Victims of Time

WHILE THE MINERS THAT BUILT THEM ARE LONG GONE, COLORADO'S GHOST TOWNS STILL STAND AS STIRRING REMINDERS OF LIFE ON THE FRONTIER.

(left) Main Street in Caribou, CO, between 1875 and 1885 (right) Caribou today
PHOTOGRAPHS BY DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY, WESTERN HISTORY COLLECTION (LEFT), SAM POLCER (RIGHT)

THE YEAR IS 1879, and Caribou, CO, bustles with life. Though established just 9 years earlier, this outpost almost 2 miles above sea level in the mountains near Denver already has dozens of homes, a post office, a brewery, a school and a threestory hotel.

When the snow comes, as it does for eight months each year, it piles so high that Sherman Hotel guests use the upstairs windows to enter and exit. A rope secured in the middle of town leads to the nearby mineshaft, so miners can fumble to and from work in blizzards. Despite the harsh climate, a few thousand pioneers have flocked to Caribou for the silver ore beneath its surface, laboring in mines that will generate $1 million that year.

But the people who call thriving Caribou home during this time are unaware of the devastation that awaits. A diphtheria epidemic will claim the lives of children - such as siblings Anna, Willie and Alice May - who will die within three days of one another.

Fire will torch the western part of town later this year, and in 1893, plummeting silver prices will ravage the economy. By 1900, just 30 years after its founding, Caribou will be little more than an abandoned speck on the Colorado map.

Nevadaville, CO, in early
1860s, with frame and
log dwellings, mining
facilities, wood piles,
privies and waste from
the mines. The snow-
capped Continental
Divide is in the distance.Today, slightly more than a century later, the only whispers of civilization in this alpine meadow are the crumbling remains of two stone buildings and a collapsed wooden cabin. Otherwise, it is again a province of violet and yellow wildflowers that decorate the hillsides, of hummingbirds that sing over the landscape and of the chill winds that whistle off the Continental Divide.

Caribou's misfortune is a common tale in Colorado history, evidenced today in the abandoned mines and buildings that litter the Centennial State. In fact, only California can claim more ghost towns (due to the 1849 Gold Rush), which are defined by Dr. Tom Noel of the University of Colorado Denver as places that, at one point, had a post office and no longer do. Noel, a bow tie-sporting history professor who answers to the nickname "Dr. Colorado," has tallied about 500 such places in the state. In the counties around Denver, he says, "There are more ghost towns than live towns."

Like Caribou, many of Colorado's ghost towns trace their roots to the Gold Rush of 1859 or the Silver Boom that began in the late 1800s. Miners - mostly young men - would flock after hearing reports of a new vein, always poised to abandon their new home if a better opportunity arose, says Thomas Andrews, assistant professor of history at UC Denver. As a result, Colorado travelers began seeing ghost towns as early as the late 1860s.

"It was much easier for a town to develop on hope," Andrews says. "Most people hadn't really come to stay. They were always looking for the next chance."

One of the few
remaining buildings
in Nevadaville today Twenty years prior to Caribou's boom, that chance lay 20 miles south of Caribou at Gregory's Diggings, later known as Central City. Journalist and future presidential candidate Horace Greeley traveled by mule to the area in 1859, five weeks after word spread of a gold ore discovery there. The journey from Denver, which today takes about 50 minutes by car, required two arduous days - illustrating to Greeley the magnitude of the fever that had seized early miners.

"Six weeks ago, this ravine was solitude," he wrote in a dispatch to the New York Tribune. "I presume less than half the four or five thousand people now in this ravine have been here a week; he who has been here three weeks is regarded as quite an old settler."

Near the southwestern edge of the ravine sprang the town of Nevadaville, which became home to a business district with a grocery store, post office, barbershop and even a lecture hall. Nevadaville soon boasted a population of several thousand - a bit larger than Denver at the time, says Colorado historian and author Kenneth Jessen, who discovered his fascination with ghost towns while hiking through Colorado's mountain backcountry 20 years ago.

"I was just fascinated by who the heck lived here, and why did they live here?" Jessen says. He has since visited 1,600 of Colorado's abandoned sites, including Caribou, Nevadaville and Tiger - an abandoned settlement near Breckenridge where hundreds of mine employees once enjoyed free electricity, heat and running water, but has disappeared except for several broken-down mine structures.

From the pampered existence of Tiger miners to the hardy souls of Caribou, the answer to Jessen's question of "who" often lies in first-person accounts from the era - such as that of Rev. William Crawford. A missionary who arrived to the tri-city area of Central City, Nevadaville and nearby Black Hawk in 1863, he compared the three towns:

"Nevadaville is the least aristocratic in character and pretensions. There are a great many cultivated and pious people, and a great many who are not."

These "cultivated and pious" people struggled against drunkards, transients and other troublemakers to make Nevadaville a real community, complete with a church and a school that boasted 100 students in 1864. But, like so many cities of its day, Nevadaville fell victim to fire - five of them, in fact - which Jessen partly blames on an inadequate water supply. As for its thousands of residents, some rest in local cemeteries; others likely departed for the next "next chance."

Today's Nevadaville is abandoned but for a handful of occupied homes on a hill above town. The main street has a few forlorn buildings and ruined foundations; a stroll past the old fire department/city hall building offers visitors an eerie sense that this was once indeed a big town.

Yet among this sense of ruin, visitors can find perhaps the most compelling aspect of ghost towns - a deeper, if more troubling, truth of the human condition: Nothing we create is permanent. "I would say there's really a cultural appeal (to ghost towns)," Andrews says. "They really are places of tremendous failure and suffering. They're humbling places."

Take Mount Vernon, a ghost town in the foothills near Denver. In 1859, Dr. Joseph Casto plotted the town's 3,600 lots near a major route into the mountains, hoping to build a metropolis that would supply miners with food and equipment on their way to the High Country. Casto touted Mount Vernon as "the greatest thoroughfare in Jefferson Territory," the area that would become Colorado. Yet after brief success, his hopes disappeared like a train into the night when the new railroad bypassed his town. Now, the only sound of civilization at Mount Vernon is the hum of traffic on Interstate 70, which passes half a mile from the site but arrived 80 years too late to save the town.

The only evidence of Casto's grandiose plans are two small cemeteries atop a windswept hill. The story of Mount Vernon, like all ghost towns, has reached an ending likely unimaginable to its founder - becoming nothing more than a lesson in humility written to future generations in the Colorado dirt.

DENVER-AREA GHOST TOWNS ARE WORTH THE SOMETIMES-BUMPY ROADS REQUIRED TO REACH THEM. HERE ARE THE BEST ROUTES:

CARIBOU
Take US 36 west to Boulder. Turn left on CO 119/Canyon Blvd. Drive 17 miles to Nederland. In Nederland, take the second exit in the roundabout onto CO 72. Drive 1/2 mile, then turn left onto CR 128. Continue on this dirt road, which is rough in places, for 5 miles. At 4 miles, continue past two mines on the left. At the top of the hill is Caribou. (50 miles; 1 hour, 30 minutes from Denver)

TIGER
Take I-70 west to exit 203, Breckenridge/Frisco. Take CO 9 south 7 miles and make a left at the Tiger Road stoplight. The Tiger town site is 5 miles down this road, 1.8 miles from the point where the road turns to dirt. Immediately after crossing a culvert, look on the hillside to the right for wooden structures. (85 miles; 1 hour, 45 minutes from Denver)

MOUNT VERNON
Take I-70 west to exit 259, Morrison. Head south on CO 26, ending up on the south side of I-70. Drive less than 1/4 mile and turn right at Matthews/Winters Park. Park and take the Village Walk to Mount Vernon, 1 mile roundtrip. Cross a stream and climb to the top of the hill, where you'll see two fenced-in cemeteries, the remains of Mount Vernon. (20 miles; 25 minutes from Denver)

NEVADAVILLE
Take I-70 west to exit 243, Central City Parkway. Take the Parkway north for 8 miles. Just before downtown Central City, take a left onto Nevada Street and climb a mile to Nevadaville. (40 miles; 1 hour from Denver)