Shown are the London boardinghouse, mill and mine (far right). More
miners lived down in Secreto Gulch to the left of this high ridge.
[Illustration: D.K.P., 1960]
_From Idaho Springs_
[Illustration]
Alice was rich in gold—particularly placer gold. But oddly and uniquely,
no one found these placers until long after other Clear Creek placers
had been worked out. Apparently no prospector was thorough enough in his
search on upper Fall River and its little tributary, Silver Creek, to
make a strike during the placer excitements of 1859 and the early
1860’s, although some silver was uncovered. When rich gold was finally
found in 1881, the discovery was made by a party working west from
Yankee along the road that ran from Central City, the county seat of
Gilpin County, past the side of Yankee Hill, down Silver Creek and Fall
River, and on to Georgetown, county seat of Clear Creek County.
Alice was described in Denver’s _Rocky Mountain News_ August 24, 1881,
as a colony of fifteen or twenty tents near Silver City, a camp slightly
higher up Silver Creek. Colonel A. J. Cropsey of Nebraska was the
superintendent of the Alice Mining Company, and he was banking sums of
twelve and fifteen hundred dollars every two weeks in the First National
Bank at Central City.
The summer and fall production proved so successful that the following
February the capital stock of the company was increased from $1,000,000
to $2,000,000; a second ditch was built to bring water for hydraulic
mining; log cabins and a mill were erected; the eleven-mile road to
Idaho Springs was improved, and the company banked $2,500 or $3,000 in
Idaho Springs every fortnight.
Hydraulic mining continued through the early 1880’s and proved
consistently profitable so that Alice absorbed Silver City (if it had
ever been anything more than a cluster of tents). As the placers were
worked out, lode mining developed in a number of mines, especially in
tunnels that led away from a pit torn out by hydraulic hoses. The
population was around thirty-five until after 1903 when it rose to fifty
or sixty. In 1908 a more modern mill was built, and production continued
steadily until 1915 when the mill shut down. Soon the ghosts took over.
Four people lingered on, including the E. J. Harpers. He had been
postmaster in 1904 (see the photo at the end of my introduction) and had
conducted business from one end of their own cabin. She served meals at
the other. On inspection trips to the Loch Lomond reservoir my father
and I used to tie our horses outside this cabin and have a delicious
lunch. In 1960 it was being used as a summer cottage but its exterior
lines were identical with Father’s 1904 photo.
In 1934 Alice, like many other Colorado gold camps, experienced a
renascence. (This was because of the price of gold rising from $20 to
$35 an ounce.) The sturdy log cabins were re-roofed; the mill started,
and the pit was turned into a real glory hole. Today Alice is unique
because of its abandoned glory hole—the only summer resort-ghost town to
boast of one within its town limits....
Returning to Clear Creek and driving farther up its course, is another
tumbling tributary, a creek also coming in from the north. Originally
this creek was called Lyon’s, but now Lion. It flows through the town of
Empire about which the splendid historian, Ovando J. Hollister, said in
1866, “Of all the towns brought into existence by the famed Cherry Creek
Sands, Empire bears away the palm for a pretty location and picturesque
surroundings.” This statement is particularly true of North Empire,
about a mile and a half up Lion Creek and its fork, North Empire Creek.
Bayard Taylor (the renowned nineteenth century lecturer and travel
writer) and William N. Byers, founder and editor of the _Rocky Mountain
News_, also visited the two towns that same year and were much impressed
with their settings. Byers reported North Empire as “a hustling busy
little hamlet right amid the mines. It has three or four mills.”
He also mentioned by name a number of prosperous mines, especially the
Atlantic owned by Frank Peck who was later the founder of Lower Empire’s
Peck House (now the Hotel Splendide). Byers was interested by an arastra
in the gulch which was operated by water power and “was pointed out as a
paying institution.”
Lower Empire was organized in the spring of 1860 by a band of
prospectors who came up from Spanish Bar (then on the south side of
Clear Creek close to its junction with Fall River). The first gold was
discovered on Eureka Mountain, northwest of Empire. A find of rich
placers and lodes soon followed on Silver Mountain, north of Empire. It
was these mines that caused North Empire to spring up on the side of
Silver and the flanking mountainside to the east, Covode.
[Illustration: E. S. Bastin, 1911; U.S.G.S.]
_Too late to alter: now proved to be Russell Gulch._