The Trail of Gold and Silver

by Duane A. Smith

  The complex causes had both domestic and international origins, but the event that triggered the collapse was the gold reserve falling below the $100 million mark for the first time in the country’s history. This created emotional fear that the government might be nearing bankruptcy and might have to suspend gold payments, which created a cascading clamor among eastern businessmen and gold advocates. As the gold reserve continued to dip, Cleveland and his supporters took the position that the Sherman Silver Purchase Act was responsible for the nation’s woes, and he called for a special session of Congress to repeal it.

  This set the stage for the final struggle between the gold bugs and the silverites, sound moneyists and inflationists, debtors and creditors, East and West—all convinced they had to save the country. Meanwhile, Coloradans were trapped in what might have been the worst depression in the state’s history. It spread everywhere, from farm to town to mine; no one seemed immune. The full force hit in July 1893. Within a few days, twelve Denver banks failed, smelters stopped operating, real estate values tumbled, businesses failed, railroads edged toward bankruptcy, and men were thrown out of work. Desperate people traveled around aimlessly, seeking any kind of work.

  Press reports from the eastern Plains to the Western Slope reveal the frantic, distressed times. “Shoulder to shoulder, men, while the war upon Colorado continues.” “The once flourishing mining camp of Aspen is now badly prostrated by a crushing blow to its great industry. It has been a complete knock-out.” “Those who remain in town must take courage, there is a better time coming.” “There are many desperate people in all parts of the state at this time.”3 Meanwhile, poor Creede’s youth and boom days vanished in a twinkling.

  In this era, which predated federal government assistance by several decades, the business community was expected to pull the country out of the depression. It could not do so. Relief groups and churches soon ran out of money, and men and families moved out of the mountains to Denver, frantically searching for work or help of any kind. None was available.

  Though it is hard to express in written words the shock, heartache, and bitterness of the disheartening, miserable summer months of 1893, a report from the Colorado Bureau of Labor Statistics came close. The report opened with a typically verbose Victorian sentence:

  From the beginning of the existing financial depression, we have all been more or less impressed with a sense of the wide-spread devastation being wrought in our state through the prostration of an industry which has filled our otherwise solitary mountains with thousands of our bravest and most stalwart citizens, who have built road-ways along the dizzy heights and beetling crags, where the eagle once circled in unbroken silence, amidst the awful grandeur of nature’s work in her sternest mood.

  Reports from the various mining districts presented the grim picture of the collapse:

  Custer County [Silver Cliff, Rosita]: “The people are almost destitute, owing to failure of crops and decreasing price of silver. Money cannot be got on any security.”

  San Juan County [Silverton]: “Our only hope is a favorable silver legislation, if that is knocked out, we go out with it.”

  Lake County [Leadville]: “Business is completely stagnated. The people are leaving as rapidly as their friends in other places can send them money to get away with. The approaching winter finds business men and laborers alike standing on the verge of bankruptcy, hunger and destitution.”

  San Miguel County [Telluride]: “With the Sherman law repealed and no substitute given us favorable to silver[,] ‘our name is mud.’”

  Summit County [Breckenridge]: “The feeling among the miners interested in silver-lead mines is rather blue.”

  Rio Grande County [Del Norte]: “This valley feels the prevailing depression heavily because of the falling off in work at mines ordinarily using valley products.”

  Pitkin County [Aspen]: “The situation is bad and couldn’t be very much worse. If we get no favorable legislation, Aspen and vicinity is a goner.”

  The BLS report also carried dismal news of unemployment and mine closings in mining communities throughout Colorado. A few samples show the drastic impact:

  Even if some of these were merely emotion-based guesses, they told the tale of woe in the bleak silver districts.

  Such terms as “gloomy, very bad, depressing, hopeless, serious, blue, dark” summarized the “general feelings” and signaled the collapse of an era and its dreams.4 Even the gold districts, such as Central City and Cripple Creek, garnered only fair reports at best. Coloradans looked to Washington, where their silver champions—Henry Teller, his junior colleague Edward Wolcott, and their allies—would need to fight the good fight on the Senate floor.

  Congress met in August, and the fight over repeal dragged on for three months. The silverites gave impassioned speeches; the sound-money advocates and creditor interests replied in kind. The outnumbered farmer and silver senators filibustered, but it did no good. In the end, the Sherman Silver Purchase Act was repealed, even though doing so solved nothing. The country and Colorado slid deeper into recession, which in Colorado lasted almost the entire decade.

  The time of silver in Colorado was over. Many of the silver camps would never recover. In towns such as Georgetown, Aspen, and Leadville, waning prosperity marked the end of an era, as silver production began its long decline. Coloradans might chant—and even believe—that “Silver Is Still King,” but its reign had ended when the price of silver plummeted to the fifty-cents-an-ounce range.

  The situation in the state would have been even worse if not for the discovery of the Cripple Creek gold bonanza, the greatest in Colorado history. It was the one final, electrifying moment before the era disappeared forever into memory and myth and left it to history to reconstruct what had happened, where, and why. Situated in a volcanic bowl west of that beacon of the 1859 rush, Pike’s Peak, the Cripple Creek area had been generally ignored. A brief flurry of excitement over purported gold strikes in 1884, which became known as the Mount Pisgah hoax, ended with the discovery that the claims had been salted; the deception gave the region a long-lasting bad name. What transpired in 1890, however, became a legendary story of a western gold discovery.

  Most people assumed that this was cattle country, not mining country. A few prospectors had drifted in and out, but one man, Bob Womack—part-time cowboy, part-time prospector—continued searching for the gold he ardently believed was there. He found some promising gold float and tried to locate its origin higher in the hills, without a great deal of success. Unfortunately, he was an undistinguished fellow, given to carousing when he ventured down to Colorado Springs, and appeared to be only a teller of “tall tales” about his gold. Hence, little credence was attached to his statements.

  Finally, in October 1890, after a decade or so of prospecting, Womack found what he had been looking for and staked the El Paso claim. His ore assayed at $250 to the ton. Finally, there was something substantial on the other side of the mountain from Colorado Springs that aroused interest. Womack’s moment of fame was already over, however. He, like so many of his kind, had discovered the wealth for others to enjoy. Bob Womack sold his claim, drank a lot, and in the end benefited little from his discovery except for the celebrity status of having opened Cripple Creek.

  In the spring and summer of 1891, the rush was on, with claims staked on nearly every hill in the immediate vicinity of Womack’s El Paso discovery. A mining district, organized in April, was named after nearby Cripple Creek, and little camps soon dotted the landscape. Both the tenderfoots and the experienced prospectors/miners who dashed into the district had nearly the same guarantee of success. As the summer wore on, the hills literally swarmed with prospectors, quickly followed by the rest of the denizens who populated a new mining area. Coloradans had seen it all before . . . but something seemed different about this rush.

  There had been no other gold district like this in Colorado. Located in a 10,000-acre bowl of volcanic rock that had been fragmented by eruptive exp
losions, Cripple Creek showed little surface gold. The ore veins, relatively narrow and not marked by quartz outcroppings, were not sufficiently different from surrounding rock to draw attention. Veins could be discovered only by blasting into the ground or sinking a test shaft.

  Valuable ore was sometimes thrown out on the dump; conversely, worthless gangue was sometimes shipped in error. Continual assaying, a potentially costly procedure, had to be done to determine the worth of one’s claim—then it took capital to open and develop the property. Despite its humble discoverer, Cripple Creek was not the storied “poor man’s diggings.” The Colorado Springs Gazette (June 24, 1891) was correct when it warned readers: “It will take a long time for the district to develop and a good deal of money to find out whether there is gold at Cripple Creek. Cripple Creek is not a poor man’s camp.”

  Nevertheless, one man bucked the trend: Winfield Scott Stratton. Stratton’s story was even more classic than Womack’s. Stratton had come to Colorado back in the 1870s and caught a bad case of gold fever. A skilled carpenter, he would ply his trade in Colorado Springs in the winter and prospect in the summer. He read books and even enrolled in a mineralogy course at the new Colorado College. He prospected everywhere—in the San Juans and at Leadville, Silver Cliff, Aspen, Red Cliff, and Tin Cup—without noticeable success.

  By the spring of 1891, the now-experienced Stratton had prospected and mined in Colorado for seventeen years. Once more he ventured out, this time nearly in his backyard, to Cripple Creek. On July 4, he finally made the discovery he had sought for so long, staking two claims on Battle Mountain, the Independence and the Washington. He was about to become a legend.

  Not quite overnight, though. Initially, he thought the Independence was not valuable and gave a thirty-day option on the property to a San Francisco mining group. The night before they took over, however, Stratton uncovered a high-grade gold vein in a crosscut while removing his equipment. He quickly covered it and spent a nerve-wracking thirty days waiting. The mining group found no valuable ore and gave up the option, to Stratton’s immense relief. He went back to mining and became a multimillionaire. Conservatively, he held down production; according to legend, limiting himself to $2,000 net per day.

  His good fortune overflowed. In January 1892, two Irishmen, Jimmie Burns and Jimmie Doyle, staked a mini-sized claim on Battle Mountain they called the Portland. Located on just 69/1000 of an acre, it was surrounded by other claims. As luck would have it, they hit a rich gold vein, but immediately realized that the adjoining claimants would dispute ownership, based on the contentious apex law. Burns and Doyle approached Stratton, who became their partner, and the three braced for a fight. Cannily, they managed to purchase enough claims to head off potential lawsuits, and eventually the three men ended up owning 183 acres of Battle Mountain. It cost more than a million dollars to buy the land, but Stratton and his partners ended up controlling the richest mines on the richest mountain in the district.

  By October 1891, with the first significant ore deliveries to the Denver smelters, Cripple Creek’s fame was assured. Even the skeptical Gazette seemed convinced. The October 24 issue proclaimed it a “very lively” district, “with buildings going up in every direction.” Gold production from the district almost met even the wildest predictions, jumping from $2 million in 1893 to $18 million in the peak year 1900. Once again Colorado became the darling of the mining world. Investors and the rest of the typical mining-rush crowd arrived, along with hordes of unemployed miners from the silver districts throughout the state.

  The result was predictable: Colorado’s first major labor dispute and strike. There had been one large strike before, at the Chrysolite Mine (see chapter 6), but there had been no strong miners’ union. Meanwhile, the hard times had caused owners and companies to cut back wages, release miners, and generally retrench—which had led to small strikes at Aspen, Rico, and Creede over these issues, plus the thorny, emotionally fraught one of unionization itself. The Western Federation of Miners (WFM), which had originated in Butte, Montana, now aimed to organize miners at Cripple Creek. If it could win in Colorado’s most prosperous district, it would gain great momentum to organize miners throughout the state.

  Initially, though, the owners held the advantage. Miners flocked to Cripple Creek looking for work. A group of owners moved to reduce wages from the standard $3 to $2.50 per day, willing to risk a strike with so many out-of-work miners clamoring for jobs. The WFM reacted by organizing a local union, and positions on both sides hardened. Unable to agree on a district-wide wage scale and hours, some of the owners took the offensive in January 1894 and unilaterally instituted a nine-hour day at $3, while refusing to deal with the union.

  The owners made pious statements about good working conditions and other districts’ hours, but the miners went out on strike anyway. They had their own problems, including the fact that a miner could barely maintain a family on $3 a day, even if he worked all the time, which many did not. Even in a depression, Cripple Creek’s boom days kept prices higher than elsewhere.

  To the amazement of the belligerent owners, the tightly organized miners stayed out into March. The owners’ position was also undercut by the fact that neither the Portland nor the Independence mines followed their lead; both continued working. To the chagrin of the other owners, Stratton, the old prospector-miner, refused to cut wages, and continued making money while his counterparts’ properties sat idle. He treated his men with more consideration than did many of his contemporaries. Further antagonizing the owners, strikers from their headquarters at Altman, the highest and most unionized camp in the district, defied them too.

  As the situation deteriorated, Governor Davis Waite sent in the state militia, which calmed things down for a while, but when the troops departed peace did not ensue. The owners, who controlled the sheriff’s office, sent a trainload of recently deputized “bully boys,” many from Denver, to teach the miners a lesson. As they passed the Strong mine, on their way to Altman, the union stronghold, the mine buildings blew up, showering the train with flying metal and wood debris; the panicked deputies quickly fled. With the recurrence of violence, Waite sent the guard back in. To the surprise and chagrin of the owners, the guard proved neutral, siding with no one. Finally, after four months, the owners were dragged reluctantly to the bargaining table. Under pressure from Waite, invited as a union representative, they conceded to an eight-hour day at the standard $3 wage.

  The WFM had won a strike, one of the longest and fiercest to date. With confidence thus bolstered, it set about to organize all of Colorado. As both sides realized, this was not the end but only the beginning. The fight between management and labor would last two decades, spreading from hard rock to coalfields, before finally ending in tragedy on a spring day in April 1914, at Ludlow, in Colorado’s southern coalfield.

  Management learned a lesson. It needed to organize into a cohesive unit and elect a supportive governor and, if possible, legislature. With the election of Republican governor Albert McIntire in 1894, the owners gained a valuable ally.

  When the WFM organized the Leadville miners and demanded a return to the $3 daily wage, which had been lowered to $2.50 by joint agreement in 1893 to help keep the district alive, the owners were ready. When that demand was refused, the WFM, riding a wave of popularity and confidence after Cripple Creek, called a strike. Both sides dug in. The owners quickly fortified their properties and brought in guards and strikebreakers, or scabs, while refusing to deal with the union representatives.

  Meanwhile, with the mines closed, some flooded, an unfortunate occurrence that slowed Leadville mining for the rest of the decade. Violence erupted at mines operated by nonunion miners. In September, a mob attacked the scabs working at Leadville’s Coronado and Emmet mines, killing several. The call went out for help, and McIntire sent in the guard—which, this time, sided with management and set out to break the union once and for all. With the guard protecting the nonunion workers, the mines gradually returned to operat
ion, and the strikers could only watch bitterly.

  The strike dragged on to a tortuous end, with the miners unable to match the staying power of the owners who were backed by the state. Many miners left, and the rest conceded dejectedly and went back to work on the employers’ terms as the strike collapsed. The Leadville union was broken, the WFM suffered a major setback statewide, and the owners learned further lessons they would not soon forget. Neither side was happy, and the lingering bitterness left them ready for another round that each was determined to win, seemingly at any cost. Outright hatred replaced mere dislike or distrust, and peaceful solutions fell victim to violence against property and individuals. A few more (albeit minor) incidents marred labor/management relations as the century came to a close, further exacerbating tensions between the two groups. Colorado was a tinderbox ready to explode. The union, meanwhile, faced long odds in a struggle that had become largely one-sided, given the state’s authority backing the owners.

  Still, not all union locals were so contentious and radical. In the northern 1890s Boulder County gold mining district of Eldora, the Western Federation of Miners gained a toehold. The district had more enthusiasm and hustling promoters than high-grade ore, but that did not matter to those caught up in the mini-excitement. The Eldora Miners’ Union was organized in the camp on March 8, 1898, “in view of the fearfully hazardous nature of our vocations, premature old age, and many ills, the result of unnatural toil.” They formed the association for “the promotion and protection of our common interests.”

  The local’s constitution provided clear insight into what the miners desired from their union, which cost $2.50 to join. Members had to be elected by a majority vote, and were “entitled to a fair trial for any offense involving suspension or expulsion.” A meeting was to be held once a week; a $75 “funeral benefit” was established; any member injured or sick would receive $10 per week, “for a period not to exceed ten weeks in any one year.” Nothing, however, would be paid for sickness or accident “caused by intemperance or immoral conduct.” Officers’ duties, rules of order, and other articles filled out the twenty-three pages of the constitution.5