october-2009

062
Fire will torch the western part of town later this year,
and in 1893, plummeting silver prices will ravage the
economy. By 1900, just 30 years after its founding,
Caribou will be little more than an abandoned speck
on the Colorado map.
Today, slightly more than a century later, the only
whispers of civilization in this alpine meadow are
the crumbling remains of two stone buildings and
a collapsed wooden cabin. Otherwise, it is again a
province of violet and yellow wildflowers that decorate
the hillsides, of hummingbirds that sing over the
landscape and of the chill winds that whistle off the
Continental Divide.
Caribou’s misfortune is a common tale in Colorado
history, evidenced today in the abandoned mines
and buildings that litter the Centennial State. In fact,
only California can claim more ghost towns (due to the
1849 Gold Rush), which are defined by Dr. Tom Noel
of the University of Colorado Denver as places that, at
one point, had a post office and no longer do. Noel, a
bow tie-sporting history professor who answers to the
nickname “Dr. Colorado,” has tallied about 500 such
places in the state. In the counties around Denver, he
says, “There are more ghost towns than live towns.”
Like Caribou, many of Colorado’s ghost towns
trace their roots to the Gold Rush of 1859 or the Silver
Boom that began in the late 1800s. Miners—mostly
young men—would flock after hearing reports of a
new vein, always poised to abandon their new home
if a better opportunity arose, says Thomas Andrews,
assistant professor of history at UC Denver. As a result,
Colorado travelers began seeing ghost towns as early
as the late 1860s.
“It was much easier for a town to develop on hope,”
Andrews says. “Most people hadn’t really come to stay.
They were always looking for the next chance.”
Twenty years prior to Caribou’s boom, that chance
lay 20 miles south of Caribou at Gregory’s Diggings,
later known as Central City. Journalist and future presidential
candidate Horace Greeley traveled by mule to
the area in 1859, five weeks after word spread of a gold
ore discovery there. The journey from Denver, which
today takes about 50 minutes by car, required two arduous
days—illustrating to Greeley the magnitude of the
fever that had seized early miners.
“Six weeks ago, this ravine was solitude,” he wrote
in a dispatch to the New York Tribune. “I presume less
than half the four or five thousand people now in this
ravine have been here a week; he who has been here
three weeks is regarded as quite an old settler.”
Near the southwestern edge of the ravine sprang the
town of Nevadaville, which became home to a business
district with a grocery store, post office, barbershop and
even a lecture hall. Nevadaville soon boasted a population
of several thousand—a bit larger than Denver at
GO MAGAZINE OCTOBER 2009
(left) Nevadaville, CO, in
early 1860s, with frame
and log dwellings, mining
facilities, wood piles,
privies and waste from the
mines. The snow-capped
Continental Divide is in
the distance. (right) One
of the few remaining
buildings in Nevadaville
today
the time, says Colorado historian and author Kenneth
Jessen, who discovered his fascination with ghost towns
while hiking through Colorado’s mountain backcountry
20 years ago.
“I was just fascinated by who the heck lived here,
and why did they live here?” Jessen says. He has since
visited 1,600 of Colorado’s abandoned sites, including
Caribou, Nevadaville and Tiger—an abandoned
settlement near Breckenridge where hundreds of
mine employees once enjoyed free electricity, heat and
running water, but has disappeared except for several
broken-down mine structures.
From the pampered existence of Tiger miners
to the hardy souls of Caribou, the answer to Jessen’s
question of “who” often lies in first-person accounts
from the era—such as that of Rev. William Crawford.
A missionary who arrived to the tri-city area of Central
City, Nevadaville and nearby Black Hawk in 1863,
he compared the three towns:
“Nevadaville is the least aristocratic in character
and pretensions. There are a great many cultivated
and pious people, and a great many who
are not.”
These “cultivated and pious” people struggled
against drunkards, transients and other troublemakers
to make Nevadaville a real community, complete
with a church and a school that boasted 100 students
in 1864. But, like so many cities of its day, Nevadaville
fell victim to fire—five of them, in fact—which Jessen
partly blames on an inadequate water supply. As for its
PHOTOGRAPH BY DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY, WESTERN HISTORY COLLECTION