Silverton Town History

The mining history-thus, the modern history-of the San Juan Country began in Baker's Park in 1860 and the mining industry continued here until 1991, longer than anywhere else in the San Juan Mountains.

The Animas River, named by early Spaniards El Rio de las Animas Perdidas, The River of Lost Souls, flows into Baker's Park from the north. There it is joined by Cement Creek flowing into Baker's Park from the northwest and by Mineral Creek, entering from the west. Less than five miles up the river from the town of Silverton, Cunningham Gulch empties into the Animas River from the east. The Animas River flows south from Baker's Park through a narrow canyon toward Durango. The creeks and canyons provided access through and over the fortress of peaks surrounding Baker's Park.
Charles Baker and a handful of men entered Baker's Park in 1860 in search of gold dust in the sand and gravel bars of the Animas River and tributary creeks. They found some of what they were looking for and the news spread quickly. By the autumn of 1860 hundreds--by some accounts, thousands--of prospectors were heading for the heart of the San Juan Country deep inside Ute territory. Winter forced them out of Baker's Park or delayed their approach. A small army of prospectors, a few with brides or families, gathered in a hastily built village of log cabins at the mouth of the Animas Canyon 25 miles south of Baker's Park to await the spring of 1861.
It was a short-lived gold rush. Inaccessibility, Utes anger over the trespassers, a harsh winter, and disappointing prospecting results combined to drive the prospectors out. By the end of 1861 the San Juan Country was empty of prospectors and securely back in the hands of the Utes. The Civil War, the Utes, and inaccessibility combined to keep it that way for another decade. But the gold panned by Baker and his party was not forgotten.

By 1870, prospectors were crossing Stony Pass from the Rio Grande River east of the Continental Divide, descending into Cunningham Gulch, and spreading out along the Animas in violation of the Treaty of 1868. A cluster of log cabins, known as Howardsville, grew up at the mouth of Cunningham Gulch.

The Brunot Agreement of 1873 with the Utes gave the prospectors what they wanted, the mountain tops of the San Juan Country. The rush was on in earnest. The town site of what is now Silverton was laid out in 1874, and a post office established there in 1875. The new town in Baker's Park soon became the mining center of the San Juan Country. The proliferation of producing mines along the Animas River attracted the attention of railroad companies headquartered in Denver. The companies raced one another to be the first to reach the San Juans. The Denver & Rio Grande Railroad won the contest and the first D&RG train from the new railroad town of Durango rolled into Baker's Park in July, 1882.
Silverton, like all the Victorian era mining towns of the San Juan Country, had within its town limits and in the surrounding high country camps and boarding houses a far greater supply of bachelors than of brides. Saloons, gambling houses, dance halls, and houses of prostitution provided a Saturday night alternative to the miners who didn't have a wife and a warm fire to go home to. Such nightlife was tolerated-barely-by the respectable citizens of the mining towns but it was limited to a designated area of town, the red light district. Prostitutes-often referred to as "ladies of the evening" in the newspapers of the time-were not welcome in the proper neighborhoods and were ostracized by all of polite society.
Neither did proper ladies from proper neighborhoods venture into red light districts unless armed with Temperance Union axes for the purpose of smashing bars.

Propriety, and an increasing supply of civilizing brides, eventually won out and the red light districts vanished. In Silverton, the red light district was spread along a few blocks of Blair Street. In Silverton the demise of the red light district seemed almost to trigger a lingering fond memory that lasted for decades. Maybe there was more fun to be had on Blair Street than at the dramatic readings staged in the formal parlors on Reese Street....

As time went on the industrial revolution caught up with mining in the San Juan Country. Mining and milling became increasingly mechanized. Where once thousands of miners and millworkers were required to produce ore and concentrates, by the mid-twentieth century a few dozen miners and millworkers could maintain the same level of production. Even in the best of times, the great booms of the San Juans were a thing of the past.

The last decades of the nineteenth century were a time when an expanding, industrializing United States could not meet the demand for laborers in the mountain mines and mills.

Hispanics from northern New Mexico, descendants of the first Europeans to enter the San Juan Country centuries before, came to work in the mines. Thousands of immigrant laborers from Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, Scandinavia, Poland, China, and Italy streamed in to work in the mines and build the railroads. They saved their pay and sent home for their families. Silverton, Rico, Ouray, and Telluride became multi-lingual, multi-cultural communities with a unique cosmopolitan air of their own.

Despite the fact that heroes such as Otto Mears, a Russian immigrant, and the Camp Bird's Thomas Walsh, an Irish immigrant, fueled the fortunes of the region's Anglo-American elite, ethnic prejudice ruled the day. Each immigrant culture formed a community of its own within the larger towns. But, when they could afford to leave for big cities or when times got bad, the elite packed up and went elsewhere. The immigrants stayed and worked the mines. They saved their money and bought Main Street.

Gold ore continued to flow from the portal at Gladstone for trucking to the mill at the upper end of Baker's Park until July, 1991. The 1991 closure of the mine and mill may have marked the end of mining in the San Juan Mountains for decades or centuries to come. Silverton today is a monument to its longlived and very recent mining past. Its citizens are determined to preserve the remnants of the mining era which surround the town. Silverton's future may well be as the place where the world comes to see and to understand the mining history--thus, the foundation of the modern history--of the San Juan Country.

-Text and Photos, Courtesy of A Historical Touring Guide to the San Juan Skyway