A Lasting Legacy
Photos Courtesy of Denver Public Library, Western History Collection
Storefronts line the west side of Breckenridge’s Main Street, Two men stand on the boardwalk; the storefront is covered by a banner announcing a clearance sale at the Charles Levy clothing store. Circa 1897
Imagine the year 1859 in spring.
A mountain paradise, rarely tramped by white men’s boots, lies serene and waiting. Colorado’s first Western Slope gold strike at today’s Breckenridge looms on the horizon.
In May, 1859 the gold seekers come.
An alpine Eden greets these first prospectors. A crescendo of mountains swathed in tumbling billows of mist serenades the sky.
Below this jumble of peaks and ridges, twisted bristlecone pines and gnarled junipers dig their bony claws into rocky soil, their trunks wrestled by brutal winter winds into tortured limbs and knobs.
Below treeline run rivulets of pure, clean water, dancing down rockfalls to join streams, rushing through green chasms to forge their crystal zest with raging creeks that surge as a riptide, churning their gathering snowmelt into the whitewater tumult of the Blue River.
That river’s valley, pristine and untrammeled, hosts abundant game—grizzly and brown bear, grazing bighorn sheep, soaring hawk and eagle, melodious songbirds, endless herds of elk and deer, flashes of red fox and sinewy mountain lions.
Outnumbering them all, immense and unpredictable, are the buffalo that crowd the meadows, gaining girth from the rich timothy grass that vie for earth space amid wildflowers along the Blue.
The first prospectors, who arrive earlier than previously thought, see this alpine beauty as window dressing for the gold that lay beneath the ground.
They scale elusive Tarryall Pass, a route shrouded by distant years. In May, 1859—not August as earlier supposed—young gold-seekers post-hole through soggy spring snow bearing on their backs an exhausting weight of supplies—food, utensils and mining equipment—essential for a wild territory.
The cool scent of spruce and the musty odor of decaying logs mingle with the smell of sweat and the rank aroma of wet buckskin and beaver fur as the gold-seekers toil upward through sub-alpine forest toward the Continental Divide.
They call this cordillera the Snowy Range, an apt name for the snow-clogged barricade.
The rampart challenges prospectors climbing from South Park along Tarryall Creek to a 12,000-plus foot saddle they will name Tarryall Pass.
Route of the ‘59ers
This pass, long confused with Boreas Pass, lies along the ten-mile long ribbon of rock wall called Hoosier Ridge, which links Boreas and Hoosier Passes.
Tarryall sits one-half mile south of Boreas Pass on this spine of the American continent. Tarryall was the route of the 1859ers.
Daniel Conner, college educated and a good story-teller, possessed the then-unusual skills to record in vivid language his grueling ascent of Tarryall Pass through armpit-deep spring snows.
In his book, A Confederate in the Colorado Gold Fields, the Kentucky-born Conner notes his arrival at the Blue River diggings 45 days after his April 8, 1859 departure from the outfitting city of Lawrence, Kansas.
That places his first day in the new Western Slope gold fields as May 23, 1859, more than two and one-half months ahead of the first documented gold strike at today’s Breckenridge.
That strike, which occurred on August 10, 1859, is usually associated with arrival of white men in the Blue River Valley.
(History buffs may want more evidence to substantiate these newly-revealed facts about when the 1859 gold seekers arrived in today’s Breckenridge and what routes they traveled.
Readers with a bent for research will find this evidence clearly documented in the author’s new book, BRECKENRIDGE, 150 Golden Years, an 1859-2009 history of Colorado’s first Western Slope community.)
When an exhausted Conner finally reached the Blue River, he found an organized mining district humming with prospector activity. Tarryall Pass funnels into the Indiana Creek drainage.
Today this gulch’s lower reaches house the Spruce Valley Ranch residential enclave.
Where Indiana Creek meets the Blue, prospectors who preceded Conner to the Blue River gold fields that spring of 1859 had already established a governmental entity, administered by elected officials under its own laws.
Prospectors called this a mining district.
The district at the mouth of Indiana Gulch, more than a mile south of present-day Breckenridge, stands as Colorado’s first Western Slope mining district. They named it, simply, Miners District.
A deeper level of research for the new Breckenridge historical book made this writer aware of new facts on when gold seekers came — months earlier than previously known.
One question remains, why? Why did they risk everything and summon the resolve to hazard the journey to an unknown part of the continent on the elusive news of gold?
Financial Despair
The answer: a crushing economic recession squeezed farmers who lacked cash to buy seed. It bankrupted shopkeepers and merchants. It ruined entrepreneurs, from blacksmiths to bankers.
The 1857-59 recession, similar in its privation to 1932 America, drove young men west.
Reports in 1858 of gold strikes at Cherry Creek and Auraria (today’s Denver) prompted a Colorado stampede that swelled to 100,000 desperate gold seekers.
Fathers of families with young children left their wives behind to run the farm. Newlyweds separated to allow the husband to reach the gold fields. Sons abandoned families dependent on their help.
Single youths left sweethearts.
The human tide, mostly older teenagers and men in their early twenties, required the energy and stamina of youth to face the physical challenges of crossing the perilous Great Plains and penetrating the merciless Rocky Mountains.
Though 5,000 travelers turned back because exaggerated reports of gold at Cherry Creek proved untrue, others overcame disappointment and pressed into the mountains, at that time largely unknown, unexplored and dangerous.
Among that group was Ruben J. Spaulding’s party, which left Denver on August 2, 1859. 
They took the long route from Denver to present-day Colorado Springs, up through South Park and across Hoosier Pass.
After a ten-day trip, these prospectors reached the Blue River and began to pan for gold.
On a sand bar in the Blue, near today’s grocery-shopping center on the town’s north end, a shout of “Eureka” went up. Ruben J. Spaulding, a miner experienced in the 1849 California rush, struck gold.
His cry rang against the walls of the Continental Divide and ultimately caused a horde of prospectors to scramble over the Snowy Range, greedy for Blue River gold.
Spaulding’s discovery stands as the first documented gold strike on Colorado’s Western Slope. Breckenridge, the town that erupted from this find, became the state’s first Western Slope community.
Born from an 1859 placer gold strike and matured by an 1879 hardrock gold boom, the town preserves both log and Victorian structures from the two gold rush eras.
Colorado’s First Skiing
Gold fever prompted Colorado’s first-ever ski event when Norwegian brothers Balce and Christian Weaver fashioned homemade skis and glided into Gold Run Gulch where they discovered a fortune in placer gold—under eight feet of snow!
Placer mining dominated that first gold rush, 1859-1879. Placer mining retrieves free gold—glacier-eroded gold scraped from original deposits—from existing waterways or from deposits on banks and benches laid down by ancient waterways now gone. It uses water to wash the gold from accompanying sand, gravels and dirt.
Hardrock or lode mining relies on blasting to extract gold from veins embedded in rock.
Placer mining thrust Breckenridge into national prominence. Its placer gold fields led all Colorado in their dazzling yield—almost $7 million from 1859-1879.
This figure, in an era when lunch cost five cents, stunned the imagination. More amazing: gold, worth over $900 an ounce at this writing, then brought only $16-$18 per ounce.
But placer gold played out. Breckenridge lapsed into an insignificant outpost holed up on the high frontier. Who knew that change loomed on the town’s horizon?
The first rumble in a coming earthquake emitted from a cry of “Eureka!” by Will Iliff.
In 1878, prompted by news of gold veins in hard rock at nearby Leadville, he struck gold at the Blue Danube lode mine. After this landmark discovery, other new strikes followed, like waves of aftershock.
A new gold rush began, this time in lode mining. By 1879 Breckenridge experienced cataclysmic change.
Area population shot from 250 to 2,000. Lots priced at $25 skyrocketed to $1,500. Construction of 500 new buildings between February and May 1880 fueled the town economy and filled the streets with joyful racket.
One hundred mining companies organized. Prospectors filed 6,190 location certificates.
“Carpenters hammers never stopped day or night,” wrote a sleepless Agnes Miner, granddaughter of 1860s Judge Marshel Silverthorn.
An equally exhausted Methodist minister, John Lewis Dyer, moaned, “The weary could hardly rest.”
Hubbub came not only from round-the-clock construction but also from 18 saloons, three dance halls and a bevy of gambling halls.
Hurdy-gurdy music flowed into the streets and shouts from saloon carousers split the air. Hardrock mining seized the day.
Town Transformation
A dizzied Breckenridge town government sought to incorporate the bulging burg.
They did so on March 3, 1880. In April, voters elected town trustees.
Officials reacted to a scathing editorial from the town’s new newspaper, the Breckenridge Daily Journal, by clearing Main Street of boulders and filling in “cellar-sized holes.”
They yanked abandoned cabins from their haphazard location in the middle of streets.
They stripped ragged tents and skeleton buildings from Ridge Street, slated to shine as Breckenridge’s showiest 1880s thoroughfare.
The 1880s transformed Breckenridge from log and shanty 1860s architecture to a Victorian jewel.
The age of Britain’s Queen Victoria had ushered in building design featuring false fronts, gingerbread trim and unrestrained propriety.
The pretentiousness of Victorian social principles proved as artificial as its structural false fronts.
For example, prim parlor etiquette reigned side by side with licensed houses of prostitution.
The ill-starred attempt to control the untamed boom town with the constraint of Victorian virtue produced amusing results—like squashing a fat lady into a whalebone corset.
Something was bound to pop. Breckenridge’s sporting element ignored the rules to indulge in carousing.
This era of contrast has left Breckenridge a heritage of gem Victorian buildings in a treasured National Historic District.
Blockaded by the Continental Divide, Breckenridge suffered from high transportation costs to bring supplies in and to freight gold ore out.
This too changed, for the Denver, South Park & Pacific, Colorado’s most colorful narrow gauge railway, arrived in 1882 to bring luxuries such as champagne and oysters, wallpaper and oriental rugs to Breckenridge.
And miners hailed lower ore freight costs.
Breckenridge celebrated its 50th year, 1909, with a binge—of progress.
First, a stately brick courthouse, its cornerstone laid July 31, 1909, marked the old camp’s transition from a half-log settlement, half-Victorian town to a mature mine community.
Second, the Reiling dredge, launched in 1909, signaled a shift from lode mining’s lead in the gold profit picture to a new era of dredge gold dominance.
The gold gobbling dredge boats, a highly-effective mode of placer mining, changed everyday people’s jobs and lives.
And third, these same gold boats tripled Breckenridge’s mining output from previous years to make 1909 a flush mining year.
Like the dredge boat, which swung around in its pond on a spud driven into the riverbed, Breckenridge pivoted during the 1900s to face its future.
The decade of the 1900s proved to be the last period of idealistic bliss, of capitalist pride, of unflawed faith in the goodness of life. The town would undergo the tragedy of World War I and the loss of local boys to the war in Europe.
Breckenridge would never again enjoy the spread of benefits from mining across the community. Instead dredge companies, which employed only a few workers, would take the profits.
A naïve Breckenridge marked its jubilee with crowds and festivities to celebrate setting the cornerstone at the new courthouse.
The $43,000 courthouse, located at 208 Lincoln Avenue, features Colonial-Revival architecture, a magnificent four-sided white cupola and entry pediments painted with mining and railroad scenes.
Visitors can see them today, for the Summit County Courthouse still serves citizens from its original brick structure. A parade of 75 Masons in full regalia marched to a brass band.
A chorus of 50 local vocalists raised a joyous anthem as the Masons set the granite cornerstone in place.
Ladies in dainty white dresses and big hats, gents in three piece suits and derby hats gathered that sunny July 31, 1909 to witness the grand event.
Breckenridge came of age. Mining moguls, Ben Stanley Revett, Captain Lemuel Kingsbury and George Evans, swaggered onto the scene, flashing diamond stickpins and gold nugget watch chains.
Now they traveled in the town’s first automobiles. George Evans navigated Breckenridge roadways in a Stanley Steamer and motored home to a plush residence complete with its own theater and a pet monkey.
The Reiling Dredge
The biggest change, however, occurred not in hardrock mining but in Breckenridge’s strong suit, placer mining.
The gold boats churned through glacially-laid river gravels to expose and collect bedrock deposits.
According to geologist Charles Henderson, Breckenridge boosted its placer gold production from about $10,000 a year through the 1890s to a respectable $145,370 in 1908 when dredges began to make an impact.
But the next year, 1909, when the Reiling dredge came on board, production jumped to a staggering $405,360. This amount, which represents placer gold only, was big money in 1909.
The dredge companies exulted Stories of Breckenridge’s past come alive today with a tour of the town’s heritage sites.
Its splendid National Historic District, one of Colorado’s finest, features buildings from the log 1860s through the stately1900s. Museums such as the Barney Ford House, the William H. Briggle House and the Breckenridge Welcome Center bring history into vivid focus.
Railway relics, such as the Rotary Snowplow Park, and mining sites, such as the Lomax Placer and French Gulch interpretive signage tour, get visitors into a world outside town that abounds with historic remains.
Author-historian Mary Ellen Gilliland has published SUMMIT, A Gold Rush History of Summit County, Colorado and The New Summit Hiker. She has just introduced a new history to celebrate Breckenridge’s 1859-2009 anniversary. It’s called BRECKENRIDGE, 150 Golden Years.
