The mining camp was already declining when this picture was taken.
Its population had fallen from twelve hundred to one hundred and
fifty.
Still Bachelor hung on as a town after that for a number of years. But
the winters were so harsh, and transportation over the two-and-a-half
mile road that climbed nearly two thousand feet up was so difficult that
in the ’teens the last residents gave up. They moved down to Creede.
In 1960 there were only three cabins left standing on what was formerly
Bachelor’s residential street and a few remnants of the boardwalk on its
main street. Among the trees on the east side of the meadow, where
Bachelor once lay, was a narrow picket-fenced grave, shaded by trees. A
local story says that three bodies are buried there, one on top of the
other, because of the difficulty of digging in the frozen ground the day
after the tragedy that claimed all three.
It seems that a reforming minister, determined to alter the town’s ways,
moved to Bachelor at the height of its wickedness. He was a widower with
a sixteen-year-old daughter. Hardly had they become settled in their
cabin, than the girl caught bronchitis, and the minister was called down
to Del Norte to conduct a funeral. As he left, the father cautioned the
daughter to stay in the cabin, keep warm and admit no one, since he was
afraid of the town’s violent riff-raff.
When the minister returned three nights later, he was alarmed to see a
saddle horse tied outside their door. He rushed inside and found a
strange young man bending over his daughter who lay in bed. Whipping out
a gun, the minister shot and killed the stranger. His daughter screamed
and explained that the man was a doctor who had come to tend her. In her
father’s absence her bronchitis had deepened into pneumonia. Worn out by
the effort of speaking, the girl fell back on her pillow and died
shortly after. In remorse the minister turned the gun on himself. The
three bodies were found together the next morning and buried amid
swirling snow.
Bachelor’s site is still tossed by storms. You can leave Creede with the
top of your jeep down and the world bathed in sunshine to arrive in
Bachelor forty-five minutes later beneath racing clouds and pelting
rain. But its location has probably the most magnificent view of our
selected ghost towns. It looks out across the Rio Grande Valley to
Snowshoe Mountain and down the river to Wagon Wheel Gap. From here the
gap shows more pictorially than from any other angle. On the return trip
there is a perpendicular sight of Creede and a view of the continental
divide with its mountains around Wolf Creek Pass and Summitville. This
is a breathtaking experience when the autumn colors are at their height.
Yes, you will find Bachelor unique for its view....
Spar City’s location may also be seen on the Bachelor trip. It lies on
the south side of the Rio Grande River up Lime Creek, about fourteen
miles from Creede. It was originally named Fisher City after John Fisher
who went prospecting in June, 1892, and found a rich float of silver and
lead by climbing up Palo Alto Creek to the lower reaches of Fisher
Mountain. The news electrified the latecomers to Creede, and a rush
ensued. By August the boomers had changed the original name to Spar City
because of quantities of spar (or feldspar) in the area.
[Illustration: Lonny Rogers, 1960]