The Trail of Gold and Silver

by Duane A. Smith

  The modern world entered mining communities in many ways, both in private homes and on Main Street. Electricity promised numerous benefits for Colorado mining and mining towns, and in the 1890s it spread throughout the mountains. Two types of electrical power were being experimented with, direct current and alternating current. In theory, alternating current was better, because higher voltages could be transported more cheaply over long distances; however, the direct-current process championed by Edison on the eastern seaboard was adopted by many communities and industries, including Aspen. Its main problem was loss of voltage over distance; power stations had to be built about every two miles.

  In the mountains, alternating current seemed more advantageous, once the theory evolved into practical reality. It did so thanks to Lucien L. Nunn and his Gold King Mine high in the San Juans, which needed an economical power source. As a result, the nation’s first alternating-current power plant opened in 1891 at Ames near Telluride. Running six days a week, the plant ushered in a new era, as well as providing quite a show for intrigued onlookers when the sparking, hissing generators were started. In the years that followed, electricity replaced older power and illumination sources, such as steam and gas, wherever possible. It forever changed work in the mines and life in the mining communities.

  The automobile, that chugging monster that scared horses, made its appearance after the turn of the century. The “horseless carriage” reached Leadville via Colorado Springs in 1902, a fairly easy, day-long drive. By comparison, the first car to travel over the well-named Stoney Pass into Silverton took five days in 1910 and even then made it only with the help of horses.

  Speeding autos soon became a problem, and city councils had to devise acceptable speed limits and prohibit such activities as driving on “sidewalks.” Because the automobile was new, it was a learning experience for all. Telluride handled the problem by prohibiting anyone from going faster than eight miles per hour on the main streets or from going through an intersection or turning a corner faster than four mph. In the rest of the town, drivers could go ten mph. If they struck “any pedestrian or another vehicle,” however, the fine ranged from $10 to $100.

  The “auto craze” led an increased demand for better roads, although the clamor actually started with the bicyclists, who soon tired of bumping over rocks and bogging down in seemingly bottomless mud holes. It was no better for the early auto drivers. For example, Creede cheered the arrival of five “automobile loads” of tourists in August 1914, all the way from Kansas City. The only problem they noticed, reported the Creede Candle (August 8, 1914) was “muddy roads,” although not in Mineral County, which they praised “liberally.”

  Part of the problem was the lack of state money for roads. The funds that were available tended to go to the more populated regions along the foothills. Cash-strapped mining counties could not offer a great deal of assistance, as much as they might have wanted to. Mountain roads also posed unusual engineering and maintenance issues, which only became worse in the high mountain mining districts. One result of these problems was the Good Roads Association, which promoted both better roads and tourism. It sponsored the Good Roads Day, when locals worked on various sections of nearby roads filling potholes, putting up road signs, grading surfaces, and doing anything else that might help.

  The new transportation wonder benefited mining in more ways than the car. Trucks offered almost unlimited potential for hauling ore, supplies, and other goods more cheaply, conveniently, and quickly than mule and burro trains—or even the railroad, for that matter. The railroads that had long been essential to mining began to decline in importance.

  Leadville, as well as other mining towns, saw the possibilities the auto offered. Georgetown, Aspen, Gothic, Ouray—towns large and small—hoped that tourists would come for a “delightful summer” stay in the “cool, beautiful” mountains that surrounded them. In May 1913, Leadville formed a Commercial Club to publicize Lake County and attract “motor tourists.” The Herald Democrat proclaimed: “The automobile is doing wonders in linking the whole country together. It is doing this in a more intimate sense, even, than the railways.” That attitude soon put an end to railroads’ domination of tourism, because “the leisurely auto tourist makes a point to stop a while at various points of interest.”

  Promote or die! Mining communities promoted tourism to the best of their limited financial abilities. They joined associations, published articles in magazines, wrote feature stories for local newspapers, and encouraged locals to “be nice to visitors.” This included, for Georgetown, having comfortable rooms available for tourists and sprucing up the town to make a favorable impression on first-time visitors. They also encouraged railroad travel bureaus to promote stopping for a visit, whether for sightseeing, fishing, or simply relaxation. A few communities that had or were near hot springs, such as Ouray and Idaho Springs, promoted the health-giving qualities of their mineral waters, whether by drinking or enjoying a “life-restoring” bath.

  More than scenery drew tourists, however. Some came to see history before it slipped away. In a few still-prosperous towns, like Creede in the 1890s or Telluride and Cripple Creek just past the turn of the century, they could see the “real McCoy,” with all its attractions and warts—the “vanished” West was right there before their eyes. More likely, they might wander around ghost towns, trying to imagine what had transpired there and talking to old-timers who had been there when times were flush. These old-timers actually became a major Colorado tourist lure: They would sit in the warm sun on summer days and reminisce (perhaps remembering more than actually happened) with visitors about times and people long gone.

  Even as they spun their yarns, a new invention was changing the image of the West forever: the motion picture. The image, though, was not of mining but of the legendary “Gunsmoke and Gallop West.” As the twentieth century dawned and matured, opera houses like the Tabor in Leadville became movie theaters, as did old stores or any vacant buildings that could be modified to show a movie. Initially, one-reel films, then two- and three-reelers soon appeared in “theaters” in the towns and even some of the camps. The Silverton Weekly Miner (August 7, 1914), promoted When the Earth Trembled, called “pathetic and thrilling” and “one of the best moving picture shows.” But it was the Western that gained the most popularity, starting with the very first one, The Great Train Robbery. Mining never became a staple subject for Hollywood.

  As the United States entered World War I and the Colorado mining camps and towns slipped into history, legend, and folklore, few stopped to look back. A new era had dawned, a new twentieth-century Colorado that looked ahead rather than to the past. That teenager of the Pike’s Peak rush, now well into his or her seventies, would have witnessed an amazing transformation. At the same time, he or she might look back longingly at the days of youth and mining’s high time. A song from that Victorian era, “After the Ball,” captured melancholy remembrances of a time that now seemed quaint:

  After the ball is over,

  After the break of morn,

  After the dancers’ leaving,

  After the stars are gone;

  Many a heart is aching,

  If you could read them;

  Many the hopes that have vanish’d

  After the ball.

  9

  “The Everlasting Love of the Game”

  Mabel Barbee Lee, in trying to portray the allure of mining for her readers, recalled a meeting she had had with an old-time Cripple Creek prospector during a 1951 visit to the then ghost-like town. No longer the exciting, booming “metropolis” of her youth, Cripple Creek languished in yesterday:

  The shine of hope and faith in the old fellow’s eyes followed me long after he had disappeared from sight, and it came to me, as it had once long ago, that it wasn’t the gold he wanted. It would likely slip through his fingers in no time, or be given away for the asking. It was the enticing hunt that led him on, the elusive chase, the everlasting love of the game.

/>   The “enticing hunt,” the “elusive chase,” the “everlasting love,” or, as David Lavender described it in his novel, Red Mountain, “the frame of mind of the people”1—all these things spurred the miners on as they rushed, claimed, developed, and then moved again to chase a new dream.

  It had started with the Pike’s Peak rush of 1859, which even in the 1890s seemed a long time ago. By 1890, a generation had passed and the early days had become the stuff of history and romanticized stories. Industrial mining had replaced the legendary prospector and his burro, and workaday reality had supplanted the strike-it-rich dreams of yesteryear. Except for Aspen, there had been little to cheer about recently. Colorado mining seemed to have reached old age as the century neared its end. Mining would continue, but it lacked the glamor, the excitement, and the individual rags-to-riches stories of wealth that spawned early Colorado mining history legends And yet, in that last decade of the nineteenth century, a faith—a fond hope—still tantalizingly beckoned: that maybe, somewhere over the next mountain, the “mother lode” still lay hidden waiting for some lucky prospector.

  The 1890s, the “Gay Nineties” of folklore and legend, were anything but gay in Colorado mining. There were a few exciting days, but there were far more depressing ones. Before the decade ended, the “jack ass” prospector’s dream of stumbling into his own private bonanza would be gone, and the day miner’s hope of owning his own mine would fade away. In their place would be the “modern” industrial world of absentee owners, professional management, stockholder demands, and labor/management confrontations.

  Silver did produce one more excitement early in 1891, when Creede roared into the spotlight and reached the $1 million production level within a year. “It was day all day in the daytime, and there is no night in Creede,” sang local newspaperman-poet Cy Warman. Like its fellow strike areas, Creede, in its own mind, was the best-ever mining district. Look out, world, shouted the Creede Candle (January 14, 1892): “Certain it is, no other camp yet opened in Colorado could show six as rich producing mines as those opened within eight months from the time the first real intelligent prospecting was done.” Overpromoted as a second Leadville and overly exploited, Creede shone briefly, but fate dealt it a bad hand. It was silver’s last hurrah.

  Except for the continuing decline in the price of silver, the early years of the decade were good to the state’s mining industry. With silver production at about the $20 million level and gold moving up from $4 million to $5 million annually, Colorado mining had never produced so much. To maintain that level of silver production, however, more ore had to be mined every year, taking from the future to pay for the present.

  Part of the euphoria resulted from the passage of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act in 1890. After more than a decade of wrangling, the silverites finally caught a break. Eastern Republicans were terrified by the possibility of inflation, which they were convinced “free silver” would bring about, but they needed western votes to pass a high protectionist tariff. Westerners were not strongly in favor of the idea, but were willing to go along if a bargain could be struck. The resulting vote-trading led to passage of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, balanced by the higher McKinley tariff. After enactment of the former, the Treasury was required to purchase 4.5 million ounces of silver per month, or the assumed total U.S. production of 54 million ounces per year. One of the main differences between this act and the earlier Bland-Allison Act was the substitution of ounces for dollars’-worth purchased.

  To placate unhappy “gold bugs,” the silver certificates issued could be redeemed in either gold or silver at the discretion of the Secretary of the Treasury. Western silver interests had again gained only half a loaf. More silver would be purchased, but there was no guaranteed price or price ratio, such as the long-sought 16-to-1 silver-to-gold ratio that Easterners stubbornly refused to grant. Such horse-trading satisfied no one completely. Conservative Easterners still wanted what to them was “sacred”: the gold standard and “sound money.” Eastern creditors also feared that the plan was a concession to “cheap money,” foreseeing that debts would be repaid with money worth less than the amounts they had loaned to debtor Westerners.

  For a while, though, the plan seemed to work. The price of silver jumped to $1.07 an ounce in 1890, but then fell steadily until it reached a dismal 78 cents an ounce in 1893 (roughly a 36 percent drop). Again the silverites rose in angry protest, but now they had a much broader support base.

  In the simplest terms, farmers were having nearly the same troubles as the miners, but for different reasons. Postwar expansion onto the Great Plains and beyond had greatly increased the number of farmers, who, thanks to virgin land and new seed varieties, improved farming methods, and better equipment, were able to produce more crops—but at a cost. To finance land and everything else they needed, they had to borrow money, mostly from eastern bankers and other investors. The market did not expand as rapidly as production, and the resulting surplus lowered prices. However, the prices the farmers paid for equipment and the high interest on the funds they had borrowed did not decline.

  The farmer—once the “backbone of America”—found himself marginalized, in debt, passed over by prosperity, and derided as a “hick” and a “hayseed” by his more “up-to-date” urban cousins. Agrarian spokespersons thought there was “a screw loose” in the American economic system, and from their perspective indeed there was. Farmer protest groups that appeared in the 1870s and 1880s finally coalesced into the People’s Party, better known as the Populist Party. Farmers and miners had similar grievances—eastern creditors, eastern bankers, unsympathetic Washington, big business, unresponsive Republican and Democratic Parties, and hard times spreading—and thus they decided to run their own candidates on their own issues.

  “All power to the people,” not to entrenched interests, became an appealing rallying cry. Both groups wanted “cheap money,” which they believed would produce inflation and raise the prices of silver and crops. Shocked eastern conservatives recoiled, horrified at such heresy, such radicalism.

  Silverites in Colorado enthusiastically cheered when the Populists announced, among their other 1892 platform positions, “the free and unlimited coinage of silver at the ratio of 16 ounces of silver to l of gold.” The “silver issue” took on intensified meaning. It was free silver, and free silver alone, that Coloradans wanted. The Populists’ and other parties’ ideas might be fine, and some might actually benefit Colorado, but free silver directly championed their interests and their future.

  Silver was going to help the miners, farming folk, city dwellers, debtors, and anyone else who believed. Belief was the key. This particular political/economic stance incorporated a strange concoction of emotion and desperation, logic and illogic, hope and fear, confidence in the cause and dismay that others could not see the justice of their stand, all based on the fact that the American dream had become a nightmare. It was rural America vs. urban America, old America vs. new America, the common folk vs. the rich, us vs. them—and it was cast in terms that were part carney pitch and part hard-headed reality.

  The Populists, less a party than a cause, were “marching to Zion” with a near-religious fervor. Coloradans certainly believed in Populism in 1892. They gave their presidential electoral votes to Populist James Weaver, elected the outspoken Populist Davis Waite governor, and sent Lafe Pence to the United States House of Representatives. Populists also gained control of Colorado’s new House seat with the election of John Bell. With the aid of the Democrats, they also controlled the state senate and came within one vote of a house majority.

  With revolution brewing at home, Colorado’s two Republican senators, Henry Teller and Edward Wolcott, worked hard to convince their congressional colleagues of the correctness of the silverites’ position. Joined by “silver” congressmen from Montana, Nevada, and Idaho, they spoke, lobbied, advocated, wrote, and tried in every manner imaginable to advance the silver cause.

  Teller worked endlessly at promoti
ng the idea of making silver and gold equal in the United States monetary world—a ploy that, it was hoped, would make silver worth $1.25 an ounce. On January 6, 1892, he rose to give a long, detailed speech in the Senate. Though not a spell-binding orator, he presented the silver question well, both logically and emotionally. Salient points included:

  • Both metals were “indispensable to the prosperity of any nation.”

  • Silver must be granted “full recognition as a money metal.”

  • Silver and gold had coexisted throughout history.

  • The country needed more money in circulation. “Without a sufficient amount of money with which to do business, the energies of the people are depressed and in time destroyed.”

  • Every nation “except this” one has hailed its precious-metals production “as a boon from the Almighty.”

  • If the people were allowed to vote, a “very very decided majority” would be in favor of bimetallism.

  • Silver “better meets the wants of the people of this country [than gold], as it does the wants of the human race.”

  • It is not a question of “cheap money” versus “honest money.”

  On April 20, he again defended silver to his colleagues, pointing out crucial issues of the times. “We have fallen upon evil times. We have felt the great power, the tremendous influence of political and partisan attachments and political and party relations.” Teller concluded: “I may be a fanatic, I may be an enthusiast. Every word I have uttered upon this subject lies close to my heart. I warn my party . . . it can not afford to put itself on the side of a contraction to the extent of one-half of the volume of the money of the world.”2 Teller and his silver colleagues probably convinced few listeners with such speeches, but the people in the silver states applauded their efforts and felt well represented.

  That, then, was where the matter stood, when the fateful year 1893 dawned. President Grover Cleveland, who had just begun his second term, soon faced a major crisis. An economic panic and crash quickly became the worst depression the country had ever faced.