Saturday, December 18, 2010

The History of Gothic, Part II: Holes in the Ground, or Hey, That's Mine!

A broken wall and a foundation sit quietly in a spruce grove alongside the overgrown trail that used to be a road in Virginia Basin.  Clear water flows from under boards and stones with which its absent owner tried to cover the immediate cold blackness of a shaft that marks the beginning of Sylvanite mine.  Brilliant crystals and many-hued rocks lay glistening in the summer sun around dozens of holes that have been burrowed into the endlessly dark earth below East Maroon Pass.  These crude and crumbling reminders of the late 1800's and the mining boom of that time lurk in the shadows of trees and by the streams of the East River valley.  They wait, quietly, to remind eager hikers and wandering passerby that this land has a human story.  A short story, true, but an intense one.

In 1873 a man by the name of John Parsons set up camp at the confluence of the East River and Copper Creek.   His tent, and the tents of his men were probably the only ones there, under the face of mighty Gothic Mountain.  To his northwest, the valley continued its way past fantastic peaks, lush valleys, and waterfalls.  To his northeast, a narrower valley with an amazing high-altitude lake (which to this day is full of delicious native cutthroat trout,) and several high passes into the valleys dominated by the Maroon Bell mountains.  To his south lay the broad lower end of the East River valley and Mt. Crested Butte.  The year before, silver had been discovered in the Elk Mountains, and John was the first to try and come to get it.

Ultimately his expedition, which included Sylvester Richardson, the future founder of Gunnison, broke up and the members spread out over the Gunnison Valley with hundreds of other incoming miners to locate and extract the "silver wires" in the ground.  During the next decade or so more and more people would come into the Gunnison Country to mine or to support the miners.  The colonies of Gunnison and Crested Butte had their ups and downs, but were pretty much established by 1879 when the real rush of people was to flood into the valley and forever change the Gunnison Country.

In May of 1879 the Jennings brothers struck it rich at the Sylvanite mine on Copper Creek.  Within months thousands upon thousands of people were tunneling through the snow of the higher passes surrounding the Gunnison Country in order to establish their claims in the new promised land of mineral wealth.  Like during many mining booms, chaos was ever present as people jostled their way over paths and crude roads with wagons, or pack animals, or whatever they could carry on their backs.  Many came from mining camps elsewhere in Colorado, and many others came from the cities on the front range.  Soon they had set up new camps in every strategic location, and had begun prospecting in each nook or cranny they could find.  These miners were used to moving from one "promised land" to the next in rapid succession, so they didn't waste much time in claiming land and starting to dig.  It became apparent quite quickly which of the mining camps were to become towns and cities.

By July of 1879 the newspapers were already calling Gothic a city.  By August, the town was incorporated, and every single lot within the town was sold.  By September, Gothic had 170 buildings, a church, a hotel, two sawmills, and several grocery and general stores.   One newspaper claimed that the town had 1,000 residents and was growing daily.  That's a lot of people.  I've only seen a couple of hundred people in this valley at one time, and even then it feels rather crowded.  1,000 people living and working in this quiet valley is a concept that tests the imagination.

By 1880, the town had even more going on.  There were regular ads for the stores in the Gothic newspaper, lawyers were making money hand over fist dealing with the legal regulations that come with claiming land, mining it, or selling it, and there were several busy saloons.  I've also heard rumors of "ladies of the night" and other such ne'er-do-wells walking the streets of the rowdy mountain town, but have yet to meet a single one.  Along with businesses that operated under varying shades of legality, there were also many people who operated completely outside the system of law.

In an area where men disappeared overnight, or were present but hardly seen, crime was a pretty easy way to make a living.  Claim jumping was one of the most lucrative endeavors the Gothic criminal could employ.  All you had to do was wait for somebody to strike some silver, hit him on the head, and claim the mine as your own.  Some might suspect foul play, but whether they do anything about it is another story.  Sometimes, one didn't even have to dispose of the rightful claimant, one could just beat him to the patent office, and let the law sort it out.  The last resident from the mining days, and the most famous, Garwood Judd was even suspected of doing a fair amount of claim jumping.  He arrived in the summer of 1880, and stayed long enough to eventually sell the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory some property in the 1920's that wasn't technically his.  While there was much suspected foul play, as in most western towns, I could only find one report of a murder within the city limits.  Similar to claim disputes, a man was shot when he was found to have stolen another man's house.  Now, if anything can evoke the feeling of boomtown Gothic, for me, it's that story.  Not only did a man get away with stealing another man's house (as in a large building in which one lives,) for a time, but when he was discovered, there was barely an argument.  The real owner of the house walked across the street, shot him a couple of times, and then after arrested, he promptly escaped from prison never to be seen again.  Isn't that interesting?

Even more interesting is another story which didn't take place in Gothic, but can put the trials and tribulations of a miner's life into perspective.  Western State College, in Gunnison has a Dining Hall like most universities.  And like most universities, they've named the building after a local celebrity.  Unlike the heroes of most universities, this celebrity violently killed and then ate several people.  Packer Dining Hall is named after Alferd Packer, the infamous Saguatch Cannibal.  The best rendition of this story is a movie by Matt Stone and Trey Parker called Cannibal: The Musical.  I'll just sum up what happened, but I'd strongly recommend checking out this cinematic tour de force.

Packer was hired by a group of miners in Utah to lead them east into the newly discovered rich lands of the Gunnison Country.  After getting lost, run-ins with Utes, and well after the party should have arrived, Alferd Packer showed up alone in Saguatch.  There, he said that he had lost his companions, and was the only one still alive after the exhausting ordeal.  He then proceeded to spend lots of money and generally make a creepy ass of himself.  When people got suspicious and searched the mountains for his lost companions, they found them murdered with various weapons; a pistol and a hatchet most prominently.  The bodies also looked as if they may have been filleted and eaten.   Alferd was caught, and he admitted to eating some people, but only out of necessity.  Then, (a common occurrence, it seems to me,) he escaped from prison and took off west.  Alferd was eventually caught again, and went through some bizarre legal battles, but no matter the outcome, the story is still a haunting reminder of what men might do when opportunity and greed coincide.  I think in this case, a dash of sociopathy might have been in the mix as well.

The Packer story may seem like a tragedy, but only six people lost their lives, however gruesomely.  The unofficial war with the Utes was far more tragic if you ask me.  While miners, ranchers, and homesteaders pushed into the Gunnison Country, the Utes were being pushed further and further from the verdant mountains that were their home.  By the time anyone realized that Gothic miners were trespassing onto Ute property (anyone white, that is,) new treaties were already being drawn up to push the Utes out of Colorado completely.  There were threats of raids, wanton murder in the hinterlands, and townsfolk stockading themselves into buildings.  White men killed Utes.  Utes retaliated.  The Sioux captured the Cheif of the Utes, Ouray's son.  Ineffective leaders were given the token position of being "in charge" of the Ute reservation, and one of these leaders promised to bring back Ouray's son if the Utes would just give the white man some more space, and maybe not fight back so much.  Under this kind of pressure, combined with the sheer numbers and organization of the white man, the Utes lost everything they had ever had and were forced to live in the desolate deserts of eastern Utah.  Like many native tribes, they fought fiercely for their land, both with the pen and with rifles.  They tried compromise, terror, begging, and ingnorance, but eventually, they too were removed from their homes forever.  Caught between the expanding east and the inflating west, the Utes were one of the last tribes to fall to the white man, and their story is one of the saddest.  They had no Pocahontas, or Sitting Bull, or the fierceness of the Apache warriors.  They had no Squanto, or a league of nations, or an empire to fall to greedy conquistadores.  They had a home, and mostly quiet lives.  They had communities without heros, and pride without a nation.  They were softly ushered into the world of obscurity with barely a whimper.

After 1882, there's not much written about Gothic anymore.  The lodes weren't very rich, and the season too short to make mining very profitable in the valley.  Coal mining caught on in Crested Butte, and maintained the economy for several decades, but the days of the upper mining camps were pretty much over.  In 1884 the price of silver shot way down, causing a panic among miners, and closing down the few mines that had remained open.  Gothic maintained a newspaper, and had town council meetings until 1888, when we can assume the town fell into the state it was in in the early 1910's when John C. Johnson stumbled upon the area and decided to start a field laboratory.  There were a few ramshackle buildings, a couple of crazy old coots, and empty land going back to nature as far as the eye could see.  Garwood Judd, and a couple of other hearty folks stayed on in the valley, but the impression I get is that they stayed not for the minimal amounts of silver they were pulling out of the ground, but for the sense of place here.  If you've never been to the valley, you probably don't know what I mean, but there's something almost spiritual about these mountains and rivers that you can feel, at least you can if you don't try too hard.

Right now, the snow is piling up to heights above my head outside.  The trees are wearing white over their evergreen needles, and the East River is slowly freezing under a crust of ice and snow.  Life must have been hard here for the miners, the Indians, and for anyone who risked their fingers and toes, and their sanity to live in this mountain valley.  But for some, I bet it was worth it.

Next time I'll post the History of Gothic, Part III:  The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, or It's a Bugs Life.

Saturday, December 11, 2010

The History of Gothic, Part I: Before the Mines, or How the West was One



The wind whips against the wooden walls of my cabin, and snow streams and scuttles around trees and settles into deep mounds by my door.  Mountains, reaching thousands of feet into the sky are obscured by the pregnant clouds blanketing the valley. I live in Gothic, an isolated mining town turned biological field station located at the confluence of the East River and Copper Creek.  The history of Gothic is relatively short, but extremely fascinating, if you’re into that sort of thing.  While Gothic has only been a town for 140 years or so, and not much of one for most of that time, its roots lie much farther back in time than the silver mines that came with the summer of 1879.  Most of what follows doesn’t take place in the upper East River Valley, but it has strong bearing on the events that did.  The history of Gothic, after all, is tied into the history of what is called “The Gunnison Country,” that sometime mythical land of ice and prosperity that makes up a large part of Western Colorado

Like in all mountainous areas, the Gunnison Country is defined by its peaks, its valleys, and the rivers that run through it.  In fact, the “Gunnison Country” is married to its water.  The name refers to and includes all the land that drains its rain and snow into the Gunnison River.  Now, the Gunnison is a pretty darn big river, emptying into the mighty Colorado, and its tributaries stretch far out into the upper reaches of the mountain ranges all around the city of Gunnison.  From Lake City and the Sangre de Cristo mountains in the southeast to the Black Canyon and the San Juan mountains of the southwest, the Gunnison Country also extends north to the Elk Mountain range where the towns of Crested Butte and Gothic are located today, and east to the Continental Divide.   It is in these mountains that the Utes spent their summers, the Spanish searched for El Dorado, trappers hunted beaver, and miners came to get rich.  It is in the Elks that scientists forged the beginnings of a world class laboratory, entrepreneurs built a world class ski resort, and I found a home.


Gothic Mountain from Rustler's Gulch

The Elk Mountains fill up nearly 800 square miles of western Colorado.  The range lies in a roughly east-west orientation, forming a T with the Sawatch range to the east.  The mountains are huge, many extending above 14,000 feet, that exciting elevation that’s unsurpassed in Colorado.  A common pastime around here is to “bag 14’ers,” or to ascend each peak above 14,000 feet in Colorado and then write it down in a notebook or something.  I must admit, the attraction is not lost on me, but it seems pretty silly to pursue the activity in exclusion of other, shorter mountains that offer greater challenges and rewards.   The Elks, in addition to being really, really big also offer some unique features that make this such a beautiful, isolated, and dangerous part of the world.

The Elks are mostly stratified sedimentary rock, such as shale and limestone, that have been compressed and raised with the drift of tectonic plates. These relics of an ancient inland sea are dotted here and there with huge igneous intrusions of rock that form the lacoliths and batholiths that make this a truly fascinating place.  For those of you that are a little rusty in your Geology, what this means is that there are folds and ripples of mountains and ridgelines that extend in long, often parallel lines creating narrow valleys capped with enclosed, avalanche prone drainage basins.  Every once in a while, however, one comes across a towering hunk of volcanic rock that has thrust itself up through the sedimentary layer to dominate the landscape.  Gothic is one of these mountains; a 12,600 foot piece of rock that has a face with towers and spires evoking images of the steeples and buttresses of gothic cathedrals.  Mount Crested Butte is also a lacolith, and rises in solitary splendor on the southeastern end of the East River Valley.  It’s hooked peak stands alone and marks the end of the paved road, and as I like to think, the end of the civilized world.  The East River itself starts high up at Schoefield Pass and winds its way past Gothic and Crested Butte to eventually merge with the Gunnison further down valley. 


The East River, Mt. Crested Butte, and Gothic

Because of their east-west orientation, the Elks receive a lot of precipitation, mostly in the form of snow.  It’s not surprising to have totals of 350 inches of yearly snowfall in places.  Because of all this precipitation, the Elks are subject to the ravages of erosion that create magnificent waterfalls, steep ravines, and glacial furrows in the land.  While stunningly beautiful, the land can also be stunningly dangerous.  Peak ski season hasn’t even started yet this year, and Gunnison County has already logged two avalanche deaths. 

Mineral wealth eventually enticed the white man to settle the valley, and ranching and tourism invited him to stay.  Before the swarm of Europeans made it to the Gunnison valley, though, the land was used as a summer camp for the large but fractious Ute Indians.  A dark skinned people, prone to putting on a little weight as middle age set in, the Utes were mostly peaceful, and existed as many hunter-gatherer societies have for tens of thousands of years.  They travelled in small bands, living in tipis, and hunting elk, deer and bison much as their neighbors in the great plains to the east did.  In fact, it wasn’t uncommon for conflicts to break out between the two factions when hunting grounds were trespassed upon.  In one of the more well known of these conflicts, the son of Chief Ouray was kidnapped by Dakota Sioux, an event that circuitously accelerated the eventual removal of the Utes from their homeland. 

The first outside pressure on the land and the people of the Gunnison Country came from Spaniards.  They arrived in the area as early as the 1500’s and various parties wandered through for various reasons.  Far from the Spanish strongholds of Mexico and California, Colorado was a pretty marginal part of the Spanish Empire.  Explored for gold, and for possible roads, it seems that the main Spanish activity in the Colorado Rockies was mostly an attempt to keep their borders secure from the French and the English or later American colonies.  They were pretty much out of the picture by 1790.

After the conquistadores, came the age of the fur trapper.  Never very rich in beaver, the great fur bearing profit machine of the early mountain man, the Gunnison Country nonetheless attracted a great deal of traffic in the early 1800’s.  To supply these trappers, the first trading post west of the Continental Divide was built by Antoine Robidoux in 1828 in what is now Delta, CO.  The outfit didn’t last long; by around 1840 everybody realized that the difficulties of just making it to the Gunnison Country coupled with a lack of beaver meant that they should probably try their luck elsewhere.  Apparently Wyoming had some good beaver, so everybody bugged out, but not before giving the Utes a taste of the white man’s manners when dealing with native peoples.  When the next batch of post-Europeans, the government surveyors and explorers, came through, the tribes were already getting a bit more aggressive.

For several years geologists, surveyors, explorers and adventurers came through the Gunnison Country searching for everything it is government explorers search for; mineral wealth, farm land, or any kind of exploitable resource, really.   Their main concern though, was to map the land and to try and find a route for a transcontinental railroad.  The most famous of these surveyors is Captain John Gunnison, who’s name has never left. 

An accomplished explorer, Gunnison came through the area trying to figure out how to get a railroad over the continental divide, and then past the western slope of Colorado.  He was stunned by the beauty and apparent resources of the Gunnison Valley, but ultimately disappointed by the lack of available routes for a track.  His biggest problem was the Black Canyon, a half mile deep crack in the ground created by the Gunnison river that was almost impossible to travel through, and time consuming to travel around.  Gunnison eventually went on west to Utah to finish his survey and was promptly killed by Utes while investigating the wanton slaughter that some Mormons had inflicted upon the natives.  There’s an interesting conspiracy theory championed by Gunnison’s wife that Brigham Young had organized Gunnison’s murder as part of a Mormon uprising.  While it’s probably not true, I’m a little taken by the idea.  I mean, the Mormons have done some crazy stuff, why not a convoluted scheme involving the head of the church inducing the natives to riddle a surveyor with arrows?

While ultimately nothing came of the Spanish, the trappers, or the surveyor’s presence in the Gunnison Valley, at least not in the way of settlements, structures, or railroads, the stage was being set for the next phase in the history of the valley. The white man was on his way to the Gunnison, and to the upper East River Valley where Gothic now stands.  The Utes were starting to get pissed, and the new breed of American was pushing westward in greater numbers and with greater frequency.  The Gunnison Country was regarded as an isolated and beautiful, but dangerous, ice filled land populated by agitated Indians.  It would only take the discovery of gold, and then later of silver to break down these barriers and begin the rush of Western Civilization to the valley.

Crested Butte Coal Mine

 So, next week I’ll delve into the mining history of the area, and will be able to get a little more specific on the history of Gothic itself.  We’ll finish up with Part III later, which will deal with Gothic as The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory.  I hope you’ve enjoyed learning a little something today, and I’d love to hear from you if you have any comments or questions!

“Either they or we must go, and we are not going.  Humanitarianism is an idea. Western Empire is an inexorable fact.  He who gets in the way of it will be crushed.”  -The Denver Times

Friday, December 3, 2010

December, or How I Started Blogging

So, family and friends, you've asked for it and here it is.  My new blog is here.  It's fresh, it's exciting, it's completely worth your time to read what I have to say about me and my life.  In fact, after a few months of this, you'll end up wondering what the hell you were doing before December of 2010.

Gothic Mountain

So, let me go ahead and give y'all a point of reference; a beginning, if there is such a thing.  I'm typing this blog at a comfortable desk in the crackling warmth of Avery cabin in Gothic, CO, an erstwhile silver mining town turned into a field station by the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory.  During the summer, the aspen glades and montane meadows are full of bright, eager, young scientists at the beck and call of bright, eager, older scientists who are studying the various species and natural processes that occur in the East River Valley.  There's a peak population of around 200 people here in July, mostly students and research assistants in various capacities.  My job is to feed them.

In the winter months, however, Gothic truly is a ghost town.  The rustic log cabins are shuttered and cold.  There is only one outhouse with a trail to it through the snow.  Wind whips through the spruces and over the little hills in town, encountering only the odd fox or rabbit to shiver at it's caresses.  There are only six of us humans here in total, and this is a very populous year.

Gothic, CO

billy barr is the accountant for the lab, and he owns a house just north of Gothic.  If you're in the valley and you see what appears to be a scarecrow on skis with long gray hair and a wild beard, chances are you've run into billy.  If you somehow end up with chocolate at the end of the encounter, it's certain that you have.

John, Ira, and Shayn are all living in the cabin across the trail from me in Rogers-Boggs cabin.  They're a motley crew that works here year round like I do, consisting of  a Texan hippie, a Colorado snowboarder, and a quiet 40ish gay Hoosier all living together.  Visiting them provides most of my daily entertainment.

Gary and Kiki are a couple from Crested Butte, the nearest town to us, who just got off a five month trek of the Continental Divide Trail, which runs from Canada to Mexico.  (Or vice versa.)  They apparently haven't had enough isolation this year, so they've decided to join us here, four miles past the end of the road.  I don't know much about them yet, but everything I've managed to learn about them; the CDT, a VW bus, avalanche training courses, and the radio call signs "Rigatoni" and "Angel Hair," add up to a couple of badass people.

Which brings us to here, where I introduce myself.  I'm a 27 year old Midwestern guy who's somehow managed to stumble into a ski bums wet dream.   I have never skied in my life.  Ok, that's a lie, I went to a bump somewhere in southern Wisconsin styling itself as a ski resort.  I can remember to this day the stiffness of frozen jeans and the terror of the ski lift that I endured with my cousins Maggie and Charlie. The Rocky Mountains of central Colorado are a bit different.  So here I am, with borrowed skis and a sense of expectancy and adventure in the middle of nowhere at 9,000 feet.  I could tell you a lot of anecdotal history about myself, which would include tales about dropping out of College to get married and move to France, or about three years of a reefer clouded stint working for Indians (dot, not feather) in Austin, Texas, and maybe a few about growing up in rural Indiana to spice things up.  But none of that's really important.  It's not where I come from, you see, but where I am that's beginning to define me.  All you need to know right now is that I'm a bearded youngish fellow with a quiver full of skis, a wood burning stove, and enough naivety to try and use them.
Me

So there we have it, a decently solid base to begin blogging from.  I think next time, I'll do a little bit on the history of the town of Gothic and the RMBL (pronounced "rumble" by the members.)  You can also expect some photographs, a bit of rough poetry from time to time, musings on the nature of the East River Valley and it's environs (which will probably be mostly dealing with snow, ice, or other variations of frozen things,) perhaps a political rant here and there, and neat little asides on humanity, philosophy, and life in general.  But for now, adieu.