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MILE HIGH CITY
by Thomas J. Noel2. THE GOLDEN
GAMBLE
Ages before the Arapaho arrived, gold settled at the
confluence of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River. Over hundreds of millions of years,
the heavy yellow metal bubbled up in hot, volcanic forms that injected it into cracks and
faults of rocks.
Erosion of the Rockies, and of an ancestral range that
existed some 250 million years ago, created the High Plains. The same glaciers and streams
that melted the mountains also washed out some of the gold into placer deposits whose
discovery gave birth to Denver.
William Greeneberry "Green" Russell, a veteran of
both the Georgia and the California gold rushes, scrutinized the Colorado Rockies
carefully. He suspected the three-mile-high barrier to Americas westward expansion
might become a goal one day. He reckoned that the Rockies hid mineral treasures. His
discovery of a few ounces of gold in the summer of 1858 proved his suspicion correct and
triggered a mass migration to Colorado. An estimated 100,000 people rushed into Colorado
between 1858 and 1860. Only one out of three found Colorado worthwhile, because in 1860,
the census taker found only 34,277 residents.
Russell and his party founded the first permanent
settlement in what is now metro Denver. They named their town Aurariafrom the Latin
word for goldafter their hometown in the Georgia gold fields. Auraria merged with
Denver City, its rival on the opposite bank of Cherry Creek, on April 6, 1860. Afterwards,
Auraria became known as West Denver.
Denvers Puppy Days
Denver City was a long shot. Most of the gold-rush
settlements would become ghost towns. In the struggle to become the county seat, the state
capital and the regional metropolis, there would be many losers and only one winner. While
other Coloradans gambled on gold, Denverites mined the miners, relieving them of whatever
wealth they might find up in the hills. Denverites gambled with cards and dice, with
mining stock and real estate and railroads. They bet on everything from dog fights to
snowfall. During the slow winter months, city fathers amused themselves with card games.
They used town lots as poker chips and of an evening won and lost whole blocks of downtown
Denver.
Demas Barnes, an argonaut crossing the plains, marveled at
Denvers site and its construction. "Why [Denver] was ever located here for is
more than I can decipher," he wrote home on June 25, 1866. "Ten thousand
carcasses of poor overworked animals mark the highway over seven hundred miles of
parching, treeless plain."
Despite the barren high plains and the dead animals, Barnes
explained that gold fever made Denver a magnet: "It is almost impossible not to
partake of the general enthusiasm, for you hear gold discussed morning, noon, all night,
and far into the next day. It is not a myth. You see ityou select specimens for your
cabinet...you hold the pure golden nuggets in your hands, your eyes dilate, your mouth
waters...."
Gold gave birth to Denver and funded the reckless rush to
grow up into a great city. Almost from the beginning Denver built for permanence in brick
and stoneunlike so many other now-vanished Colorado towns of frame and canvas.
"Denver," as Barnes put it in a letter of June 27, 1865, "is a square,
proud, prompt little place... There being no wood, brick becomes a necessity for building
purposes...It has fine brick stores, four churches, a good seminary, two theaters, two
banks, plenty of gambling shops, a fine U. S. mint [which] has actually coined the vast
amount of four thousand dollars in a whole year!"
Denver had few visible means of support, and little reason
to become a city. It lacked the navigable waterways that usually determine the location of
cities, and other settlements were closer to the mines which were Colorados
livelihood. In the decade after the gold rush, Denver faced the same fires, floods, Indian
wars and ore-processing difficulties that left Colorado Territory littered with dead
towns. Yet an English visitor, Miss Rose Kingsley, reported in her book, South by West
, that the mile-high town was "one of the most successful of all the new cities of
the West."
Kingsley well described Denvers precarious and
isolated existence. After seeing the baby town in 1871, she marveled: "It looked just
as if it had been dropped out of the clouds accidentally, by someone who meant to carry it
further on, but got tired, and let it fall anywhere."
The Peoples Government
To govern this accidental city, the Peoples
Government was formed in September, 1860, in Apollo Hall, a saloon in what is now Larimer
Square. City dads wrestled with law and order, taxes and the homeless. At the request of
Denver merchants, the first law enacted on October 8, 1860, was "an Ordinance
prohibiting Gambling & the selling of Liquor or Merchandise on the Streets or from
Wagons or Tents." This ordinance suggests that two-year-old "Denver City,"
the hub of the Colorado gold rush, bustled with boozers and losers.
The Peoples Government selected "Noisy Tom"
Pollock as marshal, partly because of his commanding voice. Pollock, who had arrived from
New Mexico in 1858, opened Denvers first blacksmith shop on January 10, 1859. Three
months later, he erected the two-story Pollock House at 11th and Market Streets, a site
now on the Auraria Campus. Pollock received 50 cents for every criminal he caught, and his
pioneer hotel soon bulged with prisoners.
Pollock earned his star in a shootout by killing George
Steele, a swaggering, murderous gambler. Pollock administered doses of
"lead-poisoning" and "rope-burn" to weed out Denvers numerous
"bummers." He repeatedly reappears in the Peoples Government ledger,
asking for help in housing prisoners. When the town failed to build a jail, Pollock
resigned.
The Peoples Government struggled to raise funds not
only for a jail, but for a courthouse, and a public school. Voters balked. After one
disastrous November 10, 1860, election, Denver "indefinitely postponed" plans to
collect taxes and began asking for voluntary donations. By May 14, 1861, the new city had
spent $8,739 and incurred a debt of $6,463. To solve the budget quandary, the
Peoples Government took to taxing the towns ubiquitous saloons.
Another revenue-raising scheme, proposed on November 22,
1860, aimed to "establish a course of Lyceum Lectures, with proceeds for the City
Poor Fund." This pioneer effort to simultaneously promote culture and care for the
homeless never materialized.
On December 11, 1860, the Peoples Government
authorized a "Literary and Historical Society of the City of Denver" which was
also asked to be "one of the overseers of the poor." This society was
still-born. Its mission fell to the state, which did not organize the Colorado Historical
Society (CHS) until 1879. The Denver Public Library did not finally open its doors until
1889. Not until 1990 did the Colorado Historical Society open the first Denver History
Museum in the old Byers-Evans House.
The clash between community and private interests began
early. In a resolution to outlaw private structures erected in the public streets and in
the bed of Cherry Creek, the pioneer city officials noted that "Such posession [sic]
by individuals of public property is an infringement upon the rights of the community and
of individual owners of property in the vicinity."
The Peoples Government was replaced on November 19,
1861, by todays city government, which was officially authorized by the new
Territorial Government of Colorado. All that is left of the Peoples Government is a
slender, mud-stained ledger recording the pioneer struggle to govern often-reluctant
citizensa battle that continues today.
William N. Byers
A prime mover behind the Peoples Government was
William Newton Byers. Byers fought to bring stagecoach service to the isolated town and
endeavored to make Denver the steamboat capital of the Rockies. The greatest Denver
booster of all, Byers was born on an Ohio farm but he did not stay put long. He headed
west to Iowa and then to Omaha, the great jumping-off place and home base for the Union
Pacific Railroad. Byers had helped lay out Omaha, which became the largest town between
St. Louis and San Francisco. He served on its first city council, and represented it in
the Nebraska Territorial Legislature. Succumbing to gold fever, he abandoned Omaha in 1859
for the Cherry Creek gold rush settlements. He wrote one of 17 1859 guidebooks to the new
promised land, selling himself as well as thousands of others on the golden gamble called
Denver City.
Byers published Denvers first newspaper, The Rocky
Mountain News, on April 23, 1859. The News puffed Denver as the pre-ordained
metropolis of the Rockies, even imagining river traffic for the high, dry city on the
shallow South Platte. In early issues of the News aimed at Omaha and other cities
filled with investors, capital, and potential immigrants, Byers called Denver the
steamboat hub of the Rockies. Noting that water traffic made major cities of New Orleans,
St. Louis, and other river towns, Byers launched a "shipping news" department.
On September 10, 1859 the News announced in a "Boat Departures" column:
"Ute and Cheyenne for mouth of the Platte. Scow
Arapahoe for New Orleans. All laden with passengers and freight."
Subsequent announcements for the benefit of Eastern
investors and the national press proclaimed ships sailing from Denver to Pittsburgh and
New York. Despite such heroic efforts by the "Rocky Mountain Liar," as critics
termed the Rocky Mountain News, the South Platte never became a mighty Mississippi,
clogged with steamboats whistling for a landing on Denvers waterfront.
Byers also used the News to promote agriculture. He
offered free seeds to anyone stopping by his office, and publicized agricultural
experiments. In the first issue of the News, Byers warned in his editorial,
"Farming vs. Gold Digging" that farmers "taken off with the Cherry Creek
yellow fever" would do better "to raise stock and produce for the mines."
All Colorado needed to make the Great American Desert bloom, Byers asserted, were a few
good farmers and a little water. Of course, cynics scoffed, a few good people and a little
water could turn hell into heaven.
The irrepressibe promoter championed irrigated farming as
the way to make the Great American Desert bloom. Even the optimistic Union Colony farmers,
who were persuaded by Byers to buy their Greeley site on the South Platte River, grew
chary of his claims. David Boyd, in his book, A History: Greeley and the Union Colony
of Colorado (Greeley:The Greeley Tribune Press, 1890), reported "fear and
trembling [at how Byers, with his fellow boosters,] is proposing to cut a great gash in
the earth, from South Platte canyon to Kansas City, and water all the land on both
sides."
As Byers career illustrates, newspapers were the
primary tool of boosterism in Western frontier towns. Lord Bryce, the English ambassador
who captured Yankee eccentricities in his classic, The American Commonwealth, put
it well: "Many a place has lived on its boom until it found something
more solid to live on; and to a stranger who asked in a small Far Western town how such a
city could keep up four newspapers, it was well answered that it took four
newspapers to keep up such a city."
Footloose frontier hordes troubled city builders like
Byers. He urged the miners swarming into, over, and often out of Colorado to settle. In
the News, March 14, 1861, he blasted the "folly of being eternally on the
tramp, without stopping long enough in any place to learn its resources or to earn a
livelihood...If the time thus spent in running over the country were judiciously employed
in prospecting or making preparation for farming, a class that is now not far removed from
a public nuisance would soon develop rich mines [and] open up valuable ranches and
farms."
Newspapers attracted newcomers and capital to upstart towns
such as Denver. Byers became the spokesman for Denver and outlasted dozens of ink-stained
competitors. He was the voice of the city and might well have been elected mayor or
governor or senatorexcept for an indiscretion with a woman not his wife.
Hattie Sancomb, a pretty divorcee from Kansas, grew very
fond of the handsome, nobly-bearded Byers. He found their affair easier to slip into than
to get out of. When he tried in 1876 to cool her ardor, she drew a pearl-handled pistol
and fired. She missed, damaging only his reputation. From behind a lace curtain of her
parlor window, Mrs. Libbby Byers saw her husband ambushed in the street and rushed out to
rescue him. Denver buzzed with a delicious scandal concerning its most prominent citizen.
Subsequently, Byers sold his newspaper and abandoned his political aspirations. Yet he
stuck with Denverand his wife stuck with him. He helped to organize a Chamber of
Commerce and tirelessly promoted Denver as the queen city of the Rockies.
Born in a gold rush, Denver got a fast start. By 1865, it
had emerged as the capital of Colorado Territory. Denverites had out-politicked Golden and
Colorado City, both of which briefly served as the capital. In an 1881 election, Colorado
Springs and Pueblo failed to muster enough votes; Denver became the permanent political
hub. Denver legislators helped arrange lesser prizes for Boulder, Caņon City, Colorado
Springs, and Pueblo. The latter received the state mental hospital and Colorado Springs
the state home for the deaf and dumb, as it was originally called. Caņon City was awarded
the state penitentiarya coveted prize, since convicts provided cheap or free labor.
Boulder got last prizethe state university. Many people then (and some now) reckoned
that faculty and students were a rowdy, disruptive lot, given to dissipation and idleness.
Historical Consciousness
Nineteenth-century Coloradans were history-conscious. They
prided themselves on being the first to see, to name, to settle, and to build. As early as
1872, Denverites held pioneer picnics for their founding mothers and fathers. In 1879, the
State Historical and Natural History Society was created. The state legislature gave the
society $500 to collect, preserve and exhibit Colorados heritage before "the
men who have been the actors, and the material for collections will be quite beyond our
reach."
In 1900, the historians and natural historians parted
company and settled in different homes. The historical society built a Greek temple of
Colorado Yule marble across Fourteenth Street from the State Capitol. The Denver Museum of
Natural History constructed its museum at the east end of City Park.
Colorado did not produce any literary giants to immortalize
the frontier erano Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, Willa
Cather, or Mari Sandoz. Travelers such as Isabella Bird, Helen Hunt Jackson, Richard
Townsend and Louis Simonin left lively, literary accounts, but not until the 20th century
would Coloradans such as Hal Borland, David Lavender, Marshall Sprague, and Frank Waters
do literary justice to the settlement of mountain and plain. Not until the poet Thomas
Hornsby Ferril (1896-1988) began celebrating Colorados mountains and rivers, its
mining camps and its Mile High City, could Colorado claim a literary giant.
Historians have been luckier. LeRoy Hafen, Frank Hall,
Jerome C. Smiley and Wilbur Fisk Stone all compiled multi-volume state histories. Smiley
also completed a monumental, 978-page History of Denver detailing the rise of
people and places in a magical mile high setting. Since 1908, the Colorado Historical
Society has issued a magazine celebrating local history, starting with The Trail in
1908 and evolving into todays glossy, color quarterly, Colorado Heritage.
Artistic Endeavors
Denverites emphasized the edifying. They ignored the fact
that their city government, as well as the territorial government, had been conceived,
born and raised in saloon halls. Saloons also housed the first theaters, art exhibits,
dance, music, theater and even libraries. By 1910, Denver had 410 saloons which offered a
wide variety of goods and services, of arts and amusements, as well as nickel beers and
free lunches.
Bar art attested to early cultural aspirations. Original
art today is often confined to museums, corporate board rooms, and the homes of the
wealthy. In nineteenth-century Denver, much original saloon art was public art. Charles
Stobie, a western artist, lived above the Gallup & Stanbury Saloon (which still stands
at 1445 Larimer Street) and exhibited his work downstairs in the bar. Editor Byers
appraised Stobies work as "the most excellent and beautiful work in oil
painting we have seen executed in this country." Stobies works, like the
paintings Charles Russell once swapped for drinks in the Mint Saloon, now command much
higher prices. Denver has lost most of its bar art with the reckless demolition of it
19th-century architectural heritage. Two exceptions are the landscapes on the old
high-back booths at the Punch Bowl Tavern, 2052 Stout Street, and the Windsor Hotel bar
mural which survives in the Oxford Hotel dining room.
Colorado artists and art lovers organized the Artists Club
in 1893 to promote the visual arts. During the 1920s, this club reorganized as the Denver
Art Museum. Anne Evans, a leading benefactor and an artist herself, helped to establish
what is still the Denver Art Museums strongest collection, its American Indian
exhibits. Ironically, she was the daughter of territorial governor John Evans, who was
removed from office after the massacre of about 148 Indians, primarily old men, women and
children, at Sand Creek. Anne Evans and the art museum prized the artifacts that were
disregarded by many pioneers as the trinkets and trappings of savages. In their rush to
culture, the pioneer generation overlooked the Indian culture and artifacts now showcased
at the Denver Art Museum, Colorado History Museum and Denver Museum of Natural History.
Performing Arts
Colorados performing arts were also born in barrooms.
Apollo Hall on Denvers Larimer Street staged Colorados first theatrical
performances in 1859. Saloonkeeper Libeus Barney, who adored Shakespeare, reported that
400 people squeezed into his hall, demonstrating "the appreciation of art in this
semi-barbarous region." In early saloon-theaters, enthusiastic audiences customarily
treated their favorite actors and actresses to libations between acts. This custom,
as historian Smiley noted, "often resulted in lowering the standard of artistic
effects of the closing scenes of the drama."
The Occidental Hall on Blake Street featured
Colorados "favorite balladist" to "delight all with operatic and
sentimental, as well as comic songs." At other times, this Blake Street bar
advertised a reading room with the latest newspapers and free stationery, offering readers
a haven two decades before the Denver Public Library was founded in 1889. The Occidental,
during its long career as a pioneer performing arts center, ballyhooed a German violinist
and Miss Lulu ("the California Prima Donna"), trapeze performances by
"Professor" Wilson and a musical machine "which makes as much music as a
dozen brass bands." The most notorious theater was Ed Chases Palace at 15th and
Blake Streets (The Palace Lofts now occupy the site). This saloon, gambling hall and
theater was notorious for its "leg art" and laughing ladies of easy virtue.
Such artistic efforts helped make Denver a cultural as well
as a commercial capital for Colorado. Farmers from the eastern plains, ranchers from the
San Luis Valley and the Western Slope, and miners from the mountains have long relied on
Denver as an amusement center. Although high-brow critics have rolled their eyes and aimed
snide comments at Denvers "cowtown culture," it has entertained Coloradans
with Western humor, sentimental nostalgia, and treatment of regional topics.
The Tabor Grand Opera House
In Europe and America, grand opera houses reigned as the
ultimate palaces of culture. Visitors to Colorado marveled at finding opera houses in
small mining towns such as Central City as early as the 1870s. Denver, of course, erected
the grandest opera house of allthe Tabor Grand at 16th and Curtis Streets. To erect
the most lavish building Denver has ever seen, silver magnate Horace Austin Warner Tabor
went shopping for an architect in Chicago. He came back with Willoughby and Frank
Edbrooke. After touring opera houses in Eastern cities to find what was most fashionable
and functional, the Edbrookes designed an $800,000 palace for opera.
"Denver," Tabor declared, "was not building
as good buildings as it ought to and I thought that I would do something towards setting
them a good example." The Tabor Grand wore a high Victorian facade of Golden pressed
brick, trimmed in Manitou limestone under a slate roof from Maine. It sported asymmetrical
Queen Anne towers, a Second Empire mansard roof, and steep chateauesque roofs on its
towers and dormers. Denverites were flabbergasted. Some called it "Oriental
luxury" while the journalist Eugene Field pronounced the edifices eclectic
style to be "modified Egyptian Mooresque."
Marble steps led to the large marble rotunda with two
immense mirrors in which Denvers socialites could admire themselves. The main
halls magnificent chandelier glittered with hundreds of crystal pendants. Patrons
often came early to watch the lighting of the chandelier, 65 feet above the parquet floor.
Above the 144-gas-jet chandelier, fleecy pink clouds floated in the twilight sky of the
dome. Plush silk curtains, tapestries, 1,500 crimson velvet opera chairs, and six
eight-person opera boxes adorned the opera house. The Tabor Grand Saloon, the finest bar
in town, featured its own ladies orchestra.
Augusta Tabor begged her husband to take her to the Tabor
Grand for the opening night. He refused, but a heavily veiled Mrs. Elizabeth "Baby
Doe" McCourt Doe was there in Horaces box, which was draped with a plaque of
silver from the Matchless mine inscribed, "TABOR." After Tabor married Baby Doe,
his mistress, their two baby girls used the opera house box as a 16- square-foot play pen.
Prophetically, the main curtain of the Tabor Grand bore a
line from Charles Kingsleys poem, "Old and New: A Parable":
So fleet the works of men,
Back to the earth again
Ancient and holy things
Fade like a dream.
Within a generation, the Tabor Grand stooped to 10-cent
movies. Clumsily remodeled and renamed the Colorado Theater, it suffered numerous
"improvements." One of the last desecrations, a gamble to compete with a
newfangled invention of the 1950s, was converting part of the enormous mezzanine into a
miniature theater called "Tabors Television Room." Following this
defilement, Tabors ancient and holy dream was demolished in 1964 to build a modern
Federal Reserve Bank, a prison-like house of finance where old paper money is shredded.
Bankrupt Banks
The Federal Reserve Bank System was established in 1913 to
prevent economic crashes like the one that undid Horace Tabor. The Federal Reserve Bank
came too late to save Denvers shaky 19th-century banks. These money houses
floundered in the 1890s when the big gamble on mining became a colossal bust. Half of
Denvers 18 banks closed in July of 1893.
The federal governments remedy for the Depression,
repealing the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, was worse than the disease as far as Coloradans
were concerned. Without the federal subsidy, the price of silver tumbled from over $1 an
ounce to half that. Silver mining, Colorados number-one industry, collpased.
Bankers became much more cautious, much more wary of
borrowers infected with gold and silver fever. Colorado National Bank, one of the
survivors, learned the truth of the old joke: a mine is a hole in the ground owned by a
liar. After the crash of 1893, the Colorado National foreclosed on several hundred mining
companies. Slowly the bankers got around to assessing their collection of mines. W. F.
Berger of Berger and Sayre, mining engineers, personally investigated some 200 claims and
30 mining companies. He reported for mine after mine; "stock is probably
worthless" and "lots of work has been done but it has not produced a cent."
Piles of handsomely printed stock certificates for gold and
silver mines impressed this author during a 1985 investigation of Colorado National
Banks vaults with the grandson of Colorado National Banks founder, the late
Harold B. Kountze. Among the confiscated collateral was a metal tube-like contraption with
an elaborately inscribed scroll from Thomas H. Edwards of Denvers Chlorination and
Cyanide Supply Company. It explained how the apparatus could be used for "extracting
gold, silver, copper and platinum from their respective or mixed ores." Such magical
devices, along with all the dubious mining stock and mines, had become "assets"
of gullible bankers who bankrolled the golden gamble.
The goldenand especially the silvergamble had
become a painful lesson. Much more money was sunk into most mines than was ever taken out.
Although the golden gamble began to look like a bust, it had given Denver a fast start,
attracting capital from the East and Europe to build up Colorado and its capital city.
Even though mining faltered, Denver had gained a grand
opera house, fine residential neighborhoods, and an impressive collection of handsome
stone and brick buildings downtown. Denverites pushed onward to eclipse Santa Fe, Cheyenne
and Salt Lake City, and to build a bigger city than Montanans, Dakotans, Kansans, and
Nebraskans. By 1890, Denver had become the undisputed regional metropolis of the
Rockiesthanks largely to a spiderweb of steel.
SOURCES:
Arps, Louisa Ward. Denver in Slices. Athens, Ohio:
Swallow Press, 1983.
Demas Barnes. From the Atlantic to the Pacific
Overland.... (N.Y.: D. Van Nostrand, 1866)
Denver, Peoples Government. Minutes of the
Meetings of the Peoples Government of the City of Denver, October 8, 1860-November
19, 1861. Coe Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
Hill, Agnes (Leonard) Scanland. The Colorado Blue Book.
Denver: James R. Ives, Pub., 1892. 237p.
Kingsley, Rose Georgiana. South by West: Or, Winter in
the Rocky Mountains and Spring in Mexico. London: W. Isbister & Co., 1874.
Moynihan, Betty. Augusta Tabor: A Pioneering Woman.
Evergreen, Cordillera Press, 1988.
Noel, Thomas J. Denver: The City & The Saloon,
1858-1916. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1982/University Press of Colorado
reprint, 1996.
Noel, Thomas J. Growing Through History with Colorado:
The Colorado National Banks; The First 125 Years, 1862-1987. Denver: Colorado National
Banks & The Colorado Studies Center, University of Colorado at Denver.
Perkin, Robert L. The First Years: An Informal History
of Denver and the Rocky Mountain News, 1859-1959. N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959.
Smith, Duane A. Horace Tabor: His Life and the Legend.
Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1973.
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