Bachelor – 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.

Never underestimate the childhood experiences you offer your young ones.

Having been born in a mining (iron ore) camp, and having a father who’d take me “to the mine” and a mother who’d participate on “giras” [tours] of historical or natural wonders relatively nearby, I was not only born in what surrounded me, I was purposefully immersed in it.

I don’t think my parents did this “intentionally” — I’ll have to ask them on Resurrection Day — but I do know they believed in the importance of gratitude. Therefore, they wanted their children to appreciate their birthplace and their heritage — in my case that would be both Venezuela and Spain as well as Massachussets and England. So as we grew up, we learned to respect, if not love, “where we came from”.

We also learned, albeit intuitively at first, the tremendous capital — human and material — necessary to carve out a mine and camp and to provide sustainable living in the Venezuelan jungle.

So, although we never had much of an interest in engineering or prospecting or related fields, we certainly respected the immense effort and costs and sacrifices entailed in any mining operation.

Early in my career, I was in an economics conference in California where a gentleman spoke of miles of pipeline being laid from Alaska down to the 48 states.

I do not recall exactly what his involvement in that multi-billion-dollar project was, but I do recall that he told of how he insisted his daughter accompany him on one of his trips to the project. She was in college and into all the trendy activism of the time.

He wanted her to see the colossal efforts and investments required to enable her to turn on her blow dryer and to successfully turn on her car ignition. And the men working the required 10 to 12-hour days to make her creature comforts happen.

As I listened to him, I felt gratitude in my heart for my parents, who did similarly to that man, only my folks did not wait till I was in college to do so.

Another aspect of mining towns was the colorful nature of some of the men who worked there. This was an aspect that a child did not automatically pick up. Rather, it was something that grew inchoately over the years, in many cases long after the child had moved away from the camp and reflected on certain characters and, if lucky, was able to ask others, still living, about them.

How many novels yet remain to be written and movies to be filmed!

So mines, any kind of mines, have always drawn my attention. I even once seriously considered accepting a position in mining operations in Senegal! Colleagues and friends advised me to wait on something like that. So decades later I was much better prepared to accept a position in Saudi Arabia.

In 1991 or thereabouts, during a family trip to Southwest Colorado, we were intrigued by a dot on the map, on the Continental Divide, that was labeled as having been a booming silver mining town in the late 19th Century.

We decided to visit and we’ve been heading back there whenever we have an opportunity to do so, most recently after my son’s wedding last month.

To summarize, Creede is named after a man who was born around Fort Wayne, Indiana circa 1843. In infancy his family moved to Iowa territory and began farming. In his late teens he volunteered with the army and worked as a scout in cavalry campaigns against the Sioux. It was during this time that he traveled through Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, and other western areas. He also witnessed the discovery of gold in the Black Hills and that piqued what became his lifelong interest in prospecting.

The man’s birth name was William Harvey. After his service in the army his intention was to return to Iowa to woo a gal he knew “back home”. But he had been gone nearly a decade and upon returning he found that the girl had married his brother and was mother to a young child.

This discovery greatly rattled William Harvey, provoked him to change his name to Nicholas C. Creede, and spurred him in his resolve to become a successful prospector, which is (most of) the rest of the story.

His first strike was near Monarch Pass, on the Continental Divide in Central Colorado. He sold his strike and promptly struck another, which he also sold for a larger sum which he used to tour the areas he considered most promising and, as he went, to study and learn about prospecting and minerals. He clearly had the desire, energy, and intelligence to become a successful entrepreneur.

After several other strikes, Creede discovered what became known as the Holy Moses strike and this drew the attention of David H. Moffat, a well known financier and industrialist, one of the pioneers of Denver, Colorado. He and his partners not only leased the Holy Moses from Creede, but also partnered with him in his further prospecting. This arrangement became very lucrative for all parties and we can only imagine how encouraging this was for Nicholas C. Creede.

And this led to his greatest find: the Amethyst vein, from which several mines were developed, including the Bachelor, which we will see in later posts. The years of study, hard work, and wise dealings and associations finally rewarded Creede, as he was now a millionaire and even lived to see a town named in his honor: Creede, Colorado, sitting on the Amethyst vein. He was described as reserved, modest, and courageous.

The town of Creede was the last silver boom town in Colorado, growing from 600 inhabitants to over 10,000 by end of 1891. The boom was over by 1893; however, Creede was never a ghost town and continued to operate well into the 1960s, relying on other minerals in addition to silver.

While mining in the area was very successful, the town attracted men and women whose primary interest was to relieve the miners of their money while in turn making “easy money”. This unfortunate state of affairs — common throughout history — was, ironically, exacerbated by “reform” activities in Denver which pushed underworld characters and their businesses out of the capital onto Creede where their trades were welcome.

So Creede (and Bachelor) were known as “having no night” and yet also had churches and, in Bachelor, even an opera house.

If you visit the Creede Mining Museum, you will learn about Jefferson “Soapy” Smith, known as the king of the Creede underworld, whose brother-in-law happened to be the deputy sheriff. You’ll also be reminded of the notorious Robert “Bob” Ford, the murderer of outlaw Jesse James. Ford moved to Creede where he himself was murdered by Ed O’Kelley whose motive for doing so was never ascertained with certainty. O’Kelley served less than a decade in prison and, after release, moved to Oklahoma where he was killed in a shootout with a policeman.

Another resident of Creede was the famous buffalo hunter, scout, and lawman, Bartholemew William Barclay Masterson, better known as Bat Masterson. In Creede, however, Masterson ran a gambling operation while also betting on prizefighting. He eventually succeeded in journalism in New York City where he died in 1921, a few months after attending his last prize fight, where Jack Dempsey defended his heavyweight title.

By the way, Jack Dempsey lived in Bachelor as a child. He likely learned how to fight there.

Creede’s population today is just under 300.

As for Nicholas C. Creede, he, sadly, did not marry well. He eventually moved to Los Angeles and died of an accidental morphine overdose in 1897. He suffered from chronic and severe stomach pain and took morphine frequently. The coroner ruled his death accidental, which most at the time considered a reasonable conclusion.

Creede and Bachelor are types of mining towns all over this earth as well as microcosms of society everywhere. Good, pious folks, living among genuinely bad or shady people.

The names above are well known to us because of so many works of fiction and non-fiction, not to mention movies and television shows. Nevertheless, we must also remember that such were not the majority of these towns. They also had folks, like Mr. Creede, who were modest, reserved, courageous, and decent.

To be continued.