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.
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