’ club. Rather than build a mansion on Millionaires’ Row, he moved into an older frame house he had once worked on as a carpenter, a house unfashionably close to the business district.23 He also made a point of paying his workers between $3 and $5 a day because in his view it wasn’t right for a former working-man like himself “to take advantage of the necessities of his fellow men.”24 An iconoclast, Stratton supported free silver presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, even though it was not in his own financial interest to do so. He was generous—outfitting the city with an up-to-date streetcar system that ran forty-one miles, donating Cheyenne Park to the town, and giving lots of valuable land to the county and the federal government. Long after he had made his fortune, Stratton underscored his alienation from the town’s elite by joining the Colorado Springs carpenters’ union, local no. 515. As a final nose-thumbing to the town’s establishment, he directed that upon his death most of his vast fortune should go to the creation of a poorhouse—a comfortable one where El Paso County’s orphans and elderly would receive ample, wholesome food and quality care from the home’s nurses and doctors.25

  Stratton’s egalitarian vision of the American dream was not shared by the Socialites, who reportedly kicked back with the working-class men and women of Cripple Creek in the early days of the rush, the years when it was all gambling and booze and brothels, but who did not identify with those men and women or their struggles. Philadelphians Spencer Penrose and Charles Tutt enjoyed a long-term business partnership, and they would have an enduring effect upon the region. After striking it rich and selling the C.O.D., their Cripple Creek mine, Penrose and Tutt (along with partner Charles MacNeill), did what so many mining magnates did: having extracted what they could from the land, they moved on to fresh terrain. In their case, they moved into the business of refining gold ore, which seemed more lucrative than mining it. They secured financial backing from Philadelphia capitalists as well as from local men, including Stratton. Their new business, the Colorado-Philadelphia Reduction Company (later surpassed by the United States Reduction and Refining Company, or USR&R, a refining conglomerate), built its first plant on the outskirts of Colorado City, at the eastern edge of Red Rock Canyon. A chlorination mill to refine the gold coming out of the Cripple Creek mining district, it was the largest of its kind in the United States, and it marked the beginning of what became an empire of refining mills.26

  Spencer Penrose is fifth from the left in this undated photograph. (Courtesy of the Margaretta M. Boas Photograph Collection, the Pikes Peak Library District, 001-277)

  Colorado City was the region’s industrial hub. Briefly the capital of the state before the outbreak of the Civil War, Colorado City was hardly robust by the time General Palmer founded Colorado Springs. “A decayed looking cluster of homes” was how journalist Bird described it in 1873. However, twenty years later the gold strikes in Cripple Creek had transformed Colorado City into a bustling town, albeit a very different kind of bustling town compared to Colorado Springs. Located between Manitou and Colorado Springs, Colorado City was the place to which everything deemed undesirable by its tony neighbors to the east—the drinking and carousing and the dirty mills—was consigned. Virtually every corner sported a saloon, and the south side of Colorado Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets was pretty much nothing but dance halls and barrooms with passageways that reportedly connected to a tunnel system that led to the area’s popular brothels. With four big ore-reduction mills at one point located there, likely employing upward of six hundred men, it was where much of the area’s working class worked and lived, sometimes in fairly shabby circumstances.27 To unionist “Big Bill” Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), the place was a “forlorn little industrial town of tents, tin houses, huts, and hovels.”28 Today this area is home to some fine historic buildings; it is also home to a fair number of dilapidated cottages from that era.

  In this 1901 photograph, the Standard Mill is on the left and the Philadelphia Mill, formerly the U.S. Reduction and Refining Company, is on the right. Laborers there wore shoes to which blocks of two-by-four were attached in order to avoid having their feet burned by the hot ore. (Courtesy of the Margaretta M. Boas Photograph Collection, the Pikes Peak Library District, 001-2193)

  The men who profited from the mills lived in Colorado Springs, and increasingly they invested their money in other parts of the West. “None of the refined gold was left here—nothing but waste and slum” was unionist Haywood’s grim verdict.29 And whenever the wind blew, the chemically treated gold tailings left in huge piles by the mills created “immense clouds of dust” for residents of Colorado City and west Colorado Springs.30

  As the writers of the WPA Guide to 1930s Colorado succinctly put it, “Colorado City did the work, but the great fortunes went elsewhere,” specifically to Utah, where Penrose and company would make yet another fortune mining copper.31 In the process, they joined forces with Cripple Creek titan and Socialite A.E. “Bert” Carlton, who controlled the transportation of all that gold. And before long they moved, with him, into sugar beet production. Penrose and the Tutt family would become known for their philanthropy, but not immediately. And along the way the two men took a position toward labor that was strikingly different from Stratton’s.

  In the early years of the boom, particularly while Stratton was still alive, there was a substantial middle ground between the Socialites, on the one hand, and Stratton, on the other. But in the wake of Stratton’s death in 1902 that shifted, and the jockeying for dominance grew more intense. Something else shifted as well—the remaining mine owners no longer felt constrained in their dealings with an increasingly militant labor movement. Cripple Creek workers had long resented the mines’ absentee owners, and when they referred to the Springs as “Little London” they did so with a sneer.32 But starting in the 1890s, labor, particularly the radical Western Federation of Miners, began flexing its muscle—both at the workplace and at the polling station. When workers went out on strike in 1894 to protest management’s demands for wage cuts and a longer workday, Colorado’s pro-labor Populist governor, Davis Waite, supported them, and the strikers won. Relations between management and labor remained tense, however, as Colorado become what one observer called a “storm center in labor troubles.”33

  Business partners Spencer Penrose and Charles L. Tutt Sr., circa 1895. (Courtesy of the Andrew J. Harlan Photograph Collection, the Pikes Peak Library District, 001-366)

  The actions of Governor Waite had the effect of energizing conservatives, including the men behind the Colorado Springs Gazette. The paper routinely denounced Waite as a dangerous radical and the WFM
as a violent outfit. The mine owners and operatives in Colorado Springs worked especially hard in these years to cultivate political influence in state government. With the collapse of Populism in Colorado by 1896, organized labor would find itself in just a few years facing a very different political landscape. The period also witnessed another change, the “industrial integration of mining and smelting.” Competition between these titans of industry was often ruthless, and meant that the region’s big industrialists did not always move in lockstep. Still, the next big strike in the region, which began in February 1903, nine years after the first strike, brought very different results.34

  None of the owners of Colorado City’s three mills could have been pleased when in August 1902 the city’s millworkers formed the Mill and Smeltermen’s Union, which was part of WFM District Union No. 1, the union of Cripple Creek miners. In response, Charles MacNeill of USR&R hired a Pinkerton detective who provided him with the names of forty-two union men at the Standard, the company’s lone Colorado City mill. It was only after the USR&R then fired those men that the Mill and Smeltermen’s Union called a strike. The Mine Owners Association (MOA) hired strikebreakers and Pinkerton detectives. The MOA also persuaded Colorado’s Republican governor, James Peabody, to call up the National Guard, despite the opposition of Colorado City’s elected officials, including its chief of police, George Birdsall. After little more than a month the owners of the Portland and Telluride mills settled with the strikers, and on terms favorable to the union. However, MacNeill refused to bargain, and the strike at the USR&R mills dragged on. The WFM was not eager for a strike, but by early August 3, 552 miners in the Cripple Creek District elected to go on strike at mines that continued supplying ore to nonunion mills. “Everything seems to be on strike in the State of Colorado” was General Palmer’s gloomy response.35

  This time around the MOA had the governor of Colorado in its corner and the support of a surging movement of businessmen, the Citizens’ Alliance—a virtual arm of the Republican Party. There were Citizens’ Alliances across the country and in Cripple Creek its members were dedicated to defeating the WFM. As the strike dragged on there was an escalation in violence on both sides. One historian has described this period as nothing less than a “miniature civil war.”36 But the governor’s actions—establishing martial law, suspending civil liberties, shuttering a free press in affected areas, calling in the National Guard, appointing to his military staff USR&R’s Charles MacNeill and Spencer Penrose as aides-de-camp, allowing the company to pay the salaries of additional deputies, and choosing anti-union mining manager Sherman Bell to lead the troops—were blatantly one-sided and doomed the strike to failure.37 Bell made clear his intentions: to “do up this damned anarchistic federation.”

  Armed miners, possibly members of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), on strike in 1904 in Victor, Colorado. (Courtesy of the Cripple Creek Photograph Collection, the Pikes Peak Library District, 192-4293)

  The strike stretched on, and in early June 1904, after one terrible, violent incident that the MOA blamed on strikers, lawyer and MOA secretary Clarence C. Hamlin orchestrated the deportation of WFM members who were found guilty by kangaroo courts presided over by members of the Citizens’ Alliance. Approximately 263 men were loaded onto trains, which took them to either the Kansas or New Mexico state line, where they were deposited. The union men, some of them homeowners, were told to never again return to Cripple Creek.38 The withdrawal of pro-employer troops that August did nothing to improve the situation in Cripple Creek and adjacent mining areas. Instead, it unleashed what the New York Times called a “reign of terror” as union sympathizers in the Cripple Creek area were subjected to mob violence, to which the governor turned a blind eye. In the Cripple Creek mining district, those opposed to unionism seized control of the local press and all municipal and county offices. In the future, all employees at the Cripple Creek District mines and the Colorado City ore mills were required to sign MOA cards. It was rumored that promotion in the mines would now be contingent upon being both a Republican and a Mason. Within two years the population of the once-vibrant Cripple Creek was significantly smaller, as some mines never reopened, gold production slowed, demand for miners fell off, and committed unionists left the area.39

  The WFM’s defeat would precipitate the formation of an even more radical organization, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). But the IWW would have no impact in Cripple Creek or Colorado City. In these towns the defeat of the WFM did more than alter the conditions of work in the mining industry. It remade the political landscape as well. Voting Republican in the Cripple Creek District was now virtually mandatory, with the result that Teller County went Republican. It was the first time since 1899, when the district had broken away from Republican-dominated El Paso County to become its own county, that the Democrats had lost it. The result: Clarence Hamlin was elected its new district attorney and Sherman Bell its sheriff. It was as if the city had been taken over by a permanent occupying force.40 As the publisher of the Colorado Springs Evening Telegraph, which he acquired in 1903, Hamlin was already a powerful man. The town’s two newspapers, the Gazette and the Telegraph, changed hands a good deal during the early twentieth century, but they were often in the hands of mine owners or those friendly to them. And in 1923 both newspapers came under the control of Penrose, Tutt Jr., Hamlin, and T.E. Nowels Sr. Doggedly anti-union, the papers’ management apparently went so far as to fire a newsboy it believed to be a “labor agitator.”41

  Throughout the strike, the MOA, the Citizens’ Alliance, and the militia presented themselves as victimized by the WFM and its supporters.42 The MOA’s narrative of the strike parallels the way in which, a decade earlier, Wyoming cattle kings, many of them Ivy League–educated Easterners and British aristocrats, characterized small homesteaders as rustlers, illegally encroaching on their rights. Take the example of the hugely popular western The Virginian, which was written by Penrose family friend Owen Wister. In his novel, Wister transformed an actual incident—the killing of two cowboys outside of Casper, Wyoming, by cattle kings and their paid mercenaries—into something entirely defensible, indeed necessary. In Wister’s hands, what was actually “a brutal murder by a power elite” became instead a proverbial case of what historian Christine Bold calls “heroic individualism”—“‘your ordinary citizen’ taking back the power of the U.S. constitution on the wild frontier.”43 As historian Patricia Limerick has pointed out, Americans’ tendency to cast themselves as innocent victims goes all the way back to the East Coast’s colonial elite, but it was nowhere more developed than in the West, where white settlers saw themselves as innocent pioneers. “An empire of innocence” is Limerick’s verdict.44

  Governor Peabody’s handling of the 1903–4 strike is symptomatic of much of the American West of the early twentieth century, and particularly in Colorado: a fusion of corporate and state power. In progressive circles, Colorado was known as a “corporation-ridden state.” The effects were hardly abstract. For example, one reason that coal-mining deaths in Colorado were twice the national average was the weakness of the state’s regulatory efforts. According to a 1914 report by the Congressional Committee on Mines and Mining, the political influence of the state’s coal operators led to ineffective regulation and to dangerous working conditions of the sort “in existence in scarcely any state except Colorado.”45 Striking coal miners in 1914 called it “government of the companies, by the companies, and for the companies.”46 One leading Democrat, and a moderate at that, went so far as to attack the state’s corporate chiefs as “anarchists” who used money and influence “to corrupt the ballot.”47

  During one interlude when the Colorado Springs Gazette was not controlled by the mining and mill trust, the paper savaged Republican Simon Guggenheim. All the “pin-headed little millionaire” had to do to win his Senate seat in Washington, claimed the paper, was to “hang around Republican headquarters in Denver and make a noise like the rustling of a pile of bank notes.”48 This
may seem hyperbolic, but as one student of Colorado’s labor wars notes, Colorado really had “evolved into a massive company town,” presided over by the state’s very influential mining magnates and the businessmen in charge of the powerful Colorado Fuel & Iron Company.49 In 1917, one advocate of cooperatives argued that Colorado harbored a “deep and powerful opposition to anything savoring of Co-operation,” and the opposition ranged from the “big Rockefeller interests down to the small retail merchant.”50

  This 1922 Republican Party attack ad assails William E. Sweet, a progressive who advocated a living wage. It ran in the west-side newspaper, the Independent, which became the mouthpiece of the Ku Klux Klan. Despite being red-baited by both parties, Sweet won the governorship. (Colorado Springs Independent)