Gateley - Wilson In Leadville

FIRST ARRIVAL YEAR +/-

RELATIONSHIP TO BILL GATELEY

Leadville

1879

Leadville

~1885

About Leadville--from COLORADO GHOST TOWNS AND MINING CAMPS

by SANDRA DALLAS, 1985

County: Lake;   Location: 103 miles southwest of Denver;   P.O. established July 16, 1877

Built on a dreary hill, surrounded by threatening mountains and buffeted by fierce snowstorms, Leadville is an ominous place, stark and cold.  But hidden beneath the grime and bilious paint encrusted on the buildings like a patina are the remains of the wildest, gaudiest, most raucous mining camp in Colorado, the most glamorous, glittering silver town in the West.  From the time silver was discovered in Leadville in 1875 until the collapse of the silver market in 1893, Leadville fascinated the world with its instant millionaires and villainous ways.  I t was known as both the wickedest city in the world and the most progressive mining town in Christendom.

The area was first settled in 1860 as Oro City, when prospector Abe Lee picked at the nuggets he found in his gold pan and called out: "Boys, I've got all California here in this pan."  Between $5 million and $10 million in gold was taken out of California Gulch before the miners deserted it a few years later.

Then, in 1875, two prospectors, one of them a metallurgist, tested the heavy sands and discovered they were rich in silver.  When the news became public, some two hundred prospectors a day poured over the divide into Leadville, sleeping in alleys or in dry goods boxes, paying fifty cents to sleep in a tent or $1 to roll up in their coats under a gaming table.  One saloon-keeper rented floor space to anyone but reserved th table tops for regular customers.  He rang a bell in case of fire.

The combination of cold, high altitude, and poor food and shelter killed many of the men, but even the risk of death seemed worth it.  The three Gallagher brothers discovered the Camp Bird Mine and sold it for $225,000.  George Fryer hit a silver mine behind his cabin on Fryer Hill.  A group of pallbearers dug a grave, discovered pay dirt, and left the body of their dead friend in a snowbank.  Several discouraged miners agreed to sell their claim for $10,000, and while the buyer went to fetch the money, the owners hit silver.  When he returned, the price was $60,000.  And two worthless prospectors, grubstaked by storekeeper H. A. W. Tabor, dug in the easiest spot they could find and struck ore at the only place on the hill the vein came close to the surface.

Even barren mines produced.  Chicken Bill Lovell salted a prospect hole called the Chrysolite with ore stolen from Tabor's Little Pittsburgh and sold the mine to Tabor.  The silver king refused to admit he had been bilked and ordered his men to keep digging; they struck silver.

NO ONE exemplified the hope, the exhilaration,  the despair of a western prospector as much as Horace Warner Tabor, the stonemason who became a bonanza king and died in poverty.  With his beautiful and adoring young wife, his mansion in Denver, and his extravagant ways, Tabor was the inspiration of every gold and silver seeker in the West.   Horace & Baby Doe Tabor Tabor arrived in Colorado in 1859 with his first wife, Augusta, and infant son, Maxcy, and for the next nineteen years prospected for gold in a succession of camps from Idaho Springs to Oro City.  He operated a series of stores, but it was Augusta who kept the family together, by baking pies and taking in boarders.  In 1878, Tabor grubstaked a pair of improbable prospectors, who by sheer luck, discovered the Little Pittsburg near Leadville, and from then on everything Tabor touched turned to silver. Tabor spent the money almost as fast as it came in.  He built opera houses in Leadville and Denver.  He outfitted the Tabor Hose Company and the Tabor Light Cavalry.  He ordered silk nightshirts with diamond buttons and indulged in champagne and oyster suppers at Leadville's elegant Saddle Rock Cafe.  It was there that he met Elizabeth McCourt Doe, and in a scandal that rocked Colorado, he divorced the faithful Augusta, who had grown old and bitter from overwork and too many mountain winters.  In 1883, Tabor, who had been named to fill a thirty-day term in the United States Senate, married Baby Doe in the Willard Hotel in Washington.  President Chester Arthur attended the wedding, along with the city's most prominent men, though their wives snubbed Baby Doe and stayed away. If Baby Doe was ignored, Tabor was tolerated because of his money.  "A fouler beast was never depicted," one senator confided to his wife,  "Such a vulgar, ruffianly boor you never beheld; uncouth, awkward, shambling, dirty hands and big feet turned inward; a huge solitaire diamond on a sooty, bony, blacksmith hand. . ." Tabor's money and gullibility made him a victim of investment sharks, and he threw away millions on worthless mines and exotic schemes, while Baby Doe squandered money on peacocks for the lawn and thousand-dollar dresses for the Tabor daughters, Elizabeth Bonduel Lillie and Rose Mary Echo Silver Dollar. The combination of poor investments and the silver crash depleted Tabor's fortune, and he died penniless in 1899, exhorting Baby Doe to hold on to the Matchless Mine.  She did, living in exile at the mine shaft, deserted by her daughters.  Lillie moved to the Middle West to live with relatives, and Silver Dollar became a prostitute and was scalded to death in Chicago. In 1935, Baby doe's body, dressed in rags, was found at the Matchless.  She had frozen to death among the mementos of the bonanza years, including scrapbooks filled with yellowed clippings and tattered ribbons that told the incredible saga of the Tabors.

Those who did not become silver kings made money too.  Charles Boettcher's hardware store was the basis of an extraordinary fortune that made Boettcher, who controlled the Great Western Sugar Company, the Ideal Cement Company, and the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver, the most powerful man in Colorado.  David May turned a successful dry goods store into the May Department Stores Company.  And a family of Philadelphia lace merchants named Guggenheim purchased the A. Y. and the Minnie mines, then risked their capital on a smelter, forming the American Smelting and Refining Company (now Asarco, Incorporated).  Leadville claimed that in a ten-year period it had created more millionaires than any city in the world.  "Not only your banker, but your baker and grocer and the man who saws you wood, has some cash interest in the silver diggings," noted a Scribners Monthly reported in 1879.

But rich men and their instant wealth were easily parted.  Leadville was gaudy with saloons, gambling dens, dance halls, and other fleshpots reeking of bartered virtue.  "Gambling saloons are more than five times as numerous as churches, and are twenty times as well patronized," wrote an 1879 visitor, who counted twenty-one regular gambling houses and noted faro equipment in drugstores, groceries, and offices.  By 1883 Leadville had ninety-seven saloons, along with twenty-three restaurants, fifty-one boardinghouses, two sausage makers, one soap manufacturer, and countless gambling halls, variety theaters, concert halls (so called because they offered music, boxing matches, and waiter girls), and other dens of iniquity.

Writers for Leadville's six newspapers, as well as visiting journalists, made the de rigueur tour of Leadville's resorts--all in the interest of informing their readers, of course.  They watched the frayed women and hardened men under the gaslights of the Bon Ton, the Odeon, the National, the Comique, the Pioneer, the Bella Union, and dozens of other establishments, and chronicled greed and lasciviousness and the petty ways of the denizens. They relished the cat fights, treating women as pitiful but amusing objects.  When the women from two State Street dance halls battled over which wore shorter skirts, the Leadville Chronicle covered the event gleefully.  Drunk on whiskey mixed with gunpowder, the women of the Red Light attacked their rivals at the Bon Ton.  "The fight was short and bloody.  The air was thick with wigs, teeth, obscenity and bad breaths," the Chronicle noted.

The favorite spot for the underworld was Pap Wyman's Saloon where a Holy Bible was chained to the counter with a sign, "Please Do Not Swear."  Wyman refused to let married men gamble, but other places were only too happy to take advantage of the unwary.  A newcomer lost his $800 stake first, and then his $300 horse, and his watch, mule, rifle, and dog.  Intending to shoot himself, the dupe put his hand into his pocket for his gun and found instead his meerschaum pipe, which he hocked.  He rejoined the game, and by daylight he was $4,800 ahead.  Collecting his winnings, the man called for a Bible and swore on it never to gamble again.

There were occasional temperance movements, but they never amounted to much.  The Grocers and Butchers Protective Association studied the weighty problem of regulating gambling halls and saloons.  The members concluded that saloons--which served free lunches--were legitimate, but they came out against gambling halls.

The grocers and butchers were not the only ones to make money off the resorts.  Saloon-keepers, gamblers, madams, and occasionally even prostitutes and dance house girls got rich, though generally they spent the money as quickly as they made it.  Maude Deuel, who was living on a $7.50-a-month pension in 1935, recalled that some dance hall girls made as much as $100 a week and that she took in as much as $200 as the most popular girl at the Pioneer Dance Hall.  She spent $200 a week, however.  "I always believed in keeping money in circulation," she said.

Very few of the women who hustled drinks or their own bodies came out ahead,  Most ended like Mabel Johnson, a tired, aged dance hall performer who collapsed amid catcalls and jibes of her drunken audience.  She was carried to her shack in Tiger Alley where the whores and dance hall girls, described as "hard enough to cut up for harrow teeth," brought in bread and cakes and set up a death watch.  When it was over, the women passed the hat to raise enough for a rosewood coffin with silver handles.

"It was a blessed death," sighed one of Mabel's women friends.  For many of the hopeless women of Tiger Alley and the more infamous Stillborn Alley, where the foulest of the cribs were located, death was indeed blessed.

Easy money inevitably produced lawlessness with footpads and cutthroats lurking everywhere.  Anyone who flashed a roll of bills was doomed.  Businessmen walked in groups down dingy corridors to their hotel rooms, and when forced to go out alone at night even a brave man down the center of the street with a cocked pistol in each hand.

There were scofflaws in high places, too.  Three leading banks "fell into ruin through profligate management, and two of them were shipwrecked by the dishonesty of the controlling powers," wrote historian Frank Hall.  When the First National Bank of Leadville folded in 1884, one Leadville paper ran a headline accusing its president, Frank W. DeWalt, of running out, noting: "Reasonable Suspicion That There is Something Rotten."

"DeWalt had gambled away $50,000, most of its depositors' money, in a mere six months and was reported to have bankrolled Winnie Purdy's byzantine bagnio, the most remarkable house of wickedness in Leadville," according to a reporter.  DeWalt eventually served a prison term for his part in the bank's failure.  "Oh, he was a beautiful gambler, but a chump of a bank president," said a sporting man.

Despite its wicked ways, Leadville was an elegant Victorian city high in the clouds with an active civilizing class of people.  If churches and schools lagged behind saloons and variety halls, they were built nonetheless.  Father John Dyer, Father Henry Robinson, and Parson Tom Uzzel brought comfort to the godly and exhortations of hell to others.  Hell was not far away.  One sinner remarked: "If one wants to see hell uncovered, let him go through one of the many gambling houses." 

Religious societies, fraternal orders, and women's clubs dominated upper-class social life with masked balls and 'possum suppers, skating parties and picnics.  For the cultured, there was the Tabor Opera House, where entertainers from Jack Langrishe to Oscar Wilde performed.  Wilde's lectures were roaring successes, not because of their languid subjects but because Wilde dad captivated Leadville by drinking a group of miners under the table.  Just as elegant as the opera house was the Tabor Grand Hotel, which was opened in 1885.  Its lobby floor was set with silver dollars.  So many fashionable people paraded about Leadville that a visiting reported was astonished to discover he had "seen more handsome and really tasteful costumes here than I saw in Omaha."

During its heyday Leadville produced more than $200 million in ore, mostly silver.  But the 1893 silver crash closed most of the mines for good, throwing Leadville into a depression that was relieved only slightly by gold production at the Little Jonny Mine.  Owned by big-spending John Campion, known as "Leadville Johnny," the Little Jonny was managed by industrious James. J. Brown, whose wife, Margaret, craved admittance to Denver society.  Her social betters, called the "Sacred Thirty-six," snubbed her until she emerged as the heroine of the Titanic disaster, and they were forced to admit "the Unsinkable Mrs. Brown" to their homes.

In an attempt to muster civic pride and to stem economic and population losses, Leadville leaders in 1896 built a glittering ice palace.  Made of huge blocks of ice cut and hauled to the Leadville site, the ice palace with its ballrooms, skating rink, restaurant, and lounge, was lit by electric lights.  Their glow reflected off the ice and glittered like stars.

The ice palace, which had cost nearly $40,000, proved a costly extravagance.  A rare warm chinook blew in, and in March, only two months after it opened, the ice palace slowly melted away.

So did Leadville.  By the turn of the century, mine production had dropped to a fraction of its high in the 1880s.  Houses were torn down for firewood.  Dogs slept undisturbed in the middle of Harrison Avenue, once so busy that pedestrians could cross only if they "drifted with the current as it moved," Hall noted.  Stills operated out of old mine shafts as Leadville became bootlegger to Colorado.  Illicit whiskey, in fact, was the county's major source of income during the period of prohibition.  By 1930, Leadville's population, once twenty thousand, had dropped to less than four thousand.

Unlike the gentler, prettier mining towns, Leadville, with its dreary winters and quick summers, never appealed to those seeking a second home.  For the past three-quarters of a century, it has lived catch-as-catch-can, unhampered by inflows of capital and such niceties as historical preservation.  Its once stylish buildings are cluttered with neon signs and distorted by cheap remodeling.  Still, through the grime of a hundred years there lurks a faded splendor, a haunting reminder of a long-gone era when silver was king and silver kings owned the world.