City of Gold

by Will Hobbs

  Till and his partner lived rough as coyotes for three or four years. It was dangerous work to say the least. Till came through it intact while his friend lost two fingers and broke some bones. They made such a hefty profit they were able to buy land and establish their own ranches.

  At the university, paleontology fascinated me no end, and the same went for Molly. What could be more interesting than the history of life, with nearly all of it yet to be discovered? For our fieldwork, we had in mind a certain remote location in the San Rafael Desert. That promontory and my dinosaur tooth were anything but easy to rediscover. On my second try, with Molly on our honeymoon, I succeeded. We stacked rocks to stand on for a better look. Up close, a small portion of a second tooth was showing, and the jawbone connecting the two. We went back with photos, and they created a sensation. Nearly every professor and grad student was eager to get on board. The complete skeleton of Ceratosaurus, a huge predator from the Late Jurassic, was waiting for our team to tease from the rock.

  Ma fell in love with a landscape painter from Vermont she met at Trimble. Once Ned saw southwest Colorado, he had a whole new world to paint, and when he discovered the canyon country with its arches, fins, natural bridges, and cliff ruins, he was head over heels. They were married in the new Friends Meeting House in Durango, and added three rooms onto the Hermosa place. Ned was a good man, and Ma found the happiness she deserved. In the ’30s, during the Depression, they finally got electricity and indoor plumbing. They lived on our forty acres from Uncle Jacob until Ma passed away at the age of seventy-seven.

  Till and I stayed as close as we could, given that Molly and I were teaching at Boulder. His ranch is on Wilson Mesa, outside Telluride. It looks east at that soaring wall of mountains I tumbled down during that snowstorm in the fall of 1900. After Molly and I retired to the old place in Hermosa, I saw Till more often. It was easy to get together in the years the Rio Grande Southern was still running. We both have a passel of grandkids. Till and Beth’s is the larger passel.

  When our children were young, my four and Till’s seven, they took our stories as factual but stretched into yarns. Their kids take them for tall tales. Till put me onto this project at a family reunion in Telluride. He said I needed to write it all down before we pass on. Not just about Butch and Sundance and the marshal and the gold, but the whole story. Start with Pa dying, Till said, and Ma having the sand to uproot herself and us and start over. And make sure to say that none of us ever got TB.

  Our outlaws often come to mind. It’s a wonder they were still on the loose in the first year of the twentieth century. Most of the historians believe Butch and Sundance met their end in Bolivia in 1908, at the town of San Vicente after sticking up a mine payroll. That hasn’t been proved and some writers speculate that one or both lived on. Of greater interest to Till and me is the fact that they fled the United States only four months after our time with them at the Roost. It took them four months, we figure, to recover the loot they’d stashed or buried in various locations around the West. I’ve read a number of books about Butch Cassidy, and I chuckle at something the writers never came across: how it was that he came up with the idea of fleeing to South America.

  During the time I was writing down my recollections here at Hermosa, I would often walk down the creek to a spot near its confluence with the Animas River. At the foot of the tall and solitary ponderosa where Till used to practice his knife tossing, that’s where we buried H and P. The big fellow lived to the age of thirty-one, and our sweetheart to thirty-four. We nailed their marker to the tree:

  HERCULES AND PEACHES

  OUR FAITHFUL FRIENDS

  SO FONDLY REMEMBERED

  Author’s Note

  City of Gold is a work of historical fiction. Hewing as close to history as the arc of the story would allow, I blended fact and fiction to create its characters, events, and timeline. My title jumped out at me from a 2016 publication of the Mining History Association: “Telluride’s gold production (circa 1897) was so robust that the town adopted the motto ‘City of Gold.’”

  I set the novel in the fall of 1900, the year the photo of “The Fort Worth Five” was taken. Historians believe the photograph of the Wild Bunch had much to do with Butch Cassidy deciding to call it quits. He’d been robbing banks and trains for eleven years. Remarkably, his only prison time was eighteen months in the Wyoming pen for knowingly buying a stolen horse that cost him five dollars. Articles in National Geographic are thought to have played a role in his decision to flee to South America. I came across “Road to Bolivia” in the July 1900 issue of National Geographic.

  Butch and Sundance, along with Sundance’s ladylove, Etta Place, sailed out of New York Harbor on February 20, 1901, bound for Argentina. The ship was a British freighter, the Herminius. In early March they disembarked in Buenos Aires and registered at the Europa Hotel under the name Harry A. Place, with Butch posing as Harry’s brother. Butch and Sundance took along enough loot to buy a 25,000-acre ranch in Patagonia’s beautiful Cholila Valley.

  The Hollowells are fictional, while their Quaker background comes from the history of eastern Kansas.

  Jim Clark was indeed the marshal of Telluride. He was widely believed in his time to have been complicit with Butch Cassidy in the robbery of Telluride’s San Miguel Valley Bank. According to one account Clark admitted to a payoff of $2,200. Marshal Clark was assassinated in 1895. He can’t object to me giving him five more years.

  Bud Norton, sheriff of La Plata County, is fictional. My interest in sheriffs, marshals, outlaws, and the Wild West goes back to my childhood. William B. Rhodes, the marshal of Dodge City, Kansas, was my great-grandfather. Will Rhodes was the town marshal for ten years beginning in 1892 and later played a leading role in reinventing Boot Hill as a tourist attraction.

  The Hites of Hite City, Utah, are historical. Hite City was inundated by the waters of Lake Powell, but the site reappears on the banks of the Colorado River when the reservoir recedes. The Hoskininni went into operation in 1901 and was abandoned the same year. The “flour gold” in the river sediment proved too fine for the dredge to collect. You have to wonder if the Navajo leader sent Cass Hite on a wild-goose chase. At the time of my story, the name “Colorado River” applied only to the river from its mouth at the Sea of Cortez up to the confluence of its two principal tributaries, the Grand River and the Green River. The Grand River was renamed the Colorado River by a joint resolution of Congress in 1921.

  Molly Dobson and her mother, Marie, are entirely fictional, but Decker Dobson (Molly’s father) is based on Francis Edward Curry, the editor of Telluride’s Daily Journal during the most contentious years in the town’s history. One of Curry’s rants against the miners appears verbatim in the novel. Telluride also had a weekly, the San Miguel Examiner. I drew heavily on its account of the Smuggler-Union disaster of November 20, 1901. In the aftermath, Local 63 charged the Smuggler-Union with criminal negligence for not having installed safety doors at the mouth of the Bullion Tunnel. Vincent St. John was the president of the local union chapter at the time, and Arthur Collins was the superintendent of the Smuggler-Union.

  In 1899 the Colorado Assembly enacted the eight-hour day in mines, smelters, and blast furnaces, only to have the new law declared unconstitutional and overturned by the Colorado Supreme Court. The miners of Local 63 went out on strike on May 4, 1901. Readers might want to look into the strike and the ensuing strife that troubled Telluride through 1908. If you’re looking for the hospital the miners built, you’ll find the building at the northwest corner of Columbia and Pine. Opened in November 1902, it has MINERS UNION emblazoned over the portal.

  Jean and I came to southwest Colorado in 1973, drawn by the shining San Juan Mountains. Early on, we rode the historic Denver and Rio Grande from Durango to Silverton, but had little sense of the former extent of Colorado’s narrow gauge railroads. In years to come we drove the mountain passes with their rusty mine works on our way to the picturesque mining towns of Silverton, Ouray, and Te
lluride. I had more than a passing interest but only a shallow grasp of their history. When I resolved to go prospecting for a story set in their mining heyday, I had a lot to learn.

  I was surprised by the extent of hard-rock mining in the San Juans—350 miles of tunnels in the Telluride area alone. The toxic legacy of the period continues to this day. In 2015, when water backed up inside a mine near Silverton and suddenly burst containment, the Animas River in Durango and the San Juan River through Shiprock ran yellow all the way to Lake Powell.

  I would like to recommend the books I drew on most heavily. Richard Patterson’s Butch Cassidy: A Biography (University of Nebraska Press, 1998) is wonderfully well researched. Brad Dimock’s The Very Hard Way: Bert Loper and the Colorado River (Fretwater Press, 2007) includes an excellent chapter on Cass Hite and the gold flurry in Glen Canyon. Gregory Crampton’s Ghosts of Glen Canyon (Publishers Place, 1988) has historic photos of Glen Canyon before Lake Powell, including Hite City and the Hite ferry at Dandy Crossing. When it comes to the history of the early dinosaur hunters, including Arthur Lakes, I would point you to “Science Red in Tooth and Claw,” a chapter in Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything (Broadway Books, 2004).

  Historian Duane Smith’s excellent Song of the Hammer and Drill: The Colorado San Juans, 1860–1914 (Colorado School of Mines Press, 1982) covers the history of the mining towns, the railroads, and early Durango. Harriet Fish Backus’s Tomboy Bride (Pruett Publishing, 1969) is rich in anecdotes of life at the Tomboy Mine, packrats and all. I am indebted to Telluride-born historian David Lavender for The Telluride Story (Wayfinder Press, 2007) and his classic memoir, One Man’s West (University of Nebraska Press, 1977), in which I learned of rustlers, running irons, and those thousands of abandoned longhorns gone wild in the canyon country.

  My first glimmers of City of Gold came from geographer Mel Griffiths’ book, San Juan Country (Pruett Publishing, 1984). Mel Griffiths and David Lavender both labored in Ouray’s Camp Bird Mine when it reopened in the Depression. Griffiths’ coverage of Telluride’s mines and mills includes his accounts of the Tomboy Mine’s “bullion mule” and the mule that carried the seven-hundred-pound load up to the Tomboy, both true stories.

  Durango, Colorado

  September 2019

  About the Author

  Photo by Jean Hobbs

  WILL HOBBS is the award-winning author of Crossing the Wire, Far North, Downriver, and many more acclaimed adventure novels. With City of Gold, his twentieth, Will brings to life the colorful and turbulent history of Telluride, Colorado. Its characters include Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in the year before they fled to South America.

  In addition to his extensive research for City of Gold, Will drew on decades of backpacking in the San Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado, exploring the canyons of southeast Utah, and running the rivers of the Southwest with his wife, Jean. They live in Durango and have been frequent visitors to Telluride over the years.

  For an interview with Will on each of his books and much more, including photos, visit his website at www.WillHobbsAuthor.com.

  Discover great athors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Books by Will Hobbs

  Changes in Latitudes

  Bearstone

  Downriver

  The Big Wander

  Beardance

  Kokopelli’s Flute

  Far North

  Ghost Canoe

  Beardream

  River Thunder

  Howling Hill

  The Maze

  Jason’s Gold

  Down the Yukon

  Wild Man Island

  Jackie’s Wild Seattle

  Leaving Protection

  Crossing the Wire

  Go Big or Go Home

  Take Me to the River

  Never Say Die

  Copyright

  CITY OF GOLD. Copyright © 2020 by Will Hobbs. Mule illustration in map: Clipart courtesy FCIT. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  www.harpercollinschildrens.com

  Cover art © 2020 James Bernardin

  Cover design by Laura Mock

  * * *

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Hobbs, Will, author.

  Title: City of gold / by Will Hobbs.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, [2020] | Summary: “Determined to recover his family’s mules, fifteen-year-old Owen is joined by his kid brother and Telluride’s notorious marshal in pursuit of a rustler—all the way to Butch Cassidy’s hideout”— Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019033269 | ISBN 9780061708817 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Frontier and pioneer life—Colorado—Juvenile fiction. | CYAC: Frontier and pioneer life—Colorado—Fiction. | Robbers and outlaws—Fiction. | Mules—Fiction. | Single-parent families—Fiction. | Colorado—History—19th century—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.H6524 Cit 2020 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019033269

  Digital Edition JULY 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-243640-5

  Print ISBN: 978-0-06-170881-7

  * * *

  2021222324PC/LSCH10987654321

  FIRST EDITION

  About the Publisher

  Australia

  HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty. Ltd.

  Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street

  Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia

  www.harpercollins.com.au

  Canada

  HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

  Bay Adelaide Centre, East Tower

  22 Adelaide Street West, 41st Floor

  Toronto, Ontario, M5H 4E3

  www.harpercollins.ca

  India

  HarperCollins India

  A 75, Sector 57

  Noida

  Uttar Pradesh 201 301

  www.harpercollins.co.in

  New Zealand

  HarperCollins Publishers New Zealand

  Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive

  Rosedale 0632

  Auckland, New Zealand

  www.harpercollins.co.nz

  United Kingdom

  HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF, UK

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  United States

  HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  195 Broadway

  New York, NY 10007

  www.harpercollins.com