![]() ![]() high opening in the San Juans known as Stony Pass, or along a wiley toll road through Animas River Canyon. Silverton and its northern mining settlements had a slow start the first few years its only entry and exit was either up and over a 12,500 ft. After the Brunot Agreement was finalized, settlers established this valley as “silver by the ton” in 1874, with other towns in the San Juan Mountains soon to follow, per the Durango Silverton Narrow Gauge. Credit Legends of America – Baker’s ParkĪfter the war and the miners returned, the booty was found farther north in Eureka, but the boys made their winter camp in a slightly lower altitude where the park was claimed. The namesake belonged to a Colorado gold rusher, Charles Baker, who found a respectable amount of gold fluttering through the contributing streams of the Animas River. The glacially sculpted valley where Silverton rests was first known to white folks as Baker’s Park through the 1860’s. Here is a nugget of history on the mining towns of Southwest Colorado that made the West so wild. And when they rose from the depths, a town made of trigger-happy saloons and tragedy-stricken brothels were their only refuge. Miners who survived chipped away at the igneous for 10 hours a day in absolute darkness, with only candles in their hats to see what wall was their target. Meanwhile the mines were tunnels of treachery themselves, with shafts being easy to fall into, collapse, trap toxic gases, or flood. The area was staggeringly remote and undeveloped, and hauling freight to and from sources became the kickstarter of multiple technological ingenuities. Credit Denver Public Library, Silverton 1880sĪnd so the wild, metal-laden peaks became fully open for big business. ![]() Congress was then required to buy 4.5 million ounces of silver from western mines every month. The law was instituted as a remedy to the five year depression, and hoisting the value of American currency by backing it with silver and gold. Then in 1878, the price of silver shot up into the heavens due to the Bland-Allison Act. So when prospectors began striking away at veins anyway in indigenous lands, a makeshift deal known as the Brunot Agreement promptly came along in 1873, which sold off the San Juans from the Ute reservation. ![]() The document designated 18 million square miles of turf throughout Colorado and Utah to indigenous tribes, leaving them with a third of ownership over the Colorado territory- including the silver-loaded San Juan Mountains. In an effort to “compromise” the rights to these prosperous lands, the Treaty of 1868 was signed by both tribe leaders and government officials. Credit Rocky Mountain PBS, miners in 1880s They arrived across the San Juan Mountains in fleets of wooden wagons on roads in the making, bumbling across country that the Utes knew to only visit during the game season.Īnd because these mountains had belonged to Utes for the past 500 years, tribes made it undoubtedly difficult for the heavily mustached newcomers blasting their sacred hunting grounds apart. The Silver BoomĪfter the war, miners slowly started coming back to Colorado to get rich quick and head back to wherever they came from, be it New England or Russia, per Western Mining History. But the Civil War would call for the burliest of brutes available, and it naturally left miners preoccupied with muskets and cannons rather than shovels and dynamite until 1865. Prospectors did begin finding some golden treasure in Southwest Colorado during this time, not on the scale of Idaho Spring or Breckinridge, but enough to keep them interested in the area per Uncover Colorado. Its remote wildernesses made the journeys far more interesting (dangerous) along with the prominent presence of the area’s indigenous peoples. Southwest Colorado in particular had its own unique influx of character in the developing West. In 1861, due to the insistence of the gold diggers, the mineral-rich area joined the territories as Colorado- meaning, “colored red” in Spanish. So after Cali’s rush faded, its metal heads quickly set their sights on the Rockies. #ITRAIN TELLURIDE FULL#When the California Gold Rush was in full pickaxe-swing in 1849, prospectors certainly couldn’t ignore these massive snowcaps on their way to the West Coast. White settlers certainly made their way through these rugged mountains on the way to kinder terrain, but few had good reasons to establish settlements within them until 1859, via Rocky Mountain PBS. The untapped land was merely an open, unclaimed swath of pristine peaks rising between wild western territories. 1870sīefore the mid 1800s, Colorado mining towns were nonexistent. How the Silver Boom made Southwest Colorado & Its Wild Mining Towns Credit Western Mining History, early miners in the San Juan Mountains, c. ![]()
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