The calm of most Colorado mountain towns allows you to hear the coyote’s howl, the elk’s bugle, the red-tailed hawk’s screech. What you can only imagine hearing today is the sound of 1893 – the jackhammer sound of silver ore crushers that drowned out bird song and human conversation and rocked the Roaring Fork Valley and other centers of Colorado silver mining.

Silver mining was noisy and risky leading up to 1893, the price of silver rising and falling over the previous decades, requiring silver prospectors and mine operators and processors to wield their accounting pencils under lamplight as skillfully as their picks and drills in the darkness underground. If their numbers didn’t add up just right, the miners moved on, leaving behind empty holes and homes.

No matter how sharp their pencils were, no one in silver could figure their way out of economic pressures in August 1893. Political decisions made by governments a world away silenced the silver ore crushers in Roaring Fork. The price for silver fell so far and so fast that mining and processing became futile overnight. Miners’ families fled Colorado silver camps and towns, leaving more than a dozen sites abandoned, the bleached and faltering timber of their homes attracting future generations of the curious, and those who mourn a lost way of life.

The fate of three silver towns – Aspen, Leadville and Teller City – shows that there was no easy path upward from the depth of a silver-lined disaster.

 

ASPEN

Today’s visitor to this leafy paradise of just under 7,000 pays $4,000 a night for the Presidential Suite at the Hotel Jerome. America’s love of Aspen’s downhill sking – it receives 1.42 million skier visits each year – puts a premium on lodging, and housing. The median single-family home price in Aspen is $14.55 million. Aspen is walkable, with a C-shaped pedestrian mall along three sides of a city block for shopping and dining. These are among the many reasons why a newcomer would not recognize what Aspen looked and sounded like in the 1890s. That’s when 40 rock crushers shook the Earth 92 times a minute, 24 hours a day, creating a ceaseless, chest-pounding roar equal to the decibel level of a Boeing 747.

The first silver prospectors arrived in Aspen in 1879 after a survey found the Roaring Fork Valley promising. B. Clark Wheeler, a silver opportunist, surveyed the town site, gave it the name Aspen, and founded The Aspen Times.

Aspen’s silver ore processing plant began operating in 1891 – so great an edifice that it required 1.5 million bricks delivered via two railroads that first reached Aspen in 1887. The ore crushers ground into sand up to 125 tons of low-grade ore a day.

Town leaders looked to the smoke rising from the plant’s 165-foot-high smokestack, the highest in the state at that time, as money in the bank. Aspen produced one-sixth of America’s silver, and with its silver wealth grew in population to 12,000-15,000, third in Colorado, after only Denver and mining rival Leadville.

Aspen became so beholden to silver, the only metal it produced in quantity, that it commissioned an 18-foot-tall statue, the silver-painted Silver Queen statue, in hopes that the statue would persuade Washington, D.C., lawmakers to continue subsidizing the price of silver.

The ore crushers would be silenced after just 18 months.

On Aug. 7, 1893, the U.S. government repealed its subsidy of silver, relying solely on gold for securing its currency. The final blow came when the British Empire asked its most populous colony, India – its 1890s population around 230 million – to stop using silver in manufacturing its one-rupee coin.

In all, Aspen produced 101 million troy ounces of silver. The troy ounce is the measure used for precious metals.One troy ounce equals just over 1 ounce, which is about 10 percent heavier.

It takes a little math to convert troy ounces into pounds or tons; 101 million troy ounces equals 6.9 million pounds, or 3,463 tons. That’s one-fourth as heavy as the Eiffel Tower.

Without silver’s return on investment, Aspen’s population fell to 700 by 1930. Locals scratched out a living at 8,000 feet, raising their own food. Those who couldn’t afford heat in winter moved into Hotel Jerome to stay warm.

The journey to prosperity began when Friedl Pfeifer, an Austrian-American veteran of the legendary 10th Mountain Division of America’s World War II fighting force in the Italian Alps, founded the Aspen Ski Corporation in 1946 along with Chicago industrialist Walter Paepcke.

Aspen residents don’t hear much in town today: maybe a few airplanes circling overhead, the occasional siren of volunteer firefighters, a thunder storm, the car horns of drivers arriving from the Front Range.

Otherwise, it’s bird calls in the morning, coyote howls in the evening, and human conversation.

 

LEADVILLE

America’s highest incorporated city hosts a third of Aspen’s population, about 2,600. It had the ironic misfortune of being rich in more than just silver, remaining a mining town for decades after silver prices plummeted.

Prospectors came to Leadville in the 1870s for gold and stayed for the silver they found in the black sand that clogged their sluice boxes. The town’s population reached 30,000, double Aspen’s. Silver enriched one of Colorado’s most colorful characters, Horace Tabor. The millionaire could boast that he built Leadville’s three-story Tabor Opera House on Harrison Avenue in just 100 days in 1879. So famous had Leadville become that Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde, author of The Picture of Dorian Gray, lectured on “Art Decoration” to a packed opera house.

Tabor famously lost everything after silver collapsed, selling off Denver properties and living his final years as a postmaster. His death in 1899 drew 10,000 people to a mile-long funeral procession through Denver.

Leadville leaders tried creating a national attraction after silver’s slide. They built an Ice Palace, modeled after a successful one in Montreal and another in St. Paul, Minn. On Jan. 1, 1896, 2,500 people arrived to enter the palace – 450 feet long and 320 feet wide, with five-foot-thick walls of ice carved from ponds north of town, held together by two 90-foot towers on the north side and 60-foot towers on the south side. The palace didn’t last long; unusually warmth weather melted Leadville’s tourism dreams. The building was condemned in March. Today, Ice Palace Park is a playground and picnicking area near the site of the long-ago Ice Palace.

In all, Leadville produced 240 million troy ounces of silver, or 8,229 tons – more than double Aspen’s load.

When silver prices collapsed, Leadville wasn’t finished with mineral mining. Steel makers found that the molybdenum extracted from Leadville’s Climax Mine could harden steel. Jet engine manufacturers found the metal ideal for their uses. Demand for “moly” would rise and fall, and with the rise and fall of each use, Climax Mine would close and reopen, close and reopen. It is operating today.

As with downhill skiing in Aspen decades earlier, recreation is drawing a new generation of recreationists to Leadville. Every February for the past 20 years, the Mineral Belt Trail, a 11.6-mile paved surface, 12 feet wide, has hosted the Leadville Loppet Nordic Ski Races.

Cyclists use the Mineral Belt Trail, too. Jordan Bennett, 30, savors Leadville’s short summers. She’s a trained archaeologist who always looks down in search of artifacts. In Leadville, that’s especially important, because artifacts from the mining era abound. She finds plenty of “fairly old stuff” – utensils, spoons, wheel fragments, porcelain plates, teacups, all of it rising to the surface after 140 years.

Bennett said she prefers Leadville’s grit over Aspen’s pricey polish and endorses a local bumper sticker, “Keep Leadville [expletive].” Let’s just say that younger Leadvillians prefer things the way they are. The nicest room (“King Suite”) in Leadville (Delaware Hotel) is $425 a night.

Fred Mark, a retired geologist, moved to Leadville in 2007. He said a younger generation is relocating to Leadville with no history or interest in mining. Most view it negatively. The town offers less expensive housing for workers who commute to recreational jobs in Summit and Eagle counties.

Mark’s son snowshoes to the ridge of the Mosquito Range, Colorado’s highest, near State Highway 91. The Mosquito Range includes Mt. Lincoln, Colorado’s eighth tallest summit.

Nine 14ers are visible from Leadville, including two of Colorado’s highest – Elbert and Massive. What lowland recreationalist wouldn’t envy that?

 

TELLER CITY

Named for Colorado’s “Silver Republican,” U.S. Sen. Henry Teller (1830-1914), Teller City is one of Colorado’s silver ghost towns.

The longest-serving U.S. senator from Colorado (1876-1882; 1885-1909) didn’t want things to work out the way they did for Colorado’s silver miners.

Teller won election to the U.S. Senate from Colorado in 1876, its first year of statehood. After leaving to serve as Secretary of the Interior, Teller returned to the Senate and got his fellow senators to approve a resolution in support of “bimetallism,” the word used to describe the policy of securing U.S. currency with both gold and silver.

The government passed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890, the act’s title explaining exactly what Teller wanted, but a provision of the law proved to be fatal to silver. It allowed silver mining companies to be paid for their silver with gold certificates, which drained gold reserves. To stop its losses, the government repealed the act three years after its passage, but not without dire consequences in Colorado. Banks closed, unemployment rose, and real estate lost value. Families fled the state, crowding onto outbound trains.

Teller’s abandoned namesake town is in North Park, off Jackson County Road 21A west to Forest Road 740, which turns north to the Teller City site.

News of a silver strike on Jack Creek in what is now Roosevelt National Forest led prospectors to what became the Teller City site in 1879. A U.S. Post Office opened in 1880. The town grew quickly, gaining a doctor, drugstore, general store, blacksmith, sawmills, saloons and hundreds of homes. Two newspapers – The North Park Miner and Grand County Times – kept the town’s 1,200 residents informed. Visitors lodged at the two-story Yates House Hotel. It had Persian rugs and European paintings, a grand piano in the parlor and 40 rooms.

Newspapers from the era quoted observers who spoke with silver tongues, a common expression for a clever huckster, claiming the Endomile Mine above Teller City was a “bonanza” like the famous Comstock Lode in Nevada. In fact, the Endomile never came close to producing enough silver to sustain operations, even after attempts to reopen it decades later, efforts that Colorado newspapers covered with breathless anticipation of a bonanza that never came.

Today, Teller City is dead quiet. All that remains is the Teller City Interpretive Site, managed by the U.S. Forest Service’s Parks Ranger District, based in Walden. A walking trail leads visitors past a graveyard of logs, as if flattened by a hurricane, with signage describing the structures those logs once formed and telling snippets of Teller City life. Camping isn’t allowed at the site, but not far away is Aspen Campground, a first-come-first-served, primitive site best suited for tent camping and small trailers.

The only silver mining in Colorado today is a byproduct of gold mining at the Cripple Creek & Victor Gold Mine in Teller County, which is also named for Henry Teller.

The keeper of Teller City’s sketchy history is the staff at The Rand Store, an improbable standalone bookstore in Rand, pop: 4, along Colorado State Highway 125. Baker Teem, daughter of store founders Sandy and Don Teem, offers a typed and photocopied history of Teller City tales.

In the tale of the “One Hundred Foot Swindle,” an eastern company had hired several Teller City men to dig a 100-foot hole. They dug 50 feet and struck water, dug another hole, again down to 50 feet, found more water, and between the two holes figured they had dug 100 feet, and called it good, billing the company, and leaving town. In another tale, Teller City had a champion horse, Sharp, which had defeated all comers. A mysterious challenger named Montgomery arrived, but the townspeople put their money on Sharp. He lost, but Sharp’s jockey left town with the prize money and a parlor girl.

Seems from their tales that leaving town might have been on the minds of Teller City folk. It was only a few years later that they all left anyway, some leaving hurriedly, dinner still on their tables. If Jack Creek and the Endomile Mine wouldn’t pay out, someplace else might. There was no one left to remake Teller City – no one to start a Nordic ski race, no downhill ski slopes. Just the sound of birds, the rustle of the wind in the forest, and flights of silver-lined imagination of couples dancing on the Yates Hotel’s Persian rug serenaded by the grand piano.