The Leavick terminus of the Last Chance and Hilltop mines’ tramway
was at the above mill. Ore buckets swung in the second story
(right), emptied and back along the towers. Below is an arastra in
Buckskin Creek.
[Illustration: D.K.P., 1960]
_From Cripple Creek_
[Illustration]
Next to Leadville, the Cripple Creek district has the most fascination
for the preterist. It had the most fabulous gold production of any camp
in Colorado—nay, in the United States. According to historian Marshall
Sprague, the district created twenty-eight millionaires as a modest
estimate. One of those who made a million was lumberman Sam Altman.
Formerly he ran a sawmill in Poverty Gulch but in 1893 he founded a
town, Altman.
His town was close to three big producers, the Pharmacist, Victor and
Buena Vista, and to his own mine, the Free Coinage on Bull Hill. By
November of 1893, the town was supporting four restaurants, six saloons,
six groceries, several boardinghouses and a telephone. A school house
and two hundred frame or log houses had been erected, and the loyal
citizens claimed a population of twelve hundred.
From its high perch Altman could look down on Independence, Goldfield,
Cameron and many another mushrooming settlement that burgeoned in the
Cripple Creek excitement of the early ’90’s. It was not a dressy camp,
but a workaday place peopled solely by miners. These miners were
workers—hard workers—and they thought they should be more justly
rewarded for their labor.
One of Altman’s miners was John Calderwood, a Scotsman and a graduate of
the McKeesport School of Mines in the class of 1876. He elected to be an
organizer for the Western Federation of Miners, a newly formed union
born in Butte, Montana, in May, 1893. He was no firebrand but a
dignified conscientious worker. Within two months he had signed up every
Altman miner for his Free Coinage Union No. 19, W. F. M., and promised
them a standard eight-hour three-dollar day.
[Illustration: T. H. Routh, 1894; D.P.L.]