Creede, Colorado’s last great silver city, sprang up like a wild child. Banks, hotels, newspapers, restaurants, saloons and whore houses opened overnight in tents to cash in on the boom.
Kilarny Kate, Slanting Annie, Timberline Rose Vastine and Creede Lil consoled the male mining masses with commercial affection. Creede Lil, the pioneer soiled dove, stayed busy around the clock until her death in 1892. The town’s thriving underworld paid for her burial in Creede’s creepy Sunnyside Cemetery. The tombstone reportedly read, “Charity covereth a multitude of sins.”
An unholy crowd flocked to Creede, a town which ironically began with the shout of “Holy Moses!” So proclaimed Nicholas C. Creede after he struck a silver lode on Willow Creek, 2 miles above its junction with the Rio Grande. His 1889 discovery started a stampede that brought an estimated 10,000 people into this remote chasm and made Creede a rival of Leadville and Aspen for silver production.
The tent town had become a frame city by 1892, when Richard Harding Davis described it in his book, “The West from a Car Window,” as “hundreds of little pine boxes of houses and log-cabins . . . . There is not a brick, a painted front, nor an awning in the whole town. It is like a city of fresh card-board.”
This “card-board” town squeezed in between towering basaltic spires was scorched by fires and drowned by several major floods. But nothing stopped the eternal hullabaloo of mining and money-making in a town with 30 saloons and dance halls. Creede attracted a rogue’s gallery of Western characters, including Poker Alice Tubbs, Bob Ford, Calamity Jane, Bat Masterson, and Soapy Smith.
Cyrus “Cy” Warman left the Rocky Mountain News to launch The Creede Candle in 1892 and immortalized the town with his poem, “Creede”:
Here’s a land where all are equal —
Of high or lowly birth —
A land where men make millions,
Dug from the dreary earth.
Here the meek and mild-eyed burro
On mineral mountains feed
It’s day all day in the daytime,
And there is no night in Creede.
The cliffs are solid silver,
With wond’rous wealth untold;
And the beds of running rivers
Are lined with glittering gold.
While the world is filled with sorrow,
And hearts just break and bleed —
It’s day all day in the daytime,
And there is no night in Creede.
Warman went on to write novels, short stories, articles and poems for nationally prominent magazines such as The Century, McClures, and Harpers. He published a dozen books and many songs, including the popular “Sweet Marie” (in honor of his wife, Myrtle Marie Jones). It sold a million copies in six months.
Warman, “The Poet of the Rockies,” immortalized Colorado’s flush times in his prolific career as one of state’s greatest wordsmiths. He probably did more than anyone to introduce a national audience to Colorado’s mining and railroading frontier.
Creede briefly sparkled in the national spotlight. By the end of 1891, it passed the $1 million mark in silver production. Fame and fortune proved especially fleeting for this silver city. After the Silver Crash of 1893, Creede faded almost as fast as it arose in its narrow, spooky canyon.
Today, thanks to a superb summer theater and an awesome underground mining museum, this well-preserved town has rebounded as a summer resort. Although far from any interstate and the tourist masses, Creede is a tourist nugget hidden high in the San Juan Mountains.
Tom Noel, who teaches Colorado History at CU-Denver, welcomes your comments at http://drcolorado.auraria.edu.
