May 2026 – The Pull Of The Land

I am grateful to men and women who have been gifted with the time and budgets, not to mention the friendships and contacts, to enable them to research and investigate the history of the Creede mining camp area. Their work has been a rewarding one, at least to me, not only because my family and I are so attracted to that area but also because their work reminds me of El Pao and the ore mining industry in Venezuela.

The temperaments and characters of many of the men and women in Creede were similar to those who came with the Bethlehem Steel and US Steel to Venezuela about a half century later.

Would that someone could do similar research and investigations of El Pao and Cerro Bolivar! It would be rewarding reading to many, I am sure.

In this concluding post I will mostly use others’ words relating events or recollections in an evocative or thought provoking manner. The sources are primarily A Silver Camp Called Creede by Richard C. Huston; Bachelor Colorado: A History Of A San Juan Mining Ghost Town by Charles A. Harbert; and Creede: Images of America by Charles A. Harbert and George Ameel.

One of several memorable anecdotes concerns the Last Chance Mine:

Ralph Granger and Eric Von Buddenbock were partners in a butcher shop in Del Norte…. One morning early in 1890 two men entered the shop to buy some salt side. They were going into the hills above Wagon Wheel Gap, they said, on a prospecting trip. They dallied, talking mining and luck and suddenly … Ralph Granger exclaimed: ‘I’ll give you all the grub you can use for a month if you’ll let me and Buddenbock in on what you find’. The prospectors, Theodore Renniger and Julius Haase, agreed and set out….

[Towards the end of their time and supplies; they took “one last chance” at prospecting] the two men were in the Creede area and camped [near] a pleasant grassy spot on Bachelor Mountain, where their burros wandered off for some serious grazing. Renniger (or Hasse) noticed that the burros were missing. He caught up with the errant animals berating them in three languages, kicking and pelting them with rocks to move them along. As burros will do, they did not budge.

Renniger sat down to wait the burros out. He began to casually chip at an outcrop of rock and struck a vein showing rich silver ore. He offered up thanks to the burros and named the discovery the Last Chance. The very rich Last Chance Mine was discovered because of three obstinate burros!

The butcher shop partners and the prospectors became wealthy men. Years later Haase was in Del Norte and asked a shop owner if he knew of a nice girl who would like to marry him. The owner said that he did; and introduced him to his daughter. They had a happy marriage.

John Jackson tells the story of a young man who lost the mining bug almost upon arrival in Creede:

A young fellow from Oklahoma had been hired by our shifter, Glen Archer, and placed on 700 level of the Amethyst Mine…. He was assigned to pull ore from a filled slope with a single car and dump it in a pocket for hoisting to tunnel level. He had removed several tons of loose ore creating a pocket above the chute that was called a hangup.

He wasn’t familiar with explosives and was debating about getting someone to help him when it gave way with a rush of air and splintered a timbered wing closing off the only route he knew to safety. He worked his way south from the slope and happened upon a ladder that reached 600 level where I was working.

He saw my light and ran to me blurting out, “Gawdamighty! I’m glad to see you!” We weren’t acquainted but he recognized me as one of the crew who rode in the same pickup from Creede. “Listen feller,” he went on, “if you’ll show me way to get out of here, I’ll never come back in a mine again.” I led him up the manway to 500 level then on to where he could see daylight. He thanked me and I never saw him again.

That young man understood the dangers and was not willing to continue. Mining ores was still ongoing in 1951 when Bill Swinehart lost his life when a hangup collapsed prematurely and crushed him to death.

Caroline Bancroft tells about her visit and research on Bachelor:

In 1960 there were only three cabins left standing on what was formerly Bachelor’s residential street and a few remnants of the boardwalk on its main street. Among the trees on the east side of the meadow where Bachelor once lay was a narrow picket-fenced grave, shaded by trees. Three bodies are buried there, one on top of the other, because of the difficulty of digging in frozen ground the day after the tragedy that claimed all three.

Charles Harbert tells about the last folks to leave Bachelor:

The last family to leave Bachelor was apparently the Allen family in 1915. For some time past they were the only family living in Bachelor and finally moved to South Creede to occupy the Spangler residence. This is the same Mr. Allen who shot his partner, Andy Wellington, in self-defense in 1905 and was acquitted of murder. After their parents died, the daughters, Mabel and Olive, lived for several years in Creede and supported themselves with a milk cow and a few sheep they obtained from herds moving to and from summer pastures.

The last person to live in Bachelor was reported to be Annie Marshall. She was the wife of Garrett E. Marshall, a prospector. They had a son, Garrett (Gary) Marshall, who was born in 1912. Gary tried to get his mother to leave Bachelor without success, so one day in 1945 or 1946 he borrowed a pickup truck to bring Mrs. Marshall and her belongings down to Creede against her will.

I will close this post with an incident which amply demonstrates a mother’s love:

The Wagon Wheel Gap Fluorspar Mine was developed by two tunnels and several small shafts and open cuts. In 1917 a surface tram track was constructed to the railroad where the ore could be dumped directly into the rail cars. The grade was such that a mule could pull a number of cars and thus a large tonnage could be loaded on the railroad cars.

In July 1927 as one of the “horse trains” approached the railroad depot, a young girl caught her foot in a rail switch and could not remove it. Her mother came to her aid and was unable to free her little daughter’s foot. The mother, seeing she could not free her daughter, then embraced and held her daughter as the cars sped towards them.

Both the child and her mother lost their lives in the accident and were buried in the Creede Cemetery.

Above photos were all taken at Wolf Creek Pass on the Continental Divide, not too far from Creede. They give an idea of the geography in the general area.

Photos by Andrew Barnes. If you’d like to see more photos, his Instagram address is https://www.instagram.com/andrew3arnes.

Before the men of El Pao brought their wives and children, the pioneers had to build the camps.

So the Bethlehem Steel set out to build a camp on the banks of the Orinoco River to receive supplies and materials needed to clear and grade a roughly 40-kilometer road through the thick jungle and also build the administrative and labor camps housing the workforce that was to come later, not to mention the mine itself.

These efforts required intelligence, strength, determination, and capital to pay for mine development and required facilities such as hoisting and power plants, mine machinery, and so on.

Visiting the Creede mining camp area, I was immediately reminded of the iron mines in Venezuela. The geography and topography, not to mention the latitudes, are nowhere near the same; however, the spirit and type of men and women drawn to such endeavors were certainly so.

The last time I visited El Pao in 2005, it was awfully quiet compared to my childhood and youth there. Nevertheless, it was nowhere near being a ghost town. A number of families still lived in the labor camp while a much smaller number occupied some of the houses in the administrative camp where I used to live.

The temperate climate and green jungle were still ubiquitous as always and the folks remained friendly.

But the dynamiting and the ore crushing and the shouts of miners and the freight movements — truck or train — were gone.

Visiting the Creede mining area provoked similar observations. The spectacular ruggedness which greeted the prospectors and, later, the miners, is still there beckoning hardy souls who dare to trespass; the sites of the numerous mines can be seen and, in some cases, visited; the areas where camps once thrived are there. But all is quiet, even though Creede itself has never become a ghost town to this day.

Many were the men and women who left their mark in this area. Many whose names are known to us and who-knows-how-many whose names remain unknown but to God.

This post seeks to note only a few, which, hopefully, give a glimpse of the many more whom space does not permit to mention.

It is believed that the first settler in the area around Creede and Bachelor was Tom Boggs, brother-in-law to Kit Carson; however, his interest was in fur trading, not mining. Of interest is the fact that Boggs, who was not only Carson’s brother-in-law but a good friend, was present at Carson’s death, when he uttered his last words, “Adiós, compadres [Goodbye, friends].”

Carson’s wife, Josefa, died a month before Carson in 1868, and Boggs became guardian to his children and also executor of his will.

In learning about the Creede mining area, my attention was immediately drawn to John MacKenzie, a Canadian known as the “father of Bachelor”. He learned the prospecting and mining trade in the gold fields of Nova Scotia in the 1860s. He also successfully prospected for gold on the Essequibo in then British Guiana and also on the Caroní in Venezuela, areas now dominated by Tren de Aragua and other bands of robbers.

MacKenzie’s health suffered in the damp, hot jungles of Venezuela and British Guiana and he returned to North America after several years. He successfully identified a number of mines in Creede including several in Bachelor, which he believed was perfectly situated for a picturesque town. His health finally gave out and he passed away in 1894. The Creede Candle reported his death:

“[He was] well known to nearly all the people of Creede camp and the mining men of the west…. He left no will …. Was unmarried and the only known relative is a brother in Halifax…. The death of Mr. MacKenzie removes one from the ranks of the old pioneers who was respected by all and held in the highest esteem as a man, a citizen, and a friend.”

Fred Ryden’s early childhood and youth were lived in Bachelor and, after Bachelor’s demise, in Creede where he still lived in 1952 when a Rocky Mountain News reporter found him and spent a day conversing and hearing his accounts of a life long since gone:

“It was the riches of the hills — the Last Chance, Bachelor, Amethyst, Commodore [mines] — that had brought the thousands there to build the stores, drink in the saloons, pray in the churches, learn in the school…. Fred Ryden went to grammar school in Bachelor, from 1893 to 1904 when his family moved down to Creede. And it was a sentimental picture to watch Fred try to find the exact spot where the old school had been. For there was nothing there now at all.”

Until relatively recently, Creede was home to families who first arrived a century before. One of these was John R. Jackson, whose grandfather, William T. Jackson, Sr., came to Creede in the 1890s during the silver boom. He and his house first made a home in a small cabin in Bachelor where he worked in the Last Chance and Amethyst Mines. Later, the family moved to Creede from where he worked the Commodore Mine. He died in his early 50s from silicosis, a common disease among miners of that era.

Jackson, Sr.’s son, “Billy” Jackson was born and spent his early childhood in Bachelor before the family moved to Creede, two and a half miles away. He too worked the mines, with a hiatus for service in WWI. He also contracted silicosis and had to resign his mining activities in the late 50s but remained in Creede, working as undersheriff and eventually as the city clerk.

His son, John, followed his grandfather’s and father’s footsteps, working the mines, serving in WWII, and returning to the mines afterwards, eventually becoming a successful investor in the business. In the 70s he worked for the Freeport Exploration Company in Nevada as a prospector for precious metals. He retired and returned to Colorado where he wrote of the people he knew in the Creede mining camps and also wrote poetry.

This multi-generational aspect is quite common in the mining industry.

In my first post of this series I told about the violence in Creede and Bachelor, while mentioning that the camps were also home to decent, hard working families. One of the incidents could have been violent but was handled creatively and successfully. The account is taken from Boom Town Boy, by Edwin Lewis Bennett, as cited in Bachelor, Colorado by Charles A. Harbett:

“I saw two fights in Bachelor that spring and each was odd in its own way.

“The first was not between men but between two women, one of them Irish and the other Cornish. They had been quarreling at each other for some time and, coming downtown that day, had run into each other and started jawing.

“Their husbands, fed up with the long feud, agreed that was the time to get it settled so they made the wives fight it out, Marquis de Queensbury, without any scratching or hair-pulling, but man style. Foster’s saloon was at the upper end of town, and the fight took place right out in front, so we had a ring-side seat. Occasionally one of the women would revert back to type and bare a claw or get a handful of hair but her husband would make her back up and start clean again, so it was a nice, respectable battle.

“There were no rounds. The women were both fairly well padded and short-winded, and the time came when they were panting and taking wild, aimless swings at each other. As one had the makings of a good black eye and the other had a bloody nose, their husbands thought they ought to have it all out of their systems and stopped the fight. The battlers sat down on the bench in front of the saloon to rest and get their breath, and, one of them happening to mention that she had some beer on ice up at the house that might do them both good, they went there, leaving their husbands to get the groceries they originally started after.

“After that fight each of them had one more friend than she had before and the husbands didn’t have to listen to any more name-calling.”

Children in such camps did not have difficulty finding excitement and adventure. In one example, Fred Foster recalls, he at 15 years old, and a buddy at 16 years old decided to go over the Continental Divide in the dead of winter to Spring Creek where his family had a ranch. They went by skis and it took them two days, and a mountain lion followed them part of the way. Imagine a 15-year-old and a 16-year-old setting out today to cross the Continental Divide in the dead of winter!

Similar to El Pao, both Bachelor and Creede had a Roman Catholic church and also a Protestant church, with a well attended Sunday school.

Charles Nelson, one of the founders of Creede camp, a friend of Nicholas C. Creede and also of John C. MacKenzie, was known as an honorable and pious man. In the winter of 1890-1891, he built a cabin in Creede. “The first church services in the new camp were held in his cabin by the Reverend Sanderson of Denver in the summer of 1891. Nelson, upon hearing that there was a preacher in camp who could not find a place to preach, insisted that he use his cabin whenever he wished [cited from A Silver Camp Called Creede by Richard C. Huston].”

After making his fortune in Creede camp mines, Nelson returned to his native Denmark where he died in 1919 after undergoing a major surgery:

“He made few enemies and many friends, to whom he was always loyal, standing by them to the finish. His death marks the passing of another one of those boom-day characters who did so much to make the state of Colorado famous. There are many old timers here yet, in the camp he helped to discover, who remember the things he did, and who will regret to learn of his death [The Creede Candle, February 21, 1920].”

The Protestant church in Bachelor at an altitude of 10,531 feet was known as the “highest church in the country”.

To be continued.

John MacKenzie, 1838-1904

Ore house and chutes for the Commodore Mine, one of the most productive in the Creede – Bachelor mining camps. The Last Chance and Amethyst were even more productive.