The elaborate layout of George S. Lee was depicted in Frank
Fossett’s 1880 publication. The outlying barns, pastures and corrals
are now gone. It is evident from this sketch that the course of
Henson Creek must have been at the southern limit of Capitol Park.
Today Henson Creek is flowing so close to the mansion that it is
about to undermine the foundation. The 1960 view looks up the valley
toward Rose’s Cabin.
[Illustration: D.K.P., 1960]
The Ute-Ulay is now part of the holdings of the powerful Newmont Mining
Company which also owns the Idarado Mining Company of Ouray and
Telluride and the Resurrection Mining Company of Leadville. There is
always the off chance that the price of metals will rise, and, should
this be the case, many a Colorado mining property would throw off its
ghostly pall and throb again with activity....
From Lake City a number of ghost towns can be seen but the most exciting
one requires a jeep. This is Carson which during the years of its
history was also known as Carson Camp and Carson City. Since Carson
City’s population during the score or so years of its existence from the
1880’s to the early 1900’s was at no time more than fifty and generally
around twenty, one is inevitably reminded by Bayard Taylor’s words:
“I only wish that the vulgar snobbish custom of attaching ‘city’ to
every place of more than three houses, could be stopped. From Illinois
to California it has become a general nuisance, telling only of swagger
and want of taste and not of growth.”
Bayard Taylor wrote these words in 1866. The “city” that called forth
his ire was Gate City, or Golden Gate City, a string of four or five
cabins, at the mouth of Tucker Creek on the stagecoach road to Central
City. He included these words the next year in his book _Colorado: A
Summer Trip_, and I first quoted the passage in my 1943 Master’s Thesis
about Central City for the University of Denver. In 1960 when I was
re-visiting many ghost towns, I thought of Bayard Taylor’s wish
frequently and smiled because Taylor never attained his wish. The vogue
of adding “city” to the name of any little hamlet continued unabated
through the whole nineteenth century and even into the twentieth.
Carson, or Carson City, deserved its appendage more than some at the
time of its naming and particularly deserves it today. Of all the towns
in our 1960 selection it gave the greatest feeling of being a ghost
town. Its buildings have been preserved by the cold and by the fortunate
fact that it is in an unusual spot which is not subject to snowslides.
This aspect is very rare in the San Juans where thundering snow is man’s
greatest enemy.
J. E. Carson discovered a mine in 1881 on top of the continental divide
some sixteen miles southwest of Lake City on the headwaters of Wager
Creek. He staked claims on both sides of the divide, the claims on the
south side being at the head of Lost Trail Creek which flows south into
the Rio Grande River. With the arrival of other prospectors the Carson
Mining district was organized, and in 1882 a camp started. The Griswolds
in their _Colorado’s Century of Cities_ have remarked that Carson was
thrown like a cavalry saddle across the continental divide with one
stirrup hanging on the Atlantic slope and one on the Pacific—a most apt
description.
The construction of both segments of Carson is very good—all the
buildings are nicely shingled and show care in their carpentry. But the
Atlantic slope, or higher, section of Carson is in much greater
disrepair and will not survive very long.
In the ’80’s Carson mined silver, and after the Panic of 1893 the camp
mined gold. But the problem of transportation to a town which lay at
various levels from 11,500 feet to 12,360 was almost insoluble. Its ore
was gold, ruby silver and copper, running sometimes as high as $2,000 a
ton. Despite the richness of the ore the deposits ran in pockets,
occasionally as high as $40,000 in a pocket of only forty feet depth.
But when a pocket was stoped out, then the ore was completely gone.
Among the best mines were the Maid of Carson, Big Injun, Saint Jacob,
Dunderberg and Lost Trail.
And today Carson, although it is unique in its preservation, is a place
where riches are indeed a lost trail!
[Illustration: D.K.P., 1960]