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From COLORADO GHOST TOWNS AND MINING CAMPS

1985

By Sandra Dallas

A single arastra, the last of a dozen that once operated in Buckskin Gulch, is all that is left of Buckskin Joe. one of Colorado's earliest and wildest mining camps. It was settled in 1859 by a group of prospectors and named "Buckskin Joe's Diggings" for their leader, Joseph Higganbottom, called "Buckskin Joe" for his deerskin dress. Higganbottom a year later traded his interest in the camp for a horse, a gun, and settlement of a bar bill and disappeared.

The miners who stayed behind prospered, and $1.6 million in gold was taken out of the diggings in the first few years, much of it crushed in the arastras. An arastra was a basin cut in rock to hold the ore that was then crushed by a heavy boulder rotated by mule power; the crushed ore was panned to remove the gold.

Early Buckskin Joe was as elegant as Denver. One visitor [Bayard Taylor-Chapter 15] reported that to his astonishment there was a carpet in his room at the Pacific House. The town had its share of "gentry", as one visitor called them, who attended brilliant balls and did not care in the least that these glittering evenings ended with supper in a saloon. Minstrel shows and theatrical performances were held in Laurette Hall. A performance by Mlle. Julia Cotton drew such rave reviews from the editor of the Western Mountaineer that a correspondent for the Rocky mountain News accused him of hoping to "cotton up" to a histrionic Senorita of like charm and style and maturer years."

Buckskin Joe had its rawer side. A News reported noted that half the town's population "are sitting in their houses or tents watching the weather and as a 'general business' playing 'high low jack' or 'seven -up' for the whiskey." Buckskin Joe was rife with saloons, gambling hells, and dance halls, whose denizens included the legendary "Silver Heels", a beautiful dance-hall girl named for her fancy slippers. When smallpox hit the camp, Silver Heels stayed to nurse the miners. She caught the disease, which left her disfigured, and she fled. From time to time in later years, a heavily veiled woman was seen laying wildflowers on the graves of smallpox victims. Legend says it was Silver Heels.

As Buckskin Joe matured, its residents voted to rename it a more refined Lauret or Laurette, but the name never really took. In 1866 the postmaster at Buckskin officially notified the United States Post Office Department that the name of the town had been changed back to Buckskin, The postmaster was an obscure grocer names H. A. W. Tabor.