The County Makers—and Cripple Creek
WHEN—long, long after the event—the opera The Ballad of Baby Doe, based on Tabor’s scandalous love affair, had its premiere at the Central City Opera House in 1956, many older natives of the state were dismayed. It was disgraceful, they said, to make a hero of an adulterer.
But Douglas Moore, the composer, and John Latouche, the librettist, took a wider view. To them, Tabor was Everyman, with all the pathetic dreams of glory of the average male, who had advanced at the age of fifty-two from dreary subsistence and despairing nonentity to international fame, political power, sexual triumph, and inconceivable wealth. Through the 1880s, his story was relayed to the ends of the earth, and in such a way that Colorado seemed to be as much a part of his success as Tabor himself.
Though the Little Pittsburg bonanza was exhausted soon, Leadville’s Croesus kept buying more Fryer Hill mines like the Matchless, and countless others along the Continental Divide—the Tam O’Shanter near Aspen, for instance, and several in the Park County and San Juan districts. It is probable that the value of the state as a whole owed much of its tenfold increase through the 1880s to the stimulus provided by Tabor’s compulsive buying as he scattered his own and borrowed millions on everything from gas and insurance companies to streetcar lines, ranches, irrigation ditches, toll roads, and uniforms for the Leadville police department. It is said that he spent $200,000 trying to become U. S. senator in 1883. The state legislature elected Thomas Bowen to the post, but Tabor was made a senator briefly—filling the thirty-day unexpired term of Henry Teller, who had resigned to become President Arthur’s secretary of the Interior.
The popular appeal of this diffident creature with the drooping moustache was of the broadest kind. Whereas other Colorado kingpins like John Evans and General Palmer maintained themselves as models of propriety, Tabor went out of his way to show that he was both bad and good. He divorced the admirable but unappetizing Augusta in 1882 at a cost of $350,000 and took up with a ravishing divorcee from Wisconsin, described as “the Belle of Oshkosh” and “a Dresden doll” by her biographer Caroline Bancroft.1 Her maiden name was Elizabeth McCourt, but she was called Baby Doe after her marriage in her teens to Harvey Doe. Baby Doe was small, blue-eyed, and possessed of a fetching plumpness when, at the age of twenty-eight, she met Tabor. She was neither a dance-hall girl nor a prostitute but one of a number of respectable young women who, after their marriages soured, popped up in Central City or in Leadville demurely on the prowl for a replacement spouse, preferably a bonanza king.
Tabor installed his mistress in Denver’s new Windsor Hotel and married her at the Willard in Washington during his thirty days as senator. President Arthur was among the guests gasping at the most sumptuous nuptials that the nation’s capital had ever seen. Tabor’s gift to his bride was a $75,000 diamond necklace that was alleged to have been pawned by Queen Isabella of Spain in 1492 to finance the first voyage of Columbus to America. Later Tabor paid $54,000 (the equivalent of half a million today) for a Denver mansion at Thirteenth and Sherman, and the couple set up housekeeping while the town’s elite ladies, the whist-playing “Sacred Thirty-Six,” ignored them utterly, and talked of nothing else.
What nobody knew until Tabor went bankrupt during the Panic of 1893 was that this ignoble affair had a noble twist. The wicked old man and his gold-digging paramour had fallen deeply and permanently in love. After Tabor’s death in 1899, his penniless widow, shorn even of Queen Isabella’s jewels, remained faithful to his memory for thirty-six years by standing guard alone at his played-out Matchless Mine on Fryer Hill until her death by freezing and malnutrition in a shack near the shaft house of the Matchless.
While legends grew about Tabor’s lack of culture, he began using some of his wealth to help Denver emerge from the planless chaos of its pioneer days into a city of aesthetic distinction. As a first step he went East in 1879 and hired Chicago’s best young architects, the brothers Frank and W. J. Edbrooke, to design an office building worthy of the city’s new status as beneficiary of the treasure pouring out of Leadville. The resulting Tabor Block on Larimer Street was a sensation. When newsmen of the day called it “a Temple to Progress, worthy of any city in the world,” they were inaugurating the custom of exalted hyperbole that Denverites have followed ever since. The Tabor Block cost $365,000, soared five stories, and was built of carved limestone, perhaps in honor of Tabor’s work as a youthful stonemason back in Vermont. Before residents could catch their breath, Tabor and Frank Edbrooke were touring the East gathering ideas for a far greater project, the million-dollar Tabor Grand Opera House at Sixteenth and Curtis. It opened on September 5, 1881, to a first-night throng who came to hear the soprano Emma Abbott in the Irish opera Maritana.
Having been lured west by Tabor, Frank Edbrooke never left Denver. He brought to the city what writer Richard Brettell has called “Denver’s first truly civilized buildings,” including the massive McPhee Block at 17th and Glenarm, the Chamber of Commerce headquarters at 14th and Lawrence, and the Metropole Hotel (today’s Cosmopolitan). His masterpiece remains the triangular Brown Palace Hotel at 17th and Broadway, with its curved corners, intricate facade, and high-rise lobby. The owner was a wealthy contractor named Henry C. Brown, who had turned up in Denver with the rest of the early birds in 1860 and pre-empted a quarter section of bluffs at $1.25 an acre a mile and a half south of town. The Brown Palace had cost him the staggering sum of $1,600,000 by the time of its opening in 1892. It might have vanished long ago with the Windsor and other obsolete inns, but age has only increased its charm.2
Henry Brown, Horace Tabor, and Edbrooke had roles in another part of the state’s architectural history. Martin Wenger, in his paper for the Denver Westerners Brand Book of 1952, explained how Brown deeded ten acres of his bluff to Colorado Territory back in 1868 to be used as a site for a badly needed territorial capitol building. When nothing was done about it even after statehood, Brown reclaimed what had come to be known as Capitol Hill and put a fence around it to discourage trespass by the state. Years of lawsuits ensued while five governors in succession tried to clear title to the hill and to raise money for a million-dollar statehouse. In 1885, five hundred of the nation’s architects were asked to compete for the design of the capitol building. The winner was Elijah E. Myers of Detroit, who described his plans as “Greek Corinthian,” though critics called them “modified Washington, D. C.” Frank Edbrooke placed second in the contest with a design titled mysteriously “Simplex Munditiis.” The U. S. Supreme Court meanwhile denied Brown’s claim to the hill, and an Illinois man won the construction contract, which specified that the capitol be built of granite from the Zugwelder quarry near Gunnison, with wainscotting of onyx from the Wet Mountains.3
Horace Tabor was in charge of the laying of the cornerstone on July 4, 1890. Fifteen thousand people were on hand for the parade, the mammoth barbecue, and the sealing of articles—Holy Bible, Denver City Directory, an 1811 edition of Zebulon Pike’s Journal, and such—in the cornerstone. Judge Wilbur Stone declared that the capitol was “the crowning glory of the Queen City of the Centennial State. It will ever stand a monument to the bravery and endurance of the pioneers of 1859–1860.”4 The judge failed to mention Elijah Myers, the creator of this crowning glory, since he had been dismissed a year earlier on charges of trying to move his private debts to the state’s public debit account.
With the cornerstone laid, construction dragged on and on, even after Frank Edbrooke was hired in 1898 to speed things up. It was Edbrooke’s idea to enhance the capitol dome with sixteen window portraits in stained glass of the state’s leading men—Gilpin, Evans, N. P. Hill, William Byers, General Palmer, and Chief Ouray among them, but, of course, no scandalous Horace Tabor. The building as it stands today was completed in 1908 at a total cost of $3,492,744.38. The final Edbrooke touch was to cover the dome with $4,000 worth of gold leaf, surmounted by a 1,400-candlepower incandescent globe.
Critics complain that the arbitrary straight-line boundaries of Colorado destroy regional harmony. They argue that the eastern plains should be in Kansas, the northwest in Wyoming, the Colorado River drainage in Utah, while San Luis Valley and the southern watershed of the Arkansas should belong to New Mexico just as they did in the Spanish seventeenth century.
The critics have a point, if one prefers consistency to color and variety. Much of the excitement of the state’s history derives from its crazy-quilt effect. After statehood a symptom of the trend toward diversity was the break up of Colorado into a welter of counties, each seeking to be independent and still a loyal though grumbling part of the whole. The gold rush of 1859 began in a single huge county, Arapahoe (Kansas Territory), and then Governor Gilpin’s legislature reduced its size and laid out sixteen more counties, on the map at least, to give Colorado Territory an organized air. Two of these new counties, Lake and Summit, stretched all the way to Utah. Each of them was more than twice as large as Massachusetts. They were technically out of order, along with Conejos County in the southwest, since part of their areas lay within the private property of the Utes. Four of the new eastern counties—Weld, Arapahoe, Douglas, and Huerfano—ran from the Front Range to Kansas. In the 1870s these four eastern counties consisted largely of land in the public domain that had been appropriated free of charge by the cattle kings John W. Iliff, John W. Prowers, and a number of absentee Scotch and English investors.
As populous towns appeared around the new gold and silver camps, the resident miners found how easy it was to carve a county of their own out of one of the original seventeen, with a county seat conveniently close by to handle their legal affairs instead of hundreds of miles away. The Colorado constitution provided that this could be done by calling for a vote on the separation issue within the large county. Since the gold-silver communities were apt to have a majority of the population of the county, the proponents of separation usually got their way. If the issue was in doubt, they had funds to lobby in the state legislature and, as one old-timer put it, “they could register the votes of approving horses, cows, mules, goats, sheep, and chickens.” Several new western counties and county seats were created in 1874, soon after the Utes released the San Juan mining districts—Hinsdale (with its county seat at Lake City), Rio Grande (Del Norte), San Juan (Silverton), and La Plata (Parrott City). A second orgy of western county carving resulted from the removal of the Utes in 1881—Garfield (Glenwood Springs), Eagle (Eagle), Pitkin (Aspen), Montrose (Montrose), Mesa (Grand Junction), and Rio Blanco (Meeker).
Meanwhile, only three new counties were formed on the semiarid eastern plains, which remained virtually empty of people through the 1870s except for those living in a few cattle-trail towns serving the open-range cattle industry along the Kansas Pacific and Santa Fe railroads. The Plains Indians were only an unhappy memory. They were seen no more in their old Colorado hunting grounds after roving bands of Cheyennes were defeated by soldiers in two battles—at Beecher Island near present Wray in 1868, and a year later at Summit Springs south of Sterling.
The tremendous increase of population and business enterprise after the Leadville boom forced the state out of its preoccupation with mining into a more rounded economy that would bring its most remote parts into use, including those empty eastern plains and sandhills that were thought of still as “the great American desert.” Coloradans had to eat, and the irrigated croplands along the South Platte and Arkansas were not meeting the demand for food. Dry-land farming—growing crops without irrigation—was an old idea, but it did not come to the plains on a large scale until the mid-1880s, when three railroads—Burlington, Rock Island, and Pueblo and State Line (Missouri Pacific)—headed for the Front Range cities from the east along the spring-fed courses of the Republican and Smoky Hill rivers.
To help pay the cost of building the three new lines across the Colorado plains, the railroad companies became ardent land developers. Their agents conducted campaigns among farmers of eastern Kansas and Nebraska urging them to increase their acreage and make estates for their children by moving to the dry lands of eastern Colorado served by the three railroads—to public lands which the government would give to them for practically nothing. The campaigns were highly successful; an American tradition was carried on. As the seaboard farmers of the eighteenth century had been lured over the Alleghenies to improve their fortunes in Ohio and Kentucky, and then over the Mississippi to Missouri and Oregon and California, so in the 1880s thousands of young Kansas and Nebraska families along with emigrant families from Russia and Germany piled their belongings into covered wagons and made for the Colorado frontier, driving their livestock before them.
These dry-land pioneers were quite different from the gold-rush Fifty-Niners, who had been motivated by greed for wealth and power. By contrast, the migrating farmers were impelled by simple pastoral dreams—of being their own boss, of matching wits with nature, of winning homes of their own on land of their own. But the railroad agents were careful not to prepare them for the reality of their Colorado Eden. The Homestead Act of 1862 limited a man to 160 free acres of prairie, which in Colorado had none of the productivity of the same acreage in the humid East. Under the Timber Culture Act of 1878—drawn by misguided Easterners who believed that trees would attract moisture and make the desert bloom—a second 160 acres could be acquired free if one planted ten acres of seedling trees, 2,700 trees per acre, and kept 675 of them alive for five years. Finally, if a farmer was lucky enough to possess $200, or was able to borrow it from a loan shark at fifteen-percent interest, he could enlarge his farm to 480 acres by pre-emption at $1.25 an acre. His problem then was to raise children and horses fast enough to provide labor and motive power to operate such a spread.
From 1885 on, the dry-landers poured into eastern Colorado, staked their homesteads, plowed up the sagebrush and buffalo grass, and prayed that their corn and wheat, barley and oats, would grow where crops had never grown before. They could not have picked a more opportune time for pioneering. They were spared serious conflict with the cattle kings, who knew by 1885 that their control of the open range was almost over. And a providential cycle of wet years had just begun, giving the farmers the illusion that they could count on at least twenty inches of annual rainfall as in the East. (The normal average for the high plains was less than nine inches.)
And still theirs was an epic struggle with few parallels in the nation’s agricultural history. In this barren region at an altitude of four thousand feet above sea level every means of survival had to be invented on the spot. The last of the buffalo that had sustained the Plains Indians had been slaughtered by the hide and bone hunters. The supply of rabbit and antelope for food was not dependable. The staple diet at first was mush and milk. Water for livestock and household was a rare commodity. To get it, one had to haul it in barrels from a neighbor’s well miles away, or dig for it by hand—a hundred and fifty feet or more down in the sandy loam. There were no roads—only the dim marks of wagon wheels. The occasional community square dance lasted until dawn so that people could see their wagon tracks and follow them home. There were no trees for lumber or firewood. Buffalo chips did for fuel. Houses were basement “dugouts,” cut in a slope of prairie with windows just above ground, or structures of sod some twenty-four feet long by eighteen feet wide. The sod was cut with a plow in long slabs to make walls for the building that were three or four feet thick. The roofs of thick turf piled on boards leaked a bit, but nobody complained. The precious water was caught in pots and basins and saved for use. The inside walls of the earth house were plastered with a pink clay—“magnesia‘—found in the banks of dry streambeds. Architecturally a “soddy” looked primitive, but it proved to be marvelously cool in summer and warm in winter.
By trial and error, heroic persistence, and ingenuity, the dry-land pioneers learned how to endure the terrors of their new home—tornadoes and blizzards, lightning, plagues of grasshoppers, rattlesnakes. The most heartbreaking of catastrophes were the summer hailstorms, destroying in five minutes a field of ripening grain—product of a full year of toiling and hoping. Dry weather threatened catastrophe too. Professional rainmakers were popular, particularly a tall and gaunt Australian named Frank Melbourne, who claimed to have caused downpours all over the world. His charge for rain was six cents an acre. His method was to burn incense in a loft of a barn while mumbling incantations to the heavens. He had a few successes, but usually, as one witness said, his rain would not quench the thirst of a grasshopper. It was found later that he picked his dates for raining from Hicks s Almanac, a St. Louis publication, which predicted everybody’s weather for five years ahead.
Through all their trials, the Colorado dry-landers enjoyed good health. Doctors were few and very far between. Wives were superbly durable and delivered amazing quantities of children without professional help. Illnesses at home were cured by Castoria and castor oil and mustard plaster. Turpentine was the favored antiseptic. A poultice of tobacco quids was good for snakebites. Matted cobwebs stopped bleeding. The weather was surprisingly agreeable. Though the winters could be severe for brief periods, the springs and falls were glorious, and even the heat of summer was pleasant in that dry atmosphere. Some newcomers were shocked by the bleakness of the prairie. But they found beauty in it later as they came to feel themselves a part of the grandeur of earth and sky.
As the farmers staked their homesteads, the railroad townsites filled magically. The first lots in Holyoke on Frenchman Creek were sold at auction on September 21, 1887. Two weeks later forty-two buildings were going up. The town of Wray, south of the sandhills in Arikaree Valley, blossomed in the same year, and so did Yuma and Akron west of Wray. The Rock Island sponsored Burlington and Flagler. Cheyenne Wells and Kit Carson were pets of the Kansas Pacific on the old Smoky Hill Trail between Kansas City and Denver. Eads was backed by the Pueblo and State Line Railroad. Lamar and Granada were Santa Fe promotions. Still farther south, Springfield was begun on the promise of being served by a branch of the Santa Fe that did not arrive until 1926. Most of these towns were given names that had no relation to Colorado or its people. They were picked by railroad officials with sentimental memories of their hometowns back East. The name “Flagler” honored Henry M. Flagler, the Florida rail tycoon. Lamar was named for President Cleveland’s secretary of the Interior, Lucius Q. W. Lamar, in exchange for giving the place a government land office.
The infant towns agreed at once on the first order of business—to break away from that handful of monster eastern counties, the seats of which were in distant Front Range cities. These counties had been kept intact through the lobbying in the capitol at Denver of the cattle kings, who didn’t mind county governments that confined themselves to Front Range affairs but wanted no politicians meddling with their feudal domain out in the plains. But the anticounty slush fund of the cattlemen was puny by the mid-1880s. The dry-land farmers became as adept at counting the votes of their domestic animals as the miners had been some years earlier. Residents of Akron started the county making on February 9, 1887, when the legislature allowed them to detach for themselves a large chunk of Weld County under the name of Washington County. Sixteen days later, another chunk of Weld became Logan County, with Sterling as the county seat. A lull followed, and then came the deluge of 1889 as the Seventh General “County-Making” Assembly demolished the old county setup with thirteen new eastern counties pretty much as they stand today.
It was a fortunate development. Four years later, the deceptive cycle of wet years ended, and four years of drouth settled over the Colorado plains. Nearly all the crops which the dry-landers had been growing by Eastern methods withered and died and blew away. Pre-emption debts could not be paid or loans extended because of the Panic of 1893. A mass exodus of pioneer families ensued. Homesteads were abandoned or traded for something useful—a pistol or a sewing machine or a churn. All that held the region together was the legal business of the new county seats and the funds to maintain their buildings and employees, which came mainly from tax money paid by the railroads.
And yet a stubborn, hardy remnant of dry-landers hung on through every crisis of bankruptcy and desperation. Groups of them made a habit of meeting to discuss their problems and exchange information about drouth-resisting crops and ways of planting and cultivating to preserve moisture. Some gave up crops and turned to raising cattle on the grasses that had done so well by the buffalo. There was a good deal of shifting to more promising homesteads. And when the drouth finally eased in 1896, these diehard farmers found themselves possessed of experience that they had lacked in the beginning. Crop yields and land values began a slow but steady rise, and their old optimism returned.
More hard times were ahead for them, but they had won a major victory over this demanding land that they had come to love as much for its perennial challenge as for its evanescent beauty.
During the middle 1880s Senator Henry M. Teller and other Coloradans perceived that the huge production of silver of Leadville and its neighbors foreshadowed a disaster that could wreck the economy of the mountain west. So much silver was being thrown on world markets that its value was declining. That made it unstable as a medium of exchange in partnership with gold at the traditional ratio of sixteen ounces of silver to one of gold. By his astuteness and forthrightness, Teller had become a power in the Republican party and the leading proponent of bimetallism—that is, the unlimited coinage of both silver and gold. Teller’s arch foe was President Cleveland, who persuaded Congress in 1893 to stop buying silver at its fixed ratio and to put the country on the single gold standard. Cleveland argued that the financial panic spreading from Europe to the United States was caused partly because the Treasury Department had to pay more for silver than it was worth to meet the limited commitment of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890.
Repeal of the Purchase Act had a catastrophic effect in Colorado which had led the nation in silver production for a decade. Thousands lost their jobs as every silver mine and smelter was forced to shut down. Banks closed, railroads stopped hauling ore, and terrorism broke out as desperate men turned to violence to get food for their families. In the fall of 1892, the voters backed the new and radical Populist Party because it stood for bimetallism, while the Democrats and Republicans shillied and shallied. Populism was a midwestern movement with a platform calling for lower freight rates and higher crop prices for farmers among other reforms that seemed drastic then—reforms like the graduated income tax, eight-hour day, and direct election of senators. Though Populism got nowhere nationally, it triumphed in Colorado when its candidate for governor, an Aspen newspaper editor named Davis H. Waite, won the election.
Waite, a brave and earnest firebrand on the order of the Kansas abolitionist John Brown, was a blunt man. In a speech against the gold standard before a crowd of silver people in Denver, he declared:
Our weapons are argument and the ballot. And if the money power shall attempt to sustain the usurpations by the strong hand, we will meet that issue when it is forced upon us, for it is better, infinitely better, that blood should flow to the horses’ bridles rather than our national liberties should be destroyed.5
The New Testament phrase about the horses’ bridles was from Revelations 15, and Waite was implying a parallel between “the money power” and the “idolaters” in the Bible whom the pure in heart were battling. His seeming demand for revolutionary action frightened the state’s conservatives out of their wits. Also it brought upon the orator the derisive nickname, “Bloody Bridles” Waite—enough in itself to limit his political career to those two short years as governor.
Waite’s views were ahead of his time but his election was instructive to Senator Teller. It confirmed Teller’s belief that he could not go on being a Republican and a bimetallist at the same time—a belief that produced one of the great dramatic moments of American politics. It came in 1896 during the national Republican convention in St. Louis, which Teller attended with the Colorado delegation. He was aged sixty-six now, a frail old man suffering from asthma. As expected, a gold-standard plank was read, and Teller took the floor to present a substitute motion for free coinage. It had no chance. The audience knew that Teller’s motion amounted to his farewell address. His biographer Elmer Ellis quoted his remarks in part:
When the Republican party was organized, I was there. It has never had a national candidate since it was organized that my voice has not been raised in his support. . . . With its great leaders, its distinguished men of forty years I have been in close communion and with many of them on terms of close friendship. I have shared its honors and its few defeats. Yet I cannot before my country and my God, agree to that provision that shall put upon this country a gold standard and I will not. I do not care what may be the result. If it takes me out of political life, I will go out with a feeling that at least I have maintained my consistency and my manhood, and that my conscience is clear and that my country will have no right to find fault with me. . . . As a bimetallist I must renounce my allegiance to my party.6
When the senator finished speaking, the convention adopted the gold plank by a huge majority. Then Teller got to his feet on the platform and so did the youthful Senator Cannon of Utah. Arm in arm, the two of them strolled down the aisle and out of the hall, followed by the entire Colorado and Idaho delegations and by delegates from other mining states—twenty-three delegates in all.
Within minutes, news of the bolt reached the cities of Colorado by telegraph. A wild, statewide celebration began with impromptu bands parading, bonfires burning and cannon booming on both sides of the Continental Divide. Later Teller and the rest of the bolters formed the Silver Republican Party. Their support enabled William Jennings Bryan to win the Democratic nomination for president in 1896 on a bimetallist platform that, Bryan said a thousand times, was intended to prevent the Republican candidate, William McKinley, from “crucifying mankind on a cross of gold.”
While battle lines were drawn for the bitterest presidential campaign since the Civil War, a paradox was developing on the other side of Pikes Peak from Colorado Springs, General Palmer’s effete resort for the idle rich. Back East in 1859, that mountain landmark had been regarded as central to the gold rush. But no gold was ever discovered on Pikes Peak in those early years by the countless prospectors who had picked it over inch by inch. Mining experts agreed that none ever would be. But an amiable Springs cowboy, Bob Womack, claimed that gold is where you find it, not where it is supposed to be. From 1870 on, he had been telling friends that he would find it at the head of a tiny Pikes Peak stream called Cripple Creek, where his cattle sometimes lamed themselves trying to cross the steep banks. And in the fall of 1890 he did find his El Paso Lode. Nobody believed him until spring, when a few gullible men rode their horses in from the Colorado Midland railroad station at nearby Florissant and began scratching on the round hills of Bob’s summer cow pasture, which was not really Bob’s land but part of the unclaimed public domain.
Womack’s discovery made him famous at Cripple Creek in time but did little else for him. He was the kind of prospector who enjoyed looking for gold more than finding it. After striking the rich El Paso Lode, he lost interest in it soon and sold his share for three hundred dollars. One of his friends up there was not so careless. Winfield Scott Stratton was a first-rate carpenter who had been earning three dollars a day through the 1880s building huge chateau and shingle-style homes and stables in the north end of Colorado Springs, where most of the nabobs lived. Stratton was a sort of bachelor. He had married a seventeen-year-old girl in 1876 but called the marriage off when his bride confessed that she was pregnant by someone else. Thereafter he spent his spare time prospecting wherever gold and silver were found—Leadville, Aspen, the San Juans, Kokomo, Redcliff, Tincup. He studied geology and assaying at Colorado College. When Womack took him up to Cripple Creek to look at the place, he probably knew as much about precious-metal mining in the Rockies as any man alive.
Stratton knew, for instance, from F. V. Hayden’s Atlas of Colorado, that Bob’s cow pasture was the site of an extinct volcano. For weeks he poked around telling the tenderfeet that the camp was a dud. Then, on July 4, 1891, he staked a granite ledge at the foot of Battle Mountain and put the name “Independence” on his location notice. He had recognized that the ledge was on the rim of Hayden’s volcano. Eight years later, when his total net profit in gold taken from the Independence came to more than six million dollars, he sold it to an English company for eleven million dollars—the highest price ever paid to one man for one mine. By then, the world knew that Bob’s cow pasture was the richest ten thousand acres that had ever been discovered, with gold production that would reach a value of half a billion dollars.
Stratton’s fortune in the 1890s was twice as large as Horace Tabor’s had been in the 1880s. The contrast between the two was evident from the way each of them spent his money. Tabor was gregarious, loving, confident, careless, and happy. Money to him was something to be spewed out on ostentatious living. Stratton was a loner, unattractive, suspicious, neurotic. He had no use for the things that multimillionaires liked to buy—not women or castles in Spain or yachts or jewels. His only interest was in finding mines, not striking it rich. Though he invested some of his wealth in Colorado real estate including a mortgage on the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver, he put most of it back into Cripple Creek in search of the volcanic mother lode where all the veins came together. He never found it, and he might have gone broke trying if he had not died of alcoholism, aged fifty-four, in 1902. He had several millions left. His will assigned his estate to trustees for the establishment of a sanctuary for indigent children and old people, the Myron Stratton Home, which thrives still in Colorado Springs.
The paradox of Cripple Creek lay in the timing. As silver lost value and the state’s silver mines went bankrupt, gold appreciated, causing commodity prices to fall, interest rates to rise, and bringing misery to debtors who had to pay their debts with dollars that were worth more than the dollars they had borrowed. Stratton was envied everywhere because each day’s deflation made him richer in gold. Stratton himself was not pleased. During the Bryan-McKinley contest, while people wondered what princely sum he would give in support of the gold-standard Republicans, the incredible news came that he was backing William Jennings Bryan and silver. Stranger still, he put up a hundred thousand dollars in cash to be bet on a Bryan victory if someone would bet $300,000 on McKinley. (Though McKinley’s election was regarded as a sure thing, the bet was not covered.) In a statement to reporters, Stratton said:
I do not make the offer because of any information that I have on the election, but I have a feeling that Bryan is going to win. I am deeply interested in seeing Bryan elected. I realize that the maintenance of the gold standard would perhaps be best for me individually, but I believe that free silver is the best thing for the working masses of this country.7
The story of all that gold from Bob Womack’s cow pasture reached its peak of paradox in the decline of Bryan’s political fortune after the election of McKinley in 1896. Cripple Creek gold increased the world supply so much that the metal began to lose value, just as silver had done in the 1880s. As a result, that shining knight of the underprivileged, Bryan, lost his “Cross of Gold” appeal and was beaten by McKinley a second time in 1900. And by 1908, when Bryan suffered his third and final defeat, bimetallism was a dead issue.
1. Caroline Bancroft, Silver Queen (Denver: Golden Press, 1950), p. 6.
2. Richard R. Brettell, Historic Denver (Denver: Historic Denver, Inc., 1973), p. 33.
3. Martin Wenger, “Raising the Gold-Plated Dome,” Denver Westerners Brand Book, 1952 (Denver: Denver Westerners, 1953), p. 119.
4. Wenger, “Gold-Plated Dome,” p. 125.
5. Fritz, Colorado, p. 354.
6. Elmer Ellis, Henry Moore Teller (Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers, 1941), p. 260.
7. Frank Waters, Midas of the Rockies (New York: Covici-Friede, 1937), p. 169.