The Trail of Gold and Silver

by Duane A. Smith

  Most of my days were spent perusing the Rocky Mountain Cook Book, mixing recipes, washing dishes, in a desperate endeavor to set before my husband appetizing meals from our limited larder. I learned to cook the hard way, but it took time.

  Her husband, George, did not think Harriet should have their first child at the Tomboy Mine, so he found her a temporary home near Telluride’s hospital.

  I was uncomfortable and found it difficult to walk on our rough paths. My long, brown maternity dress had a short yoke from which the very full gathered skirt hung to the floor. But it would have been highly indelicate not to have such a voluminous disguise to hide my figure. Mother had always said so.

  George’s birthday was September 2nd and I thought it would be fine if I could give George a living birthday present. So a couple of days before September 2nd I started to walk up the steep paths nearby. It happened that our doctor was in that area and asked what I was climbing like that for. My answer was I wanted the baby to come on the second, but she didn’t.

  Mabel Barbee Lee recounted her mother’s experiences during the start of the Cripple Creek boom when they moved into a tent:

  [Our tent] was patched and dirty, but differed from [others] by having a store door with an adjoining half window. A lumpy mattress sagged on an old wooden bed in a corner and a thin pad covered the cot in the lean-to which I proudly called “my room.”

  Kitty [her mother] began at once to clean and scour. My father and I . . . made trips to Roberts’ Grocery for food supplies. There was little to choose from but Kitty could make the plainest things taste good.

  Anne Ellis saw life from the underside, both as a miner’s child and later as a miner’s wife. In Bonanza, her family consisted of five people crowded together in close quarters:

  Now comes a heavy snow, and we are all penned up in one small room, each time the door is opened the wind driving the snow in and across the floor. Around the tiny stove, German socks and overshoes are drying; across one corner is stretched a rope; this also holds clothes left to dry.

  In Cripple Creek, she and her two children heard sad news, the tragedy that had to be in the back of the mind of every miner’s wife day in and day out:

  “Well, Mam, you see he drilled into a missed hole, and here we didn’t know he had a family. But—well, Mam, you might as well know. He is dead, shot all to pieces.”

  I just melt on the floor, the quilt covering me. One of the men say “Look, boys, and see if there is any whiskey or camfire,” and tried to raise me, but I, dry-eyed and voiced, ask them to leave me alone for a while.8

  These women, and thousands like them, followed their husbands along the Colorado mining trails. They turned shacks into livable dwellings, cooked meals under conditions that would appall a modern housewife, and raised their families in the best Victorian manner they could manage under very trying circumstances.

  Children grew up fast in mining communities. Young girls, once they became teenagers, were available to be courted in a world very short of eligible women. By that age, boys might be working to help their families as well, although they generally did not do underground mining until they turned sixteen.

  Mildred Ekman remembered growing up at the Tomboy Mine. “Kids,” she recalled, could find fun such as going “up on the hill and throwing rocks down an old shaft. And listening for them to hit bottom or wherever they hit.” Rocks once got Ekman and some friends in trouble. They “liked pretty rocks,” picked some up, and piled them behind her house to play with. One day the mine manager appeared and said that “someone [had] reported my dad highgrading behind the house. Mom took him [there]—he laughed and said let them play.”

  Martha Gibbs recalled that she spent “many happy hours making bouquets of clover blossoms,” enjoyed sliding in the winter, liked “walking on top of the board fence around the house,” and had fun playing hopscotch at Telluride’s school. Ernie Hoffman vividly remembered his Silverton days: “If I got in trouble in school I automatically got in trouble at home, no question about that.” Despite that, he “thought a hell of a lot of all my teachers—couldn’t say a bad word about any of them.”9

  Most of the teachers were women, with men serving as the principals and teaching in communities that had high schools. A single woman, as Annie Laurie Paddock explained about Creede, “was expected to follow certain standards.” Those standards included teaching Sunday School, not being seen alone with a man, wearing “proper clothes,” and “never, never” going into a saloon or being seen drinking.

  In some senses, women found greater freedom in mining communities than they could have in the more restricted eastern society. For example, more jobs and positions were open to them because so many men were tied up with mining and did not have the time to work in town. They ran stores, taught school (a popular profession for women everywhere), and operated post offices, restaurants, and boardinghouses. A few were even found in traditional male occupations like packing, freighting, and gambling. According to popular ideas of the time, women’s voices sounded better over the telephone and their fingers were more fit for typing than men’s, so telephone operators and clerks were often women. Divorce, too, did not carry the same social stigma for Colorado women that it did elsewhere in America. In an overwhelmingly male-populated world, men were always eager to have a woman’s companionship.

  Despite these freedoms, the Victorian ideal of the woman’s place being in the home raising the children was an axiom of social organization. Even with upper-class women on the march as the century turned, women in the mining camps tended to be conservative in many ways. They did, however, help orchestrate the 1893 women’s suffrage victory, putting Colorado in the forefront of the movement.

  They were also in the forefront of efforts to civilize their camps or towns. The presence of a school and a church symbolized urban America. No one supported the establishment of these two institutions more than women. Mining communities were proud of their schools and churches (brick or stone structures were particularly impressive), regardless of whether they financially supported or attended them, because such institutions were signs of permanent settlement and lent at least the appearance of refinement to isolated Colorado mountain outposts. Local newspapers kept an eye on young scholars and their teachers. The editor of the Rocky Mountain Sun was shocked during a visit to Aspen’s school, reporting that the low number of students would “convince anyone that a number of children were not attending school. The cause was probably lack of interest by their parents, not poverty.” He went on to warn, in an April 5, 1890, exposé, “ignorance is a vice which should not be tolerated.”

  Depending on a variety of circumstances, the school year might last only a few months, or classes might be held in the summer. The equipment available, the subjects taught, and the teachers’ qualifications varied considerably. School boards often had a difficult time keeping single female teachers. In this male-dominated, Victorian world, married teachers were generally not approved, and a teacher who was in the “family way” was not at all acceptable.

  Meanwhile, students might or might not attend classes, for various reasons. Many families needed more income, and few jobs required much schooling. In some areas, the prevailing feeling was that, having mastered reading and writing and perhaps a smattering of arithmetic, a child was well prepared to venture out in the world. High schools were available in only a few of the towns, and college was well beyond both the means and the aspirations of most members of that generation. Nevertheless, the school was generally the center of community life, particularly in the camps. Social events, graduations, school programs, community Christmas celebrations, plays, and even political rallies were all held at the schools.

  In the spring, a young man’s fancy might turn to that cute young lady in his class—but more likely, it turned to baseball. Baseball was wildly popular in mining communities large and small. Every town and a number of camps fielded a “nine” that played to uphold the community’s reputation and garner the
money locals bet on their favorite team.

  The Rocky Mountain Sun (September 12, 1885) reported that Crested Butte “is itching for a game with the Aspen nine. Why don’t they come over here, it is their turn to cross the range anyway.” In 1871, Central City accused Denver of gathering players “from the four-quarters of the globe, veterans of years standing.” Rivalries between towns often grew, particularly if a team sported some “ringers.” The local paper might complain, as did Silver Plume’s Silver Standard (May 29, 1886), if the home nine had a victory “stolen” from them.

  Familiar cries that “the umpiring was rotten” and “our boys batted out of luck” graced many reports of games. The Creede Candle (July 27, 1907) became particularly aggrieved about the umpire at Monte Vista, “who rankly favored his home team.” It concluded: “Umpires who allow prejudice to supplant honor and honesty will eventually kill baseball if tolerated.” Sadly, visiting teams often faced this problem.

  The greatest Colorado team of the nineteenth century, the Leadville Blues, took to the diamond in 1882. Determined to overcome its 1880 image of mining failures, the Cloud City fielded a team made up of five future or former Major Leaguers. They dominated the Colorado scene, defeating teams everywhere from Denver to small mining camps, often by large scores. Then they took to the road, but got their comeuppance when they ran into a team in Council Bluffs made up of Chicago players from the recently completed National League season. The Blues took the field in other seasons, but never again with such success.

  Scores were high in those early decades, with poor playing fields and no gloves—gentlemen would not wear them. Though the Central City Stars were “woefully defeated,” 55–30, the local paper still had hope: “We are not disposed to give up our faith in them. We firmly believe they will yet be so developed as to then enable them to meet and overcome the best club in the Territory.” Locals followed their teams with pride and occasional dismay at an “overwhelming defeat.”

  These were the decades, as the Rocky Mountain News proclaimed in 1867, when baseball was “the American national sport, and [no other] outdoor amusement or exercise equals it in genuine healthful recreation.” The reporter continued, “As a means of invigorating manhood and developing the physical powers of youth, it stands without a rival.” Long before Casey strode to the plate, mining-camp newspapers published baseball poems. Even after the turn of the century, springtime brought forth a poem or two:

  In the spring the young girl’s fancy

  lightly turns to thoughts of hat, . . .

  In the spring the young man’s fancy

  lightly turns to thoughts of ball.10

  For all its popularity, baseball did not dominate the sporting scene entirely. Boxing, wrestling, bicycling, running, shooting matches, fire company races, and eventually basketball and football all attracted fans. Even cricket was played a few times. These events attracted men more than women, and betting was a constant and major adjunct to all events.

  Women were more likely to be involved in the local church. In fact, they were the backbone and mainstays of mining-community churches. Church was an acceptable social outlet for both women and their children in these predominantly male enclaves. Further, women could play a leadership role in churches that might be denied to them elsewhere. The Reverend James Gibbons, who served Catholic churches throughout Colorado mining towns, said this about women:

  As workers in the church, they were second to none. The women attended not only to the proper duties of the altar society, but in no [small] measure to the financial affairs of the church. Fairs and balls were organized and managed by them, the tickets sold, the collections made and the money put in the bank to the credit of the church.

  Churches needed that support, because Sunday was a wide-open business and social day on which various entertainments and activities (some highly secular) competed with worship.

  It took a special type of minister or priest to match his congregation’s needs. Presbyterian George Darley, who served throughout the San Juans and elsewhere in Colorado, felt that in “no region” can men be found who “are so indifferent to religious influence as in a new mining camp.” Yet, he opined that there “are more faithful followers of Christ than some men like to have us believe.”

  The materialism of the mining communities challenged religion at every turn. Darley felt you “had to suffer and suffer again” to minister to these people. Physically, it was demanding. Darley walked 125 miles, “more than half the distance through deep snow,” in five days and four nights to reach Ouray. Years later, in writing of the difficulties he and other pioneer ministers faced, he concluded that the obstacles “were more than the average minister cared to face then or would care to face now.”11

  Darley met people where they were, not needing a church and a pulpit. He preached in saloons, homes, and other places that might have shocked the faithful back East. A “poor” minister did not last long, nor did one steeped in unbending conservatism or one whose ultimate goal was simply to build a “house of God.” Few mining camps had enough Methodists, Baptists, or any other denomination to corral the members needed to maintain a church. Ecumenism was the answer, at least among the Protestants.

  The church and school were the centers of respectable entertainment. Women of the former might sponsor dinners to help raise money for building or some other church need. These dinners were popular with single males, of which every community had an abundance. School functions allowed proud parents to watch their sons and daughters show off their talents at music or oratory.

  One way to overcome the transitory and isolating nature of mining work was to join a fraternal lodge, some of which also had women’s auxiliaries and children’s groups. The Masons, Woodmen of the World, Elks, and other lodges provided entry into a new community for members; they also sponsored dances and other social events along with regular meetings. For Union veterans, the Grand Army of the Republic held meetings, sponsored social events, and marched in parades; it also worked hard to get pensions for its steadily aging members. Every two or four years, the two major political parties, and some of the minor ones, organized “clubs” to advance their candidates.

  Americans and Coloradans in those years were joiners. The era represented the high tide of fraternal orders and clubs such as literary groups and Chautauqua meetings with its social, educational, and cultural events. Mining communities did not lag behind in organizing, participating in, and enjoying clubs. As the largest of Colorado’s mining communities, Leadville offered the greatest variety of clubs and societies, including (among others) the Bible Society, Band, Athletic Club, Glee Club, Women’s Club, Temperance Club, Women’s Christian Temperance Union, Y.M.C.A., Pioneers Society, Jockey Club, and Library Association. If one cared to belong, there was an organization available; no one need be left out. There were even enough blacks in the community to allow them to organize both social and political clubs.

  In the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century, the Western Federation of Miners became very active in working for better pay, safer working conditions, and members’ rights. The union also helped build hospitals in several San Juan communities. In the antagonistic labor world of turn-of-the-century America, however, unions fought a losing battle, as will be discussed in the next two chapters.

  Colorado mining communities reflected the trends of the United States overall, as did the neighboring farm and ranching towns. The bicycle craze hit in the 1890s, just as in the Midwest and parts East. The safety bicycle, which replaced the large front-wheeled bike (the “ordinary”) of previous years, found ready acceptance. People rode bikes all over the mountains on roads that were hardly more than trails. Local newspapers reported their adventures and hailed the arrival of bicycle salesmen as a harbinger of spring. Bicycle clubs were formed, and they, too, sponsored social occasions. The ladies rode, too, although they were careful to wear long dresses, or maybe “bloomers” that would cover their sexy ankles.

  Interestingl
y, as single- and double-jack equipment was replaced by machine drills in the mines, hand-drilling contests gained popularity. On holidays, such as the Fourth of July or Labor Day, a baseball game and drilling contest often highlighted the occasion. An individual or a team competed in a timed contest to see who could drill the deepest into a granite boulder. Prizes of a hundred or more dollars were not uncommon—compared to miners’ wages, a profitable few minutes’ work—and “champions” were hailed in the press and often recognized regionally.

  The 1893 Fourth of July celebration in Creede was typical. The doublejack contest offered $250 for first place and the single-jack prize was $50; the winning baseball team received $300. There were “fast and slow” bicycle and burro races, plus contests purely for entertainment, such as the blindfolded wheelbarrow race and the sack race. A bowling contest was also included.

  The other major holiday season stretched from Christmas through New Year’s, when the mines closed and the miners came to town. Fraternal organizations and clubs sponsored dances, the churches held various celebrations, and the schools often displayed their young scholars singing and reciting holiday carols and verses. Santa Claus might also make an appearance with candy for the “good boys and girls.” The Creede Candle, December 23, 1892, wished: “May Santa Claus, he of the white beard, jolly face, rotund figure and the reindeers, fill each and every one of your socks clear to the brim with good things.”

  New Year’s Eve might have a few “watch night” services, but was generally given over to fun and frolic. Cripple Creek, at the height of its boom, welcomed the new year and the new century in this fashion, according to the Star. “At the stroke of 12 not only did pandemonium break loose in the way of shrieking whistles and booming dynamite and yelling people but [also in] a flow of free ardent and malt beverages at the different saloons.” The reporter added that in spite of this commotion, there was “very little drunkenness observed” and “no disturbances.”