The Trail of Gold and Silver

by Duane A. Smith

  A Denver Post editorial (March 15, 2008), “This Isn’t Your Father’s Gold Rush,” returned to another theme that had been around for a generation: “an overhaul of the [1872] mining law is long overdue.” It proposed that royalties from “gross income” be, among other things, tied to a mine cleanup fund. A “Hardrock Mining and Reclamation Act” had already passed the House and awaited Senate action. Still, Congress has been down this road before, and the end is still not in sight in mid-2009.

  The miner of 1859, 1879, and 1909 would be amazed at the continuing evolution in the mining industry, and Colorado’s development, since he dug his lonely way into the mountainside. One item that would certainly catch his attention would be the wages paid his industrial descendants—but he would need to take a good look at the cost of living today before he succumbed to envy. He would look about and see only large mining corporations. The wandering jackass prospector is long gone, along with most of the small-time, independent operators. Meanwhile, Uncle Sam watches over every miner’s shoulder. That old-timer would, no doubt, be surprised at today’s safety measures, today’s equipment, and today’s mining methods, not to mention the cost of that mining equipment. He would probably bemoan the loss of the independence and freedom that were once hallmarks of the industry, but which are now only part of the legend of the “rush” days.

  Nothing might shock him more than the environmental revolution of the past generation. Nor would the harsh criticism of mining and its legacy, during the 1960s and 1970s, be appreciated or understood. Criticism continues into the twenty-first century, though generally with less emotion and public outcry unless there is an environmental accident. Some of the criticism has certainly been warranted; some has not. Even today, in some respects, most non-mining Americans do not understand the significance of mining to the present and the future. Once again, that bumper sticker reminds all who see it: “If it can’t be Grown, it has to be Mined.” Coloradans face the multidimensional problem of escaping their mining past, accepting that past, and coming to grips with the legacy of that past. Then they must come to grips with the future.

  Of the four most important Colorado mining districts (Central City, Leadville, San Juans, and Cripple Creek), only the last is still actively mined today on a major scale. The others mine tourists’ pocketbooks, thanks to their historical legacies: They profit from their past by recalling their days of fame and fortune. In many senses, they, and their counterparts in other states, have made legends out of the things they want to believe. In some ways, mining provides a more constant source of income for the old mining camps and towns in the twenty-first century than it ever did when it underwrote their settlement and development. Thus, mining continues to play a role throughout the mountains and valleys, with fact and reality so often intermixed with legend and folklore that the two are sometimes hard to separate.

  Colorado mining, which gave the towns their mines, enabled their birth, furnished their sustenance, nourished their growth, and delimited their lives, “is dead my friend,” in the words of that quintessential Westerner Charlie Russell, “but writers hold the seed and what they saw will live and grow again to those who read.” Horace Tabor, the epitome of Colorado mining’s reality and legend, apparently understood this. He placed these words of the poet Charles Kingsley on the drop curtain of his splendid architectural achievement, the Tabor Grand Opera House:

  So fleet the works of men back to the earth again;

  Ancient and holy things fade like a dream.

  Russell’s prediction stands against the fact that neither fiction writers nor Hollywood ever took much of a fancy to mining. The legend of the cowboy on a horse, riding the open range, driving a herd along a trail, and galloping into town for fun and frolic somehow seems more romantic, more exciting, and more typically Western to the public. A miner working an underground shift in a dangerous, dark environment, or a millhand laboring to separate gold and silver from mere rock, does not attract as many readers or viewers as stories of the wide-open spaces.

  Occasionally a mining town gains some literary, television, or film attention, but it usually comes as a function of the urban environment rather than the mining that was the industrial base of its existence—or it becomes simply the backdrop for a western morality play. The musical, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, is a good example. Although Molly had strong ties to Leadville mining, her primary fame sprang from her survival of the sinking of the Titanic.

  Perhaps it is only fitting that grand opera—a genre known for its larger-than-life characters, often-melodramatic plots, and towering passions—best recaptures the Leadville scene, the late nineteenth-century Colorado era, and mining’s highs and lows. The Ballad of Baby Doe ardently and sensitively does what historians and writers have had difficulty achieving: It elicits a spirit, an essence, an emotion that opens a door to the past and brings it all back to life.

  The Tabor story has fascinated for generations, as no other story from those mining years has ever done—possibly because Horace Tabor’s tale has it all: hard times, sacrifice, sudden success, loyalty and betrayal, politics, scandal, heartbreak, and financial ruin. Though fictionalized, of course, John Latouche’s solidly fact-based libretto, along with Douglas Moore’s splendid music, capture and present the truth better than any mere written account ever could. On wings of emotion and song, the opera reveals the heart, the soul, the ambiance, and the frame of mind of an era and a generation.

  The Ballad of Baby Doe begins in November 1879, on the opening night of Tabor’s opera house—Leadville’s symbol of culture and its grand aspirations. In that flush year of Leadville’s fame and fortune, the suddenly famous Tabor tells his cronies, who are taking a breather from the festivities, that times could not be better. Indeed, they could not: silver mining, Leadville, and Colorado had become synonymous.

  I dug by day and dug by starlight.

  I’m an honest son of labor.

  Dug my way right through to Hell;

  Satan said “Why here comes Tabor!”

  Dig, dig you gophers, dig them holes,

  Dig away to save your souls!

  There’s mountains galore of silver ore;

  It’s cheap in Colorado.

  That evening, mining was king in Colorado, the future only held more gold and silver bonanzas, and everything and anything seemed possible. The rest of the story, mirroring the rise and fall of Colorado mining, unfolds through dizzying successes to heart-wrenching failures.

  In the opera’s last scene, Tabor—old, weary, semi-delirious, and nearly bankrupt—wanders onto the stage of his empty opera house. He looks about and finds himself reliving his life:

  Wow! He’s struck it!

  Struck the Little Pittsburg—ten thousand a week!

  Struck the Chrysolite—twenty thousand a week!

  Struck the New Discovery,

  The Dives and the Winnemucca—Count up the millions!

  Recalling those excitements and triumphs, Tabor realizes that they all took place many yesterdays ago, far distant though only twenty years past. The phantom of his first wife, Augusta, then confronts Horace, sharply rebukes him, and harshly forces him to face the issue of his career and significance: “You are going to die, Horace Tabor, and you die a failure.” Tabor responds with an aria that might easily echo through the decades as an epitaph for what once was and never would be again:

  How can a man measure himself?

  The land was growing, and I grew with it.

  How can one measure Tabor, his predecessors and contemporaries, and the mining generations since? One thing is clear: They did not fail. The land has grown remarkably within the 150 years of this story and its saga has taken on epic proportions. Colorado gold and silver mining played a major role in that saga, and even if, in the twenty-first century, that “gold and silver echo” that Coloradans once heard “roar in the wind” no longer resounds around the mountains and down the canyons, its story is not yet finished.

  Notes

 
CHAPTER 1: PIKE’S PEAK OR BUST

  1. Quoted in William Byers, Hand Book to the Gold Fields of Nebraska and Kansas (Chicago: D. B. Cooke, 1859), 9.

  2. Kansas Weekly Herald (Leavenworth), July 24, 1858.

  3. Journal of Commerce (Kansas City), July 30, 1854.

  4. Cited in LeRoy Hafen, Pike’s Peak Gold Rush Guidebooks of 1859 (Glendale, Cal.: Arthur H. Clark, 1941), 76.

  5. Byers, Hand Book, 113. See also LeRoy Hafen, Overland Routes to the Gold Fields, 1859 (Glendale, Cal.: Arthur H. Clark, 1942). Most of the reports and quotes in this section are from these two books.

  6. Quoted in Elliott West, Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1998), 127–128.

  7. Quoted in Hafen, Overland Routes, 280–281.

  8. Quoted in Hafen, Overland Routes, 47–48, 156, 260–261, 276, 314.

  9. Missouri Democrat, May 31, 1859, quoted in Hafen, Overland Routes, 315.

  10. Thomas M. Marshall, Early Records of Gilpin County, Colorado 1859–1861 (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1920), 1–4.

  11. Horace Greeley, An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), 98–106.

  12. Greeley, Overland Journey, 127–129.

  CHAPTER 2: 1859: THE YEAR DREAMS BECAME REALITY

  1. Thomas Marshall, ed., Early Records of Gilpin County, Colorado 1859–1861 (Boulder: University of Colorado, 1920), 10–12.

  2. Tom is a shortened version of long tom, a sluice box that stretched a hundred feet or more. Rockers are contraptions that looked somewhat like a child’s cradle but with a sieve-like tray at the top of one end, several wooden cleats across the length of the tray, and an opening at the opposite end.

  3. Marshall, Early Records, 12–15, 55, 66, 114, 125, 172–173, 185, 195, 202, 228, 242, 246, 258.

  4. Marshall, Early Records, 12–13, 15, 74, 151, 192, 244, 256.

  5. L. D. Crandall to nieces, July 17, 1859 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin).

  6. Rocky Mountain News, June 18, 1859. Unless otherwise cited, all newspaper references in this chapter are from the News.

  7. Frank Fossett, Colorado: Its Gold and Silver Mines (New York: C. G. Crawford, 1879), 122; Ovando J. Hollister, The Mines of Colorado (Springfield, Mass.: Samuel Bowles, 1867), 68, 72.

  8. Copies of the Tabor interviews are found in the Bancroft Library and the Colorado State Historical Society.

  9. Henry Villard, Past and Present (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1932 reprint), 57; Robert H. Shikes, Rocky Mountain Medicine (Boulder, Colo.: Johnson, 1986), 26, 30–31, 39–40. See also Ronald C. Brown and Duane A. Smith, No One Ailing Except a Physician (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2001).

  CHAPTER 3: 1860–1864: “TO EVERYTHING THERE IS A SEASON”

  1. William A. Crawford, to Mina, June 17, 1860 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin).

  2. Ovando J. Hollister, The Mines of Colorado (Springfield, Mass.: Samuel Bowles, 1867), 106–107.

  3. Crawford to Mina, June 17, 1860; September 2, March 31, and October 13, 1861; May 11, 1862 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin).

  4. Hollister, Mines of Colorado, 108–109.

  5. Hollister, Mines of Colorado, 111–112.

  6. Sources for the section on the California Gulch rush: Weekly Rocky Mountain News, March 28, July 25, and August 15, 22, 1860; May 8, 15, and August 29, 1861; Augusta Tabor, “Cabin Life,” Bancroft Library, 2–3; Don and Jean Griswold, History of Leadville and Lake County, Colorado (Denver: Colorado Historical Society, 1996), vol. 1, 43–46; Alice Polk Hill, Tales of Colorado Pioneers (Denver: Pierson & Gardner, 1884), 277.

  7. Hollister, Mines of Colorado, 122; Samuel Mallory, letter, July 8, 1860, Colorado Magazine (May 1931), 114.

  8. Rocky Mountain News, July 18, 1860; June 5, 1861; and July 16, 1863; Miners’ Record, August 17 and September 14, 1861; The Rocky Mountain Directory and Colorado Gazetteer for 1871 (Denver: S. S. Wallihan & Co., 1871), 169–171.

  9. Rocky Mountain News, April 26, 1862; Weekly Rocky Mountain News, September 11, 1862 and January 8, 1863; Colorado Republican, June 26, 1862; Colorado Mining Life, September 13, 1863.

  10. Samuel Leach to George Leach, October 25, 1862, The Trail (March 1926), 11. For Pat Casey, see Duane A. Smith, The Birth of Colorado (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989).

  11. Maurice O’Connor Morris, Rambles in the Rocky Mountains (London: Smith, Elder, 1864), 124; Weekly Rocky Mountain News, July 16, 1863.

  12. See Smith, The Birth of Colorado, 97–99, 159–163, 195–197.

  CHAPTER 4: 1864–1869: “GOOD TIMES A-COMIN”—SOMEDAY

  1. James W. Taylor, “The Mineral Resources of the United States East of the Rocky Mountains,” in Reports on the Mineral Resources of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1868), 9.

  2. See chapters 1–3 in Liston E. Leyendecker, Christine Bradley, and Duane A. Smith, The Rise of the Silver Queen (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2005). See also issues of the American Mining Journal, 1867–1869.

  3. Rossiter Raymond, Statistics of Mines and Mining (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1870), 368–369.

  4. Ovando J. Hollister, The Mines of Colorado (Springfield, Mass.: Samuel Bowles, 1868), 318.

  5. James W. Taylor, “Gold Mines East of the Rocky Mountains,” in Reports upon the Mineral Resources of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1867), 328; Taylor, “Mineral Resources,” 8.

  6. Taylor, “Gold Mines,” 327; Raymond, Mines and Mining, 347–348.

  7. Raymond, Mines and Mining, 362.

  8. Nathaniel Hill to “My Dear Wife,” June 23, 30, August 8, 11, September 4, 22, and October 3, 16, 1864 (Hill Papers in Western History Collection, Denver Public Library). For a detailed examination of Hill and his smelter, see James E. Fell Jr., Ores to Metals (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 11–54.

  9. Raymond, Mineral Resources, 348–349 and 356–362.

  10. Taylor, “Gold Mines,” in Mineral Resources (1867), 351–355; Rodman Paul, Mining Frontiers of the Far West (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963), 169–173.

  11. Raymond, Mines and Mining, 342–343.

  CHAPTER 5: 1870–1874: BONANZA! “THREE CHEERS AND A TIGER”

  1. Rossiter Raymond, Statistics of Mines and Mining (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1872), 287.

  2. James D. Hague, “Mining Engineering and Mining Law,” Engineering and Mining Journal (October 20, 1904), 6, 8.

  3. Rossiter Raymond, Statistics of Mines and Mining (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1874), 287. See also Rossiter Raymond, Statistics of Mines and Mining (Washington, D.C., 1870), 364.

  4. Rodman Paul, Mining Frontiers of the Far West (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963), 173–174; Rossiter Raymond, Statistics of Mines and Mining (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1873), 453–454, 456. The entire law is printed in this section.

  5. Mining and Scientific Press, October 11, November 15, 22, and December 13, 1873.

  6. Raymond, Statistics of Mines and Mining (1870), 293.

  7. Thomas T. Read, The Development of Mineral Industry Education in the United States (New York: American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers, 1941), 88–90.

  8. Herbert Hoover, The Memories of Herbert Hoover (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1901), vol. I, 131; Clark C. Spence, Mining Engineers and The American West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 370; Raymond, Statistics of Mines and Mining (1873), in ch. XIX, “American Schools of Mining and Metallurgy.”

  9. Raymond, Statistics of Mines and Mining (1874), 386.

  10. Summering in Colorado (Denver: Richards, 1874), 21, 24; Rossiter W. Raymond, Camp and Cabin (New York: Fords, Howard & Hulbert, 1880), 235; Sidney Glazer, ed., “A Michigan Correspondent in Colorado, 1878,” Colorado Magazine (July 1960), 215; Engineering and Mining Journal, Sept
ember 7, 1877, 50.

  11. Summering in Colorado, 21–22; James Rusling, Across America (New York: Sheldon, 1874), 66.

  12. Joseph T. Gordon & Judith A. Pickle, eds., Helen Hunt Jackson’s Colorado (Colorado Springs: Colorado College, 1989), 18.

  CHAPTER 6: 1875–1880: “ALL ROADS LEAD TO LEADVILLE”

  1. Rodman W. Paul, ed., A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West: The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote (San Marino, Cal.: Huntington Library, 1972), 172.

  2. Rossiter W. Raymond, Statistics of Mines and Mining (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1877), 284–286.

  3. James E. Fell, Jr., Ores to Metals (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 44–46, 137–138, 160–162; Rossiter Raymond, Statistics of Mines and Mining (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1875), 379–385.

  4. Charles Harvey to family, May 22, 1879 (Charles H. Harvey, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.).

  5. Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention . . . For the State of Colorado (Denver: Smith-Brooks, 1907), 688, 700.

  6. Composite picture of Oro City taken from: Rocky Mountain News, August 3, 1870, October 25, 1871, July 21, 1872, and June 29 and August 31, 1873; Engineering and Mining Journal, February 19 and May 6, 1876, March 31, 1877; New York Times, May 20, 1878.

  7. Henry Wood, Territorial Assay Book, entries for 1873–1874 (Henry Wood Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, California); Rocky Mountain News, July 1872 and November 29, 1873; Engineering and Mining Journal, December 30, 1876.