2. THE GOLDEN GAMBLE

Ages before the Arapaho arrived, gold settled at the confluence of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River. Over hundreds of millions of years, the heavy yellow metal bubbled up in hot, volcanic forms that injected it into cracks and faults of rocks.

Erosion of the Rockies, and of an ancestral range that existed some 250 million years ago, created the High Plains. The same glaciers and streams that melted the mountains also washed out some of the gold into placer deposits whose discovery gave birth to Denver.

William Greeneberry "Green" Russell, a veteran of both the Georgia and the California gold rushes, scrutinized the Colorado Rockies carefully. He suspected the three-mile-high barrier to America’s westward expansion might become a goal one day. He reckoned that the Rockies hid mineral treasures. His discovery of a few ounces of gold in the summer of 1858 proved his suspicion correct and triggered a mass migration to Colorado. An estimated 100,000 people rushed into Colorado between 1858 and 1860. Only one out of three found Colorado worthwhile, because in 1860, the census taker found only 34,277 residents.

Russell and his party founded the first permanent settlement in what is now metro Denver. They named their town Auraria—from the Latin word for gold—after their hometown in the Georgia gold fields. Auraria merged with Denver City, its rival on the opposite bank of Cherry Creek, on April 6, 1860. Afterwards, Auraria became known as West Denver.

Denver’s Puppy Days

Denver City was a long shot. Most of the gold-rush settlements would become ghost towns. In the struggle to become the county seat, the state capital and the regional metropolis, there would be many losers and only one winner. While other Coloradans gambled on gold, Denverites mined the miners, relieving them of whatever wealth they might find up in the hills. Denverites gambled with cards and dice, with mining stock and real estate and railroads. They bet on everything from dog fights to snowfall. During the slow winter months, city fathers amused themselves with card games. They used town lots as poker chips and of an evening won and lost whole blocks of downtown Denver.

Demas Barnes, an argonaut crossing the plains, marveled at Denver’s site and its construction. "Why [Denver] was ever located here for is more than I can decipher," he wrote home on June 25, 1866. "Ten thousand carcasses of poor overworked animals mark the highway over seven hundred miles of parching, treeless plain."

Despite the barren high plains and the dead animals, Barnes explained that gold fever made Denver a magnet: "It is almost impossible not to partake of the general enthusiasm, for you hear gold discussed morning, noon, all night, and far into the next day. It is not a myth. You see it—you select specimens for your cabinet...you hold the pure golden nuggets in your hands, your eyes dilate, your mouth waters...."

Gold gave birth to Denver and funded the reckless rush to grow up into a great city. Almost from the beginning Denver built for permanence in brick and stone—unlike so many other now-vanished Colorado towns of frame and canvas. "Denver," as Barnes put it in a letter of June 27, 1865, "is a square, proud, prompt little place... There being no wood, brick becomes a necessity for building purposes...It has fine brick stores, four churches, a good seminary, two theaters, two banks, plenty of gambling shops, a fine U. S. mint [which] has actually coined the vast amount of four thousand dollars in a whole year!"

Denver had few visible means of support, and little reason to become a city. It lacked the navigable waterways that usually determine the location of cities, and other settlements were closer to the mines which were Colorado’s livelihood. In the decade after the gold rush, Denver faced the same fires, floods, Indian wars and ore-processing difficulties that left Colorado Territory littered with dead towns. Yet an English visitor, Miss Rose Kingsley, reported in her book, South by West , that the mile-high town was "one of the most successful of all the new cities of the West."

Kingsley well described Denver’s precarious and isolated existence. After seeing the baby town in 1871, she marveled: "It looked just as if it had been dropped out of the clouds accidentally, by someone who meant to carry it further on, but got tired, and let it fall anywhere."

The People’s Government

To govern this accidental city, the People’s Government was formed in September, 1860, in Apollo Hall, a saloon in what is now Larimer Square. City dads wrestled with law and order, taxes and the homeless. At the request of Denver merchants, the first law enacted on October 8, 1860, was "an Ordinance prohibiting Gambling & the selling of Liquor or Merchandise on the Streets or from Wagons or Tents." This ordinance suggests that two-year-old "Denver City," the hub of the Colorado gold rush, bustled with boozers and losers.

The People’s Government selected "Noisy Tom" Pollock as marshal, partly because of his commanding voice. Pollock, who had arrived from New Mexico in 1858, opened Denver’s first blacksmith shop on January 10, 1859. Three months later, he erected the two-story Pollock House at 11th and Market Streets, a site now on the Auraria Campus. Pollock received 50 cents for every criminal he caught, and his pioneer hotel soon bulged with prisoners.

Pollock earned his star in a shootout by killing George Steele, a swaggering, murderous gambler. Pollock administered doses of "lead-poisoning" and "rope-burn" to weed out Denver’s numerous "bummers." He repeatedly reappears in the People’s Government ledger, asking for help in housing prisoners. When the town failed to build a jail, Pollock resigned.

The People’s Government struggled to raise funds not only for a jail, but for a courthouse, and a public school. Voters balked. After one disastrous November 10, 1860, election, Denver "indefinitely postponed" plans to collect taxes and began asking for voluntary donations. By May 14, 1861, the new city had spent $8,739 and incurred a debt of $6,463. To solve the budget quandary, the People’s Government took to taxing the town’s ubiquitous saloons.

Another revenue-raising scheme, proposed on November 22, 1860, aimed to "establish a course of Lyceum Lectures, with proceeds for the City Poor Fund." This pioneer effort to simultaneously promote culture and care for the homeless never materialized.

On December 11, 1860, the People’s Government authorized a "Literary and Historical Society of the City of Denver" which was also asked to be "one of the overseers of the poor." This society was still-born. Its mission fell to the state, which did not organize the Colorado Historical Society (CHS) until 1879. The Denver Public Library did not finally open its doors until 1889. Not until 1990 did the Colorado Historical Society open the first Denver History Museum in the old Byers-Evans House.

The clash between community and private interests began early. In a resolution to outlaw private structures erected in the public streets and in the bed of Cherry Creek, the pioneer city officials noted that "Such posession [sic] by individuals of public property is an infringement upon the rights of the community and of individual owners of property in the vicinity."

The People’s Government was replaced on November 19, 1861, by today’s city government, which was officially authorized by the new Territorial Government of Colorado. All that is left of the People’s Government is a slender, mud-stained ledger recording the pioneer struggle to govern often-reluctant citizens—a battle that continues today.

William N. Byers

A prime mover behind the People’s Government was William Newton Byers. Byers fought to bring stagecoach service to the isolated town and endeavored to make Denver the steamboat capital of the Rockies. The greatest Denver booster of all, Byers was born on an Ohio farm but he did not stay put long. He headed west to Iowa and then to Omaha, the great jumping-off place and home base for the Union Pacific Railroad. Byers had helped lay out Omaha, which became the largest town between St. Louis and San Francisco. He served on its first city council, and represented it in the Nebraska Territorial Legislature. Succumbing to gold fever, he abandoned Omaha in 1859 for the Cherry Creek gold rush settlements. He wrote one of 17 1859 guidebooks to the new promised land, selling himself as well as thousands of others on the golden gamble called Denver City.

Byers published Denver’s first newspaper, The Rocky Mountain News, on April 23, 1859. The News puffed Denver as the pre-ordained metropolis of the Rockies, even imagining river traffic for the high, dry city on the shallow South Platte. In early issues of the News aimed at Omaha and other cities filled with investors, capital, and potential immigrants, Byers called Denver the steamboat hub of the Rockies. Noting that water traffic made major cities of New Orleans, St. Louis, and other river towns, Byers launched a "shipping news" department. On September 10, 1859 the News announced in a "Boat Departures" column: "‘Ute’ and ‘Cheyenne’ for mouth of the Platte. Scow ‘Arapahoe’ for New Orleans. All laden with passengers and freight."

Subsequent announcements for the benefit of Eastern investors and the national press proclaimed ships sailing from Denver to Pittsburgh and New York. Despite such heroic efforts by the "Rocky Mountain Liar," as critics termed the Rocky Mountain News, the South Platte never became a mighty Mississippi, clogged with steamboats whistling for a landing on Denver’s waterfront.

Byers also used the News to promote agriculture. He offered free seeds to anyone stopping by his office, and publicized agricultural experiments. In the first issue of the News, Byers warned in his editorial, "Farming vs. Gold Digging" that farmers "taken off with the Cherry Creek yellow fever" would do better "to raise stock and produce for the mines." All Colorado needed to make the Great American Desert bloom, Byers asserted, were a few good farmers and a little water. Of course, cynics scoffed, a few good people and a little water could turn hell into heaven.

The irrepressibe promoter championed irrigated farming as the way to make the Great American Desert bloom. Even the optimistic Union Colony farmers, who were persuaded by Byers to buy their Greeley site on the South Platte River, grew chary of his claims. David Boyd, in his book, A History: Greeley and the Union Colony of Colorado (Greeley:The Greeley Tribune Press, 1890), reported "fear and trembling [at how Byers, with his fellow boosters,] is proposing to cut a great gash in the earth, from South Platte canyon to Kansas City, and water all the land on both sides."

As Byers’ career illustrates, newspapers were the primary tool of boosterism in Western frontier towns. Lord Bryce, the English ambassador who captured Yankee eccentricities in his classic, The American Commonwealth, put it well: "Many a place has lived on its ‘boom’ until it found something more solid to live on; and to a stranger who asked in a small Far Western town how such a city could ‘keep up four newspapers,’ it was well answered that it took four newspapers to keep up such a city."

Footloose frontier hordes troubled city builders like Byers. He urged the miners swarming into, over, and often out of Colorado to settle. In the News, March 14, 1861, he blasted the "folly of being eternally on the tramp, without stopping long enough in any place to learn its resources or to earn a livelihood...If the time thus spent in running over the country were judiciously employed in prospecting or making preparation for farming, a class that is now not far removed from a public nuisance would soon develop rich mines [and] open up valuable ranches and farms."

Newspapers attracted newcomers and capital to upstart towns such as Denver. Byers became the spokesman for Denver and outlasted dozens of ink-stained competitors. He was the voice of the city and might well have been elected mayor or governor or senator—except for an indiscretion with a woman not his wife.

Hattie Sancomb, a pretty divorcee from Kansas, grew very fond of the handsome, nobly-bearded Byers. He found their affair easier to slip into than to get out of. When he tried in 1876 to cool her ardor, she drew a pearl-handled pistol and fired. She missed, damaging only his reputation. From behind a lace curtain of her parlor window, Mrs. Libbby Byers saw her husband ambushed in the street and rushed out to rescue him. Denver buzzed with a delicious scandal concerning its most prominent citizen. Subsequently, Byers sold his newspaper and abandoned his political aspirations. Yet he stuck with Denver—and his wife stuck with him. He helped to organize a Chamber of Commerce and tirelessly promoted Denver as the queen city of the Rockies.

Born in a gold rush, Denver got a fast start. By 1865, it had emerged as the capital of Colorado Territory. Denverites had out-politicked Golden and Colorado City, both of which briefly served as the capital. In an 1881 election, Colorado Springs and Pueblo failed to muster enough votes; Denver became the permanent political hub. Denver legislators helped arrange lesser prizes for Boulder, Ca�on City, Colorado Springs, and Pueblo. The latter received the state mental hospital and Colorado Springs the state home for the deaf and dumb, as it was originally called. Ca�on City was awarded the state penitentiary—a coveted prize, since convicts provided cheap or free labor. Boulder got last prize—the state university. Many people then (and some now) reckoned that faculty and students were a rowdy, disruptive lot, given to dissipation and idleness.

Historical Consciousness

Nineteenth-century Coloradans were history-conscious. They prided themselves on being the first to see, to name, to settle, and to build. As early as 1872, Denverites held pioneer picnics for their founding mothers and fathers. In 1879, the State Historical and Natural History Society was created. The state legislature gave the society $500 to collect, preserve and exhibit Colorado’s heritage before "the men who have been the actors, and the material for collections will be quite beyond our reach."

In 1900, the historians and natural historians parted company and settled in different homes. The historical society built a Greek temple of Colorado Yule marble across Fourteenth Street from the State Capitol. The Denver Museum of Natural History constructed its museum at the east end of City Park.

Colorado did not produce any literary giants to immortalize the frontier era—no Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, or Mari Sandoz. Travelers such as Isabella Bird, Helen Hunt Jackson, Richard Townsend and Louis Simonin left lively, literary accounts, but not until the 20th century would Coloradans such as Hal Borland, David Lavender, Marshall Sprague, and Frank Waters do literary justice to the settlement of mountain and plain. Not until the poet Thomas Hornsby Ferril (1896-1988) began celebrating Colorado’s mountains and rivers, its mining camps and its Mile High City, could Colorado claim a literary giant.

Historians have been luckier. LeRoy Hafen, Frank Hall, Jerome C. Smiley and Wilbur Fisk Stone all compiled multi-volume state histories. Smiley also completed a monumental, 978-page History of Denver detailing the rise of people and places in a magical mile high setting. Since 1908, the Colorado Historical Society has issued a magazine celebrating local history, starting with The Trail in 1908 and evolving into today’s glossy, color quarterly, Colorado Heritage.

Artistic Endeavors

Denverites emphasized the edifying. They ignored the fact that their city government, as well as the territorial government, had been conceived, born and raised in saloon halls. Saloons also housed the first theaters, art exhibits, dance, music, theater and even libraries. By 1910, Denver had 410 saloons which offered a wide variety of goods and services, of arts and amusements, as well as nickel beers and free lunches.

Bar art attested to early cultural aspirations. Original art today is often confined to museums, corporate board rooms, and the homes of the wealthy. In nineteenth-century Denver, much original saloon art was public art. Charles Stobie, a western artist, lived above the Gallup & Stanbury Saloon (which still stands at 1445 Larimer Street) and exhibited his work downstairs in the bar. Editor Byers appraised Stobie’s work as "the most excellent and beautiful work in oil painting we have seen executed in this country." Stobie’s works, like the paintings Charles Russell once swapped for drinks in the Mint Saloon, now command much higher prices. Denver has lost most of its bar art with the reckless demolition of it 19th-century architectural heritage. Two exceptions are the landscapes on the old high-back booths at the Punch Bowl Tavern, 2052 Stout Street, and the Windsor Hotel bar mural which survives in the Oxford Hotel dining room.

Colorado artists and art lovers organized the Artists Club in 1893 to promote the visual arts. During the 1920s, this club reorganized as the Denver Art Museum. Anne Evans, a leading benefactor and an artist herself, helped to establish what is still the Denver Art Museum’s strongest collection, its American Indian exhibits. Ironically, she was the daughter of territorial governor John Evans, who was removed from office after the massacre of about 148 Indians, primarily old men, women and children, at Sand Creek. Anne Evans and the art museum prized the artifacts that were disregarded by many pioneers as the trinkets and trappings of savages. In their rush to culture, the pioneer generation overlooked the Indian culture and artifacts now showcased at the Denver Art Museum, Colorado History Museum and Denver Museum of Natural History.

Performing Arts

Colorado’s performing arts were also born in barrooms. Apollo Hall on Denver’s Larimer Street staged Colorado’s first theatrical performances in 1859. Saloonkeeper Libeus Barney, who adored Shakespeare, reported that 400 people squeezed into his hall, demonstrating "the appreciation of art in this semi-barbarous region." In early saloon-theaters, enthusiastic audiences customarily treated their favorite actors and actresses to libations between acts. This custom, as historian Smiley noted, "often resulted in lowering the standard of artistic effects of the closing scenes of the drama."

The Occidental Hall on Blake Street featured Colorado’s "favorite balladist" to "delight all with operatic and sentimental, as well as comic songs." At other times, this Blake Street bar advertised a reading room with the latest newspapers and free stationery, offering readers a haven two decades before the Denver Public Library was founded in 1889. The Occidental, during its long career as a pioneer performing arts center, ballyhooed a German violinist and Miss Lulu ("the California Prima Donna"), trapeze performances by "Professor" Wilson and a musical machine "which makes as much music as a dozen brass bands." The most notorious theater was Ed Chase’s Palace at 15th and Blake Streets (The Palace Lofts now occupy the site). This saloon, gambling hall and theater was notorious for its "leg art" and laughing ladies of easy virtue.

Such artistic efforts helped make Denver a cultural as well as a commercial capital for Colorado. Farmers from the eastern plains, ranchers from the San Luis Valley and the Western Slope, and miners from the mountains have long relied on Denver as an amusement center. Although high-brow critics have rolled their eyes and aimed snide comments at Denver’s "cowtown culture," it has entertained Coloradans with Western humor, sentimental nostalgia, and treatment of regional topics.

The Tabor Grand Opera House

In Europe and America, grand opera houses reigned as the ultimate palaces of culture. Visitors to Colorado marveled at finding opera houses in small mining towns such as Central City as early as the 1870s. Denver, of course, erected the grandest opera house of all—the Tabor Grand at 16th and Curtis Streets. To erect the most lavish building Denver has ever seen, silver magnate Horace Austin Warner Tabor went shopping for an architect in Chicago. He came back with Willoughby and Frank Edbrooke. After touring opera houses in Eastern cities to find what was most fashionable and functional, the Edbrookes designed an $800,000 palace for opera.

"Denver," Tabor declared, "was not building as good buildings as it ought to and I thought that I would do something towards setting them a good example." The Tabor Grand wore a high Victorian facade of Golden pressed brick, trimmed in Manitou limestone under a slate roof from Maine. It sported asymmetrical Queen Anne towers, a Second Empire mansard roof, and steep chateauesque roofs on its towers and dormers. Denverites were flabbergasted. Some called it "Oriental luxury" while the journalist Eugene Field pronounced the edifice’s eclectic style to be "modified Egyptian Mooresque."

Marble steps led to the large marble rotunda with two immense mirrors in which Denver’s socialites could admire themselves. The main hall’s magnificent chandelier glittered with hundreds of crystal pendants. Patrons often came early to watch the lighting of the chandelier, 65 feet above the parquet floor. Above the 144-gas-jet chandelier, fleecy pink clouds floated in the twilight sky of the dome. Plush silk curtains, tapestries, 1,500 crimson velvet opera chairs, and six eight-person opera boxes adorned the opera house. The Tabor Grand Saloon, the finest bar in town, featured its own ladies orchestra.

Augusta Tabor begged her husband to take her to the Tabor Grand for the opening night. He refused, but a heavily veiled Mrs. Elizabeth "Baby Doe" McCourt Doe was there in Horace’s box, which was draped with a plaque of silver from the Matchless mine inscribed, "TABOR." After Tabor married Baby Doe, his mistress, their two baby girls used the opera house box as a 16- square-foot play pen.

Prophetically, the main curtain of the Tabor Grand bore a line from Charles Kingsley’s poem, "Old and New: A Parable":

So fleet the works of men,
Back to the earth again
Ancient and holy things
Fade like a dream.

Within a generation, the Tabor Grand stooped to 10-cent movies. Clumsily remodeled and renamed the Colorado Theater, it suffered numerous "improvements." One of the last desecrations, a gamble to compete with a newfangled invention of the 1950s, was converting part of the enormous mezzanine into a miniature theater called "Tabor’s Television Room." Following this defilement, Tabor’s ancient and holy dream was demolished in 1964 to build a modern Federal Reserve Bank, a prison-like house of finance where old paper money is shredded.

Bankrupt Banks

The Federal Reserve Bank System was established in 1913 to prevent economic crashes like the one that undid Horace Tabor. The Federal Reserve Bank came too late to save Denver’s shaky 19th-century banks. These money houses floundered in the 1890s when the big gamble on mining became a colossal bust. Half of Denver’s 18 banks closed in July of 1893.

The federal government’s remedy for the Depression, repealing the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, was worse than the disease as far as Coloradans were concerned. Without the federal subsidy, the price of silver tumbled from over $1 an ounce to half that. Silver mining, Colorado’s number-one industry, collpased.

Bankers became much more cautious, much more wary of borrowers infected with gold and silver fever. Colorado National Bank, one of the survivors, learned the truth of the old joke: a mine is a hole in the ground owned by a liar. After the crash of 1893, the Colorado National foreclosed on several hundred mining companies. Slowly the bankers got around to assessing their collection of mines. W. F. Berger of Berger and Sayre, mining engineers, personally investigated some 200 claims and 30 mining companies. He reported for mine after mine; "stock is probably worthless" and "lots of work has been done but it has not produced a cent."

Piles of handsomely printed stock certificates for gold and silver mines impressed this author during a 1985 investigation of Colorado National Bank’s vaults with the grandson of Colorado National Bank’s founder, the late Harold B. Kountze. Among the confiscated collateral was a metal tube-like contraption with an elaborately inscribed scroll from Thomas H. Edwards of Denver’s Chlorination and Cyanide Supply Company. It explained how the apparatus could be used for "extracting gold, silver, copper and platinum from their respective or mixed ores." Such magical devices, along with all the dubious mining stock and mines, had become "assets" of gullible bankers who bankrolled the golden gamble.

The golden—and especially the silver—gamble had become a painful lesson. Much more money was sunk into most mines than was ever taken out. Although the golden gamble began to look like a bust, it had given Denver a fast start, attracting capital from the East and Europe to build up Colorado and its capital city.

Even though mining faltered, Denver had gained a grand opera house, fine residential neighborhoods, and an impressive collection of handsome stone and brick buildings downtown. Denverites pushed onward to eclipse Santa Fe, Cheyenne and Salt Lake City, and to build a bigger city than Montanans, Dakotans, Kansans, and Nebraskans. By 1890, Denver had become the undisputed regional metropolis of the Rockies—thanks largely to a spiderweb of steel.

SOURCES:

Arps, Louisa Ward. Denver in Slices. Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 1983.

Demas Barnes. From the Atlantic to the Pacific Overland.... (N.Y.: D. Van Nostrand, 1866)

Denver, People’s Government. Minutes of the Meetings of the People’s Government of the City of Denver, October 8, 1860-November 19, 1861. Coe Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

Hill, Agnes (Leonard) Scanland. The Colorado Blue Book. Denver: James R. Ives, Pub., 1892. 237p.

Kingsley, Rose Georgiana. South by West: Or, Winter in the Rocky Mountains and Spring in Mexico. London: W. Isbister & Co., 1874.

Moynihan, Betty. Augusta Tabor: A Pioneering Woman. Evergreen, Cordillera Press, 1988.

Noel, Thomas J. Denver: The City & The Saloon, 1858-1916. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1982/University Press of Colorado reprint, 1996.

Noel, Thomas J. Growing Through History with Colorado: The Colorado National Banks; The First 125 Years, 1862-1987. Denver: Colorado National Banks & The Colorado Studies Center, University of Colorado at Denver.

Perkin, Robert L. The First Years: An Informal History of Denver and the Rocky Mountain News, 1859-1959. N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959.

Smith, Duane A. Horace Tabor: His Life and the Legend. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1973.

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