One of the few remaining sights in Lulu City is this unusual device
for deluding Mr. Bruin. A piece of meat was set inside. While he was
nosing his food, a trip hammer released the door which fell and
caged him well.
[Illustration: D.K.P., 1960]
His prophecy has come true in full measure—only you can’t see the hotel
at all! If you count carefully, you can discover the foundations of
twenty-three buildings in the main part of town. Some five hundred feet
farther north, there is a lone remote ruin in a grove on a point jutting
west. This belonged to the town prostitute.
Lulu City’s most distinctive relic is at the southern entrance to town—a
former bear trap which gives Lulu City its uniqueness today.
The town also had uniqueness in the past. It took part in one of the
bloodiest county-seat wars in Colorado history, a war that resulted in
the death of four men on July 4, 1883. This carnage was followed by the
suicide of a sheriff and the escape of an undersheriff.
Grand County, when created in 1874, was a very large county. Hot Sulphur
Springs was the only settlement of any size in the area and was given
the county seat. Shortly afterward, gold and silver were found in the
mountains which led to the founding of Lulu City, Gaskill and Teller.
This mountainous section decided that they should have the county seat
and that it should be at Grand Lake. They agitated for an election on
the change of county seat and won in 1881.
Many antagonisms and animosities were built up in the course of this
contest that kept on festering. Two years later one county commissioner
was allied with the sheriff and deputy sheriff while the two other
commissioners were allied with the county clerk. In the midst of a
Fourth of July celebration, when the morning was already full of noise
of firecrackers and of people sending shots of jubilation out over the
lake, a mortal fight began at an ice house near the Fairview Hotel.
By the time people on the hotel porch reached the ice house, two men
were dead and two were dying, one of whom claimed he had been attacked
by the deputy sheriff. The sheriff and the deputy sheriff fled. The
deputy sheriff disappeared, and his end is unproved. Less than three
weeks later in a hotel room in Georgetown, the sheriff committed
suicide. Mystery still cloaks the cause of the actual shooting.
Although no one of the six was a resident of Lulu City at the time of
the tragedy, the undersheriff had been previously, and all the men had
been visitors. The dismal affair sounded the death knell of Lulu City.
Not many years afterward the many bears and mountain sheep had the
townsite all to themselves, and the bears could laugh at Lulu City’s
renowned trap.