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