BRECKENRIDGE, COLORADO
*Note: Father John Lewis Dyer is Kith Gateley's second cousin, three times removed, the nearest common ancestor being John Foster, 1st. The York--and probably Peabody-- families attended his church. Edna York and Sidney Gateley were married by the Rev. Jno. R. Wood, the church's minister at that time.
1937, April 10: The last train through Breckenridge made its way over Boreas
Pass. The rails were torn up during the following year. In 1952 the railroad bed
on the Breckenridge side was converted into an auto road which finally reached
Como in 1954.
Post Office Established January 18, 1860
|
From COLORADO GHOST TOWNS AND MINING CAMPS 1985 By Sandra Dallas |
| The rock piles begin across from Peak One of the Tenmile
Range. They spill out of the gulches and move on to Breckenridge,
ugly and harsh as the dredges that left them in their wake. The
dredges were demons of destruction, huge barges that churned up the
mountain streams, sending their buckets down to bedrock in search of
gold. When they had passed on, the mountain streams were gone,
choked by pills of stone higher than a town. Two generations later
the rock piles remain, unyielding. Only a few clumps of grass and
a few sturdy aspens grow on them.
The rock piles are in the detritus of Breckenridge's third and longest boom--dredging. The first began in 1859 when gold seekers swarmed over the Front Range to placer mine the streams of the Tenmile. They settled a dozen towns, but Breckenridge became the most important of them when its residents stole county records from Parkville [10 miles northeast of Breckenridge] and established Breckenridge as the county seat. Gold was discovered on the Blue River August 10, 1859, when a party of prospectors picked Ruben J. Spalding, an experienced California miner, to work the first pan of dirt. He recovered 13 cents' worth of gold. The second pan yielded 27 cents. "Our little party now felt jubilant . . . and began to realize that here lay the fulfillment of their most ardent hopes," Spalding told historian Frank Hall. Spalding traded his mule for two sacks of stale flour and 175 feet of lumber to build long toms. Wrapping his feet in pieces of saddle blanket, Spalding worked in ankle-deep water. The first day netted $10 and a bad cold. Even luckier was William H. Iliff, just across the river from Spalding, who scratched out $7,000 in gold from a patch 40 feet square. When Iliff told of his good fortune in Denver, some two thousand men stampeded into the area. In early 1960 prospectors organized the town of Breckinridge, naming it for United States Vice-President John C. Breckinridge. The chances of getting a post office designation were greater if the town was named for a political official; there are nine Breckenridges or Breckinridges in the United States. After Abraham Lincoln was elected president and John Breckinridge defected to the South, Union supporters changed the spelling to "Breckenridge." [Lelon Peabody came to the area in the early 1860s, and Harry York came from Denver in 1896] The placer mines lasted about three years. By 1868 when Samuel Bowles visited Breckenridge, it was a settlement of only twenty or thirty cabins, "scarcely habitable in winter," Bowles wrote. He also noted that Breckenridge had a good hotel with a "broad buxom matron and black-eyed beauties of daughters"--probably the family of Judge Marshall Silverthorne, who was so sickly when he crossed the Missouri River for Colorado in 1859 that one party refused to allow him to join them. Only after Silverthorne challenged the biggest man in camp to a fight did they allow the plucky individual to go with them. Nevertheless, they slipped a few boards into the bottom of a wagon for a coffin. Another early settler was Edwin Carter, who went to the mountains in search of gold but stayed to become the state's most prominent naturalist. Carter killed and mounted hundreds of animals and displayed them in his Breckenridge museum. Forty years of breathing the arsenic then used in taxidermy contributed to Carter's death in 1900, and his collection was acquired by the city of Denver as the foundation of the city's Museum of Natural History. The discovery of gold in fissures and veins in the early 1880s caused a second rush to Breckenridge. Dozens of mines were established in the gulches and on the mountainsides around Breckenridge, on Farncomb Hill, where wire gold was discovered, on Shock and Nigger hills, and along Georgia Gulch and the Swan River. By 1885 there were two thousand residents in Breckenridge, and the townspeople had begun to replace the log cabins with false-fronted stores, gingerbread-trimmed houses, and commercial buildings gripping with carved wooden icing. The most elaborate were the hotels--the Hotel Arlington with its scalloped false front and the double-gabled Denver Hotel. Managed by Robert Foote, the Denver Hotel was a haven for traveling men, gamblers, local merchants, and occasional blackguards. One summer evening in 1898 a tough named Pug Ryan and a gang of henchmen robbed the patrons of the Denver Hotel. Intent on plundering the hotel safe and robbing a local merchant who spent his evenings dozing in the lobby, the robbers changed their plans when a gun accidentally discharged. They quickly took the cash from the barroom till and relieved the customers of their money and jewelry. The robbers were tracked to a cabin near Kokomo, between Breckenridge and Leadville, and in a bloody shoot-out, two members of the gang and two lawmen were killed. Ryan escaped and was not captured until four years later in Seattle when the tattoo "PUG" on his arm gave him away. He was jailed but escaped; he was recaptured and eventually sent to prison, where he died in 1931. Ten years after the robbery, schoolchildren on a picnic found part of the loot from the robbery, including a watch belonging to Foote, that Ryan had stashed in a log near the Kokomo cabin. When Foote heard of the discovery, he took the train to Kokomo and scratched in the dirt until he found his stolen diamond stickpin. Dredging, Breckenridge's third gold boom, began on the Swan River in 1898 when Ben Stanley Revett, a mining engineer, launched the first dredge boat, a 100-foot barge with a clamoring bucket line. It flew a silk flag designed by Revett himself. Revett, a mountain of a man, directed dredge operations in the gulches and slowly moved down the rivers to Breckenridge, making such a persistent din that residents woke up in the middle of the night if the bucket lines stopped. Dredges were tolerated because they provided jobs at a time when mines all over Colorado were closing down. But Breckenridge residents has a love-hate relationship with the barges that extended even to the children. The daughter of a dredge master recalled forty years later that her playmates loved to taunt her when the dredge broke down, chanting: "Your dad's bucket line is in the pond." Like the mine owners elsewhere, the dredge officials were the elite of Breckenridge society. In the early 1900s George H. Evans, manager of the Gold Pan Company, built a hall onto his house where he showed motion pictures and his wife gave violin concerts. Evans, an Englishman, drove a white Stanley Steamer and hired a governess for his children. When he asked an associate, Bob Gore, to buy a pair of gloves at Gano Downs, an elegant department store in Denver, he contemptuously refused to accept the purchase because Gore had paid a niggardly $12.50 for the gloves. Despite such pretensions, Breckenridge was wide open. One evening when Mrs. Gore was entertaining a church group, her daughter answered a knock at the door to find a drunk who lunged at her, crying: "I'll take you, Katy." The drunk, new in town, had asked directions to the whorehouse but had been pointed instead to the Gore house. Most of the whorehouses were "over the Blue," across the river to the west of town, and they included the Blue Goose, the Pines, and the Columbine Rest. The prostitutes kept to themselves, mixing only during town celebrations or when there was trouble. The last of the madams, May Nicholson, who lived until the 1960s, bragged that she led the Fourth of July parade carrying the American flag. Another madam agreed to sell a house she owned to a family with seven or eight children, but before the deal was closed, the husband died of the flu. After the funeral, the madam quietly presented the deed to the house to the widow. When the financially precarious dredging operations finally shut down during World War II, the brothels were closed and the prostitutes moved on or became a part of the town fabric. Some of the girls who stayed on lived with former customers, and if the relationship looked as though it might last, the women began to be called by the men's names. Then Breckenridge people said that the woman has "risen from over the Blue." After the dredges stopped and the young men went off to war, the town was in limbo. Then, in 1962, a ski area was opened on Peak Eight to the west of Breckenridge, and skiers swarmed into town, remodeling the houses into Victorian chalets. Successive waves of vacationers have built towering condominiums on the mountainsides and Victorianesque houses in town. They have turned Main Street into a boutique mining camp. But the rock piles remain. |
