Leadville, Colorado
Under construction.
So you come across the Great Plains and bump into the Front Range of the Rockies. If you cross those mountains at the right latitude, you'll find yourself in an oval-shaped valley called South Park and on its west side you'll face another mountain range. It's the Mosquito Range, shown here, and in 1879 it was crawling with people trying to get to the silver that they were sure was waiting for them on the other side.
Nowadays it's easy to get past the Mosquitoes: State Highway 91 comes roaring down from Fremont Pass. Duck soup.
The Mosquitoes themselves are still a tad intimidating, but the indomitable human spirit triumphs over every obstacle. Right? (I'm a speechwriter in training.)
The journey was more sobering when Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly ran this drawing of prospective millionaires approaching the Mosquitoes. The drawing is from the April 12th, 1879, issue, and it's by Edward Jump, a prolific French illustrator who, despite his artistic bravura, blew his brains out a few years later. I find this surprising. I expect successful illustrators to have successful lives. Foolish me. "Grow up!"
Another of Jump's drawing, and from the same issue.
The wagon seems to be carrying a circular furnace of the type sometimes used to smelt Leadville's ore. Most of that ore was destined to build mountains of slag, but perhaps 20 percent was lead and a much smaller but far more valuable amount was the bright metal. I kind of hate numbers, but by 1923 Leadville had produced 230 million ounces of silver with a nominal value of $189 million. Annual production peaked in the early 1880s at 9 million ounces. Slowly declining, production twenty-five years later sank permanently below 3 million ounces annually, and by 1919 it had slipped permanently under one million. The last mine to operate--its name almost a prediction--was the Black Cloud. It closed in 1999.
(Charles W. Henderson, Mining in Colorado, USGS Professional Paper 138, 1926, p. 176.)
Leadville never produced as much silver as Idaho's Coeur d'Alene or Montana's Butte, but it produced enough to inspire a rush. I assume that publicity like Jump's drawings helped.
(May 24th, 1879.)
The Mosquito Pass summit is 13,185 feet above sea level, and stagecoaches were always in a hurry. A dozen or more crossed each way every day in 1879.
(A.A. Hayes, "Grub Stakes and Millions," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, February 1880, pp. 381-397.)
A calmer presentation, by a woman who actually crossed the mountains. I'm not sure why she makes them look benign, because she found the crossing terrifying. That was in winter, but Spring could be as bad. That's when Helen Hunt Jackson crossed the Mosquitoes: "Some of the horses were stuck fast in mud; some drivers were unloading and dividing their load into two parts, to make two trips across the ridge; some were unhitching their horses and mules, to 'double up' on the more heavily loaded wagon of a comrade. All was misery. In desperation, for there was nothing else to be done, we floundered along...."
(H.H. Jackson, "To Leadville," The Atlantic Monthly, May 1879, pp. 567-579; the drawing is by Mary Hallock Foote and appears in her novel, The Led-Horse Claim, A Romance of a Mining Camp, 1882, p. 10.)
Want a map? The larger coin, from South Africa, flanks Denver, and the Brazilian penny is on Leadville. (Hooray. I finally have a use for a couple of my orphaned coins.) The airline distance between them is just under 80 miles; the road distance today, via Interstate 70 and State Route 91, is about 100. The map is from Ferdinand Hayden's classic Geographical and Geological Atlas of Colorado (1881), but it was reprinted in the The Atlas of Leadville published by the U.S. Geological Survey in 1883. You probably can't see the details clearly, so I'll point out that Leadville is near the head of the Arkansas River, whose valley, near the left edge, continues south beyond the map's edge and then turns east to pass through the scenic Royal Gorge before coming out onto the Great Plains near Pueblo. The mountains just to the east of Leadville are our friends, the Mosquitoes, although the map also offers an alternative, the Park Range. The name Front Range, by the way, was in common use even before Hayden formalized it with this map. Breckenridge, now the most popular ski resort in the United States, appears as a small town just east of the letter "S" in Mosquito.
Here's the Arkansas Valley, with the Arkansas River thoughtfully ponded by a beaver. We're a five-minute drive west of Leadville.
I want to look at another map for a moment. Here's the credit.
There's the Arkansas Valley, the Sawatch Mountains on the left and the good ol' Mosquitoes (at least up to their summit) on the right. Leadville is a tiny grid, but the striking thing is that the hills east of town are plastered with names. It's the only part of the map loaded that way, and the obvious explanation is that that's where the silver was.
The U. S. Geological Survey's Leadville atlas included this topographical map centered on the Mosquito Range. If you have sharp eyes, you may see a road passing over Mosquito Pass and continuing down the western slope to Leadville. This is the road followed by Mary Hallock, who drew that comparatively mild picture of the mountains. The Mosquito Pass Wagon Road Company built the road as a toll road, but it must have a financial disaster, because it opened in 1879, one season before the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad came up the Arkansas Valley to offer a much easier way to get to Leadville. The Mosquito Pass road is still there, waiting for a location scout needing a place to film a Jeep ad.
The boom began on the topographically insignificant Fryer Hill, immediately east of town. The map, I should tell you, is the work of Allan David Wilson (his first names appear on his many U.S.G.S. maps only with the initials "A. D." He was an alum of Clarence King's exploration of the fortieth parallel, and when King became the first director of the U.S.G.S. he hired Wilson as the organization's first chief topographer.
Another map in the atlas allows us to zoom in on Fryer Hill and (just below those words) see the Little Pittsburg Mine, the mine that ignited the Leadville rush. Two other important mines, the Matchless and the Robert E. Lee, are near the top. The distance on the ground between the Matchless and the Little Pittsburg was about 750 feet.
The silver ore was in the limestone shown here in blue, but all the layers are capped with an obscuring mask of glacial debris, shown here in tan. The geologist making this map had to go down mine shafts and record what he found, foot by foot. He reported that only one mine owner refused him access. Finding the ore in the first place, of course, was completely hit and miss, because nobody had any idea what was under the glacial debris.
Another cross-section from the atlas, this time including the Matchless Mine, whose owners were apparently willing to venture beyond the blue limestone. The name Matchless refers not to the mine's yield but to the prospectors' preferred brand of chewing tobacco.
This bedrock geology map shows the surface material if there was no glacial cover. The cross-hatched area is the part of the blue limestone with lead and silver. The dotted areas are the places from which ore has been extracted through a myriad of tunnels.
Here's the man behind those geological maps. He's Samuel Franklin Emmons, a rich kid who graduated from Harvard and went to Europe during the American Civil War, nominally to care for his ailing mother. Subsequently he studied at the French School of Mines and then, like many mining engineers at the time, at the famous Freiberg Bergakademie, near Dresden. People how knew him said that he was always the student best prepared for class. Clarence King hired him for the Fortieth Parallel Survey and then hired him onto the U.S.G.S. almost as soon as it was created. Emmons had leapt at the chance to work in the West. Still, upbringing is sticky. I mean, when working in the field on those Leadville maps, Emmons habitually wore white buckskins custom tailored in London.
At least one woman who knew him thought his chin weak, which may be why Emmons grew a beard and kept it. But don't get me wrong: though he was a man of refinement, he was also physically tough and of course hard working and smart. He spent his career at the U.S.G.S. and in time became a mentor to younger colleagues. A friend wrote that Emmons admired the young men's "excellent powers of observation" but deplored their writing. "Their English is wretched," he said.
(Arnold Hague, "Biographical Memoir of Samuel Franklin Emmons, 1841- 1911," National Academy of Sciences, Biographical Memoirs, 1912, p. 329.
Here, for fans, is the cover of that now-rare Leadville atlas. The other day I spotted a copy for sale for about $600.
Here's an artist's view of Fryer Hill. It look bucolic apart from all the smoke, presumably from boilers used to drive engines hoisting ore buckets.
(William Fiske Stone, ed., History of Colorado, 1918, vol. 1, p. 155.)
And here's the Little Pittsburg, where August Rische and George Hook, grubstaked by a storekeeper named Horace Tabor, more or less stumbled into a fortune at a depth of less than 30 feet.
There's a nice juxtaposition between the rustic atmosphere of the scene and the fact that the company soon maintained a corporate office on Pine Street, in New York City's financial district.
(Carlyle Channing Davis, Olden Times in Colorado, 1916, p.204).
Here they are, later in life. Theodore Hook, on the left, earned $55,000 in dividends from the Little Pittsburg before selling his one-third interest to Rische and Tabor for $98,000. August Rische, on the right, earned $135,000 in dividends before selling his interest to Horace Tabor for $265,000. Tabor, now the sole owner, earned about $1.5 million in dividends before selling the mine to two Denver bankers for a cool million.
(Carlyle Channing David, Olden Times in Colorado, 1916, p. 202.)
You'd think it would be easy to visit the Little Pittsburg today. I mean, there's lots of stuff shown in this photo of the mine taken by the famous William Henry Jackson.
(William C. Jones and Elizabeth B. Jones, compilers, William Henry Jackson's Colorado, 1975, p. 133.)
Here it is. Let's walk up the hill.
Uh, not a lot to see.
Where did it all go? It's a five-minute drive east of downtown Leadville.
After selling the Little Pittsburg, Tabor began investing in other mines, then tried politics. He became the first mayor of Leadville, then Lt. Governor of Colorado and, for a few weeks, a U.S. senator. He looks presentable here, so long as you don't mind the exploding moustache, but he didn't impress his Senate colleagues. Here's Senator John Ingalls of Kansas pulling out all the stops in a letter home to his wife: "A fouler beast was never depicted. Such a vulgar ruffianly boor you never beheld: uncouth, awkward, shambling, dirty hands and big feet turned inward: a huge solitaire diamond on a sooty, bony, blacksmith finger: piratical features, unkempt, frowsy and unclean: blotched with disease he looks the brute he is."
Was Ingalls fair? Another contemporary of Tabor describes a different person: "He is genial, affable, accessible, unaffected, flaunting no parvenu airs in the faces of old comrades, generous to a fault, and aims to deal justly by all men."
Take your pick.
(William Connelley, Ingalls of Kansas, 1928, p. 31, and Captain R. G. Dill, author of the chapter on Lake County in History of Colorado, published by O.L. Baskin, 1881, p. 384. The image is the frontispiece of that same book).
Tabor's wife Augusta was a tough cookie. She left a fragmentary memoir. I wish there was more of it, but here are two tidbits recalling the days before she became wealthy. "We came with ox-teams across the plains. We then went up to where Golden now stands and camped there three weeks, on Clear Creek, at the foot of the mountains. Mr. Tabor went up into the mountains to look after gold and I stayed in camp and took care of the cattle and the provisions. We had six months provisions with us. The cattle were foot-sore and could not go far but I kept them from straying. I stayed there quite alone; there was no one there, no Indians, nothing there but just myself and our teams, silence reigned around, not a soul but me and my baby, and I was a weakly woman, not nearly so strong as I am today." Settled near Leadville by 1860, she and her husband operated their own express service ferrying gold across Mosquito Pass. "I had the gold in buckskins, then put in gunnybags, then laid on the horse and then my saddle put on over the blanket.... Then there would be nothing visible but the saddle. If anyone came along they would rather search him than me. There were some miles that we could not ride our horses on account of the wind, it blew so fiercely. We had to have out clothes tied on firmly. In some places it was so steep we had to hang on to our horses' tails, it was all the horses could do to get up."
(Mrs. H. A. W. Tabor, "Cabin Life in Colorado," The Colorado Magazine, March 1927, pp. 71-75; photo from Wikipedia.)
Scandalously, Tabor left Augusta for Elizabeth McCourt, alias baby Doe. With her help, plus the Panic of 1893, Haw lost his fortune but got by as Denver's postmaster.
Here's Baby Doe helping Haw spend his money by dressing in ostrich feathers and ermine.
And here she is a few months before her death in 1935, when she froze to the death in a cabin at the Matchless Mine, which Tabor had bequeathed to her with the plea that she never sell it. Tabor had made (and spent) $10 million from the Matchless, and he hoped it would make her rich again, but it didn't.
Here she is in a composite photograph from 1934. She's standing in front of a drawing of the entrance to the mine.
Her cabin is one of the few surviving reminders of Leadville's silver boom.
Here's the mine in 1929.
(Howard N. and Lucille L. Sloane, A Pictorial History of American Mining, 1970, p. 171).
Behind her cabin you can see the hoist for one of the several shafts on the Matchless.
The cabin in August 2026.
The shaft next to this hoist is about 500 feet deep. It's covered with this grate, which won't save your phone if you drop it.
The National Mining Museum in Leadville has this model showing some of the voids under the mine.
Another model at the museum shows the mine's several shafts and voids.
A linear ridge next to the shaft. What is it? It's what's left of a railroad spur that came here to pick up ore.
They're gone now, but there was a spaghetti bowl of tracks collecting ore from various mines for transport down to local smelters.
(Christopher James, Silver Rails: The Railroads of Leadville Colorado, 2015, p. xi.)
Just before we quit gawking at the rich and famous, here's the house where Horace and Augusta lived before their divorce in 1883. It's at the corner of 17th and Broadway in Denver, and Augusta stayed here until 1893, then moved across the street to the Brown Palace Hotel, which her son managed. She died two years later, at 61, in Pasadena. Haw died three years later, in Denver, at 68. The house was demolished in 1903.
https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/image/augusta-tabors-denver-mansion↗↗↗↗↗↗↗↗↗↗↗↗↗↗
It's time to meet the lawyers!
Once prospectors found silver on public land--and the land here was public--they had to file lode claims, which in theory were staked along the outcrop of the mineral vein the prospector had found. Well, the silver here isn't in veins, but the law's the law, so we have the ground plastered with the narrow rectangles characteristic of lode claims. I'm showing only Fryer Hill, but if you look closely, you can see both the Little Pittsburgh (usually spelled without the h), and the Matchless. Trying to operate each claim separately with ownership tangles like this was basically impossible.
Here's a map from 1901 that colors operating mines. Most if not all of them encompass several claims.
(Charles F. Saunders map of Leadville Mining District, 1901. https://raremaps.com/gallery/detail/108002/the-leadville-mining-district-compiled-from-official-records-and-other-reliable-sources-by-chas-f-saunders-january-1901↗↗↗↗↗↗)
A detail showing (at the arrow) the Little Pittsburg, by 1901 apparently no longer in production.
The implication is simple: the ol' sourdough with his mule and pickaxe didn't last long. The Robert E. Lee Mine, close to the Matchless, expanded to control a handful of claims covering 13 acres and employing 150 men working over 25 faces.
Most of Leadville's mines sprawled south from the Matchless Mine over Led-Horse Creek (marked here by Highway 1) and over the next big hill, Iron Hill, to the valley of California Gulch (marked here as S. Toledo Street). The mine dumps hint at the mess the miners made.
Here's California Gulch, here seen between Iron Hill on the north and Rock or Dome Hill.
(U.S.G.S. Prof. Papre 148, 1927, pl 6.)
The A.Y Mine, on the slope of Iron Hill was the first of many properties acquired by a young Meyer Guggenheim, progenitor of the Guggenheims.
Close-up.
Another view.
(USGS Prof. Paper 148, 1927, plate 5.)
Here's Upper California Gulch in 1900. Yes, it's a mess, but you can't make an omelet, etc. The WPA guide to Colorado memorably speaks of "the outskirts of the camp, each a treasure house, long since stripped of trees and virtually disemboweled."
(The WPA Guide to 1930s Colorado, 1987, p. 168; photo from Dan L. and Jean Harvey Griswold, The Carbonate Camp Called Leadville, 1950, following p. 18.)
The site in 2026.
I'd like to drive farther, but our friends at Newmont won't give us the key. The road continues to their Black Cloud Mine, closed since 1999.
Better to poke around on the north side of Iron Hill, where there are lots of places where we can get hurt.
Try here.
This might be fun.
Slide?
Time for the town itself.
(Andrew Fiske Stone, ed., History of Colorado, 1918, vol. 1, p. 155.)
A clos- up, makes the place look like it grew, as we like to say, organically.
(Dan L. and Jean Harvey Griswold, The Carbonate Camp Called Leadville, 1950, following p. 18.)
The caption reads, "Residence in Leadville."
Augustus Allen Hayes, "Grub Stakes and Millions," in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, February, 1880, p. 393.)
Well, I trust photos more than drawings, so I'll concede that there were simple cabins in the early days. The men appear to be reading books because they couldn't figure out how to charge their phones.
(Carlyle Channing Davis, Olden Times in Colorado, 1916, p. 248.)
This drawing was published in 1879 and suggests a much more organized place than the previous pictures. There's still no railroad, but there's a wide street and an area with smelters. The view is north from Brooklyn Heights, at the southern end of town.
(Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly, July 5, 1879)
Brooklyn Heights is now occupied by the loop of homes at the bottom of this image. They were built in the aftermath of COVID-19.
Can't see much? No problem. We'll zoom in. (This is the 1879 Baldwin Map, named after its publisher.)
https://www.geographicus.com/P/AntiqueMap/leadvillecolorado-baldwin-1879↗↗↗↗↗↗↗↗↗)
Here's a closeup. It sure doesn't look like that snowbound village. Notice the Harrison Reduction Works at the lower right. That would be the town's first major smelter, established by Edwin Harrison in 1878. Looking up from Harrison's smelter, which was more formally the St. Louis Smelting Company, you see Harrison Avenue. No mystery about the name. It's the town's main street, though until 1879 people would have said that Chestnut was the main street. (Chestnut crosses Harrison near the bottom of the grid.)
The whole townsite is labelled as the Stevens and Leiter Placer, which is interesting in two ways. First because the earliest miners in this part of Colorado were looking for alluvial or surface gold and, as such, were legally permitted, to stake 160-acre placer claims. This particular claim proved more profitable as urban real estate, and so Stevens and Leiter set up a real-estate office and had the placer claim surveyed into blocks, then sold off lot by lot. The other interesting point (but this will get arcane) is that Leiter was Levi Leiter, the partner of Marshall Field in Chicago. In 1895, six years after this map appeared, Levi's daughter Mary married George Curzon, who four years later became viceroy of India. I wonder how many people in Leadville in 1900 knew or cared about India's famously beautiful vicereine. I also wonder if the lovely Mary ever heard of Leadville. (I told you it would be arcane.)
Example of a standard town lot.
Here is Harrison Avenue emphasized by the heavy line of U.S. 24, with the site of Harrison's St. Louis Smelting Company down around those ponds.
Here's an A.D. Wilson topographic map from 1880, drawn with east at the top. It shows Harrison Avenue running toward Edwin Harrison's St. Louis Smelting and Refining Company. Below it, center right, is the even bigger Grant Smelter.
The Harrison smelter operated from 1877 to 1893.
A bit of gory detail from a Sanborn fire-insurance map covering the Harrison smelter. The map is hard to read, but a note says, sure enough, that the smelter was not operating in June, 1895.
(https://www.loc.gov/resource/g4314lm.g010311895/?sp=31&st=image↗).↗)↗↗↗↗↗↗
The Grant Smelter cheerily dispensed carcinogens from 1878 until it burned down in 1882. Grant went on to grander things and was elected governor of Colorado in 1883.
(Dan L. and Jean Harvey Griswold, The Carbonate Camp Called Leadville, 1950, following p. 50.)
By 1893 Meyer Guggenheim owned all the lead smelters in the Rocky Mountains and operated them under the name American Smelting and Refining, later acronymized into ASARCO. Such were the rude beginnings of the Guggenheim Foundation. Too bad, so sad for the nearby La Plata smelter, in operation from 1878 to 1887.
Another view.
Leadville has a bit more appeal for vacationers today than it did when its smelters were smoking. Why aren't they smoking here? I don't know.
(For more than most people want to know about smelting in Leadville, see Andrew Mueller's 2019 doctoral dissertation from Michigan Tech: Fortune and Failure - Gold and Silver Smelting in the Colorado Rockies 1861 to 1900.)
The sites still haven't recovered.
In fact the entire town was designated an EPA superfund site in 1983. There's been a lot of cleanup since then, but the county still offers free blood-lead testing.
Your EPA at work, with a dam on California Gulch. The water ponded here is brought up to drinking-water standards. That's what they say, but there's no EPA office in Leadville. If you want to tlak to an official, the nearest office is in Denver.
I should keep my grumbling to myself, and anyway we're ready to poke around the town proper. Here's Edward Jump's drawing of Chestnut Street in 1879, before it had been supplanted by Harrison as the town's main street.
Busy? Leadville's population jumped from 8,000 on May 1, 1879, to 18,000 at year's end.
Everything still has to be shipped in by wagon, yet Leadville has a bookstore! I've seen thousands of Westerns but nary a bookstore in any of them. The store belonged to John Leininger, a German immigrant who had tried mining but thought better of it. One writer in 1880 says that Leininger's "stock is creditable to the tastes of his patrons, and would not seem out of place upon any of the fashionable streets of the large Eastern cities." I bet Dickens sold well, but of course that was mostly because people didn't know about YouTube.
(R.G. Dill, in History of Colorado, published by O.L. Baskin, 1881, p. 227; Leslie's Illustrated Weekly, April 12, 1879; the quotation is from L.A. Kent, Leadville, 1880, p. 131. Note: Leininger's name is often spelled Lieninger.)
A photograph of the same corner, just to prove that it wasn't always insanely busy.
I bet the bookstore business was good. After all, the town's post office handled 5,000 letters daily. And before you ask, the 1880 census reported that over 90 percent of the population of Colorado could read and write.
Here's the amazing block of Chestnut east of Harrison in 1880..
(Don L. Griswold and Jean Harvey Griswold, History of Leadville and Lake County, Colorado. This history is a huge compilation filling two telephone-book size volumes. These maps, which the authors appear to have compiled, appear in volume two.)
Here's the block on the west side of Harrison.
You'd never guess that this is the same block (Chestnut west of Harrison) in 2026.
A block north of Chestnut, West Second Street (at the time called State Street) was the entertainment district, with 23 saloons on the first block west of Harrison. Wild and crazy? John Franklin Graff wrote that "a Leadville merchant, after admitting to me that a large portion of the city was openly devoted to licentiousness and prostitution, rounded up his admission with this tremendous 'but.' Said he, 'I was born in Europe, and have lived in several Eastern American cities, and I find more straight-up-and-down, honorable men to the square foot here than I ever found elsewhere. A laboring man has no show in the East; he's the foot-ball of capital; here he has an equal chance and goes for what he's worth."
(John Franklin Graff, Graybeard's Colorado, 1882, p. 70; drawing from Leslie's Illustrated Weekly, May 17, 1879.)
Here's that sinful block. Too bad we don't have any late-night photos.
(Dan L. and Jean Harvey Griswold, The Carbonate Camp Called Leadville, 1950, following p. 130)
The Pioneer Club Bar opened in 1883 at 116 State. It closed in 1972, and the bar proper was shipped to a restaurant in Old Sacramento, California, where it may survive.
(Christian J. Buys, Historic Leadville, 1997, p. 196.)
It didn't take long for railroads to arrive in Leadville. The first (it was the railroad that killed the toll road over the Mosquitoes) was the Denver and Rio Grande in 1880, coming up the Arkansas Valley from Pueblo. The track's still in place, but it hasn't seen a train since about 2000.
The D&RG reached Deadville in 1880 but continued north and in another three years offered a through route from Denver to Salt Lake City via Pueblo and Leadville. (Rudyard Kipling came east this way in 1899 and in From Sea to Sea left an entertaining account of his trip. I wish he had ventured the few miles from Leadville Junction to Leadville proper, but he didn't.) A few years later, when this map was surveyed, two more railroads had arrived in Leadville, including the Colorado Midland, whose Hagerman Tunnel (with its heroic eastern approach) is at the map's left margin.
(U.S.G.S. Leadville quadrangle, 1:125,000, surveyed in 1891.)
The tunnel was over 2,000 feet long and was only 500 feet shy of the Sawatch summit, which here is about 12,000 feet above sea level. I'd have been nervous to ride this, the first train to pass through the tunnel.
(Dan Abbott, Colorado Midland Railway, 1989, frontispiece.)
Here's the way the railroad got up to the tunnel. See the curved trestle?
I find it more impressive than Jump's drawings of a decade earlier, simply because the trestle really looked like this. I hate to think about the forest that was sacrificed, but, as I've said, you can't make an omelet, etc.
(Dan Abbot, Colorado Midland Railway, 1989, p. 66.)
Another magazine (Harper's Weekly, 1889), another artist (Henry Farny), and another helping of artistic license: "Down the Grade From the Divide in Colorado--Section Hands Going to Camp for Provisions."
Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg, Rio Grande, Mainline of the Rockies, 1962. p. 88.)
That was fake romance, but here's the real. It's the hotel and station of the Denver, South Park, and Pacific Railroad, which reached Leadville in 1884 via Como, a tiny place in South Park. In 2026 the hotel was being restored for romantics. A bit of track is still there, but the line was abandoned in the 1930s.
Here's the long-gone Leadville station of the equally long-gone Colorado Midland. There was a restaurant downstairs. Upstairs was accommodation for employees. It stood on Spruce Street just north of Third. You're not familiar with those names. Be patient.
(Dan Abbot, Colorado Midland Railway, 1989, pp. 258-9).
No more carrying precious metal by horseback over Mosquito Pass: bullion went by boxcar down to Colorado Springs.
(Christian J. Buys, Historic Leadville, 1997, p. 119.)
Here's the D&RG's Leadville depot, along with a photo of the place being taken apart in 1940.
(Christopher James, Silver Rails: The Railroads of Leadville Colorado, 2015, p. 225.)
Time marches on: the iniquitous State Sreet about 1940.
(Christian J. Buys, Historic Leadville, 1997, p. 230.)
Another view. Marion Post Wolcott took the picture in 1941 while she was working for the Farm Security Administration.
(George F. Willison, Here They Dug the Gold, 1946, p. xxv.)
The street's pretty empty now. This is the former Pioneer Club of 1892. It closed in 1972 but was then renovated as apartments.
When they renovated it, they should have left the sign.
There's only one place left with a sign of that vintage. It's on Harrison. The building is from 1881, but it has operated as a bar only since the 1940s.
Sunday morning penance.
(Leslie's, May 17, 1879).
The Annunciation Catholic church opened in 1880 on Poplar at 7th. The steeple and tower were added in 1898 by Francis Colahan, who 20 years earlier had built Central School. He w
(Christian J. Buys, Historic Leadville, 1997, p. 44. For Colahan, see the obituary published in Leadville's Herald Democrat December 5, 1915.)
Here it is in 2026, along with the rectory. A sign states that Mass is now offered only at the newer St. Joseph's church.
A Presbyterian Church opened at Harrison and 8th in 1889. That's the Leadville High School in the background. We'll get to it.
Christian J. Buys, Historic Leadville, 1997, p. 98.)
The Presbyterian church today.
Here's St. George Episcopal Mission on West Fourth. It's unusual.
What's unusual?
Answer: half the nave is a warehouse for a foodbank, and the narthex is now a professional kitchen preparing hot meals served free four days a week.
Leadville had several hundred Jews by 1880, most operating stores in town. A synagogue opened in 1884. Eventually, as the community shrank, the synagogue became an apartment building with four apartments under a drop ceiling. In 2008 it was restored as a synagogue with occasional services. It's a museum, too, free--unlike most if not all of Leadville's other museums.
Interior with the Torah ark between two faux marble columns.
Back at the Presbyterian church I pointed out the town's high school. It's now a museum.
Here it is before the conversion. It opened in 1901.
(Christian J. Buys, Historic Leadville, 1997, p. 146(
Snoop around and you can see bits of the original facade.
Elementary schools opened much earlier. This photograph from 1880, looking north from Brooklyn Heights, shows the town's Second Ward or Central School at Chestnut and Spruce.
(USGS Prof. Paper 148, plate 4)
Here it is. It's gone now, but in 1881 Leadville had 1300 schoolchildren. The entire county today has fewer than 900 students in public schools.
(Dan L. and Jean Harvey Griswold, The Carbonate Camp Called Leadville, 1950, following p. 258.)
Central School, George King, architect, Chestnut at Spruce, 1881. Demolished
A group of early Leadville teachers. They're a remarkably intelligent group. I know a few particulars about one of the woman, the one second from the left in the back row.
She's Nellie Healy, an Irish immigrant who spent her career here, not only teaching bur running Healy House, a boarding house.
Today it's the Healy House, a museum. The house was built by August Meyer, a mining engineer who, like so many others, studied at Freiberg. Arriving in Leadville, he was the first person to send a load of ore for assay. It went to St. Louis, which cost more than the silver was worth, but the results proved that there was more than enough silver to make money in Leadville if you could smelt the ore locally, which of course is what Edwin Harrison began to do.
Here it is in the early days. We're at 10th and Harrison.
"Here's August." (I'm imagining Ed McMahon is here to say it for me.)
In case you were underwhelmed by Meyer's house in Leadville, let me show you the place he built for himself when he moved on to Kansas City. It's now the home of the Kansas City Art Institute.
His house then became the Healy Boardinghouse. A third floor was added, and I imagine Nellie Healy going up and down those stairs day after day, year after year. Perhaps some of the other teachers were boarders.
Meyer left some nice woodwork.
Pictures of the students are hard to come by, but here are some girls in the 1890s. Not a happy crew. I'll never know why.
(Christian J. Buys, Historic Leadville, 1997, p. 127)
Many of their mothers were ambitious and more conscious of their social status than you might expect in a mining town. Case in point: here are four of the daughters of Roswell Eaton Goodell, who from 1886 to 1890 was Leadville's postmaster.
(Carnegie Channing Davis, Olden Times in Colorado, 1916, p. 223.)
Yes, the Goodell family was unusual. Here's dad with five daughters in Paris, where's he's taken them so they can learn to behave as ladies. Mary, at the upper left, would marry James Grant, who after studying at the Freiberg mining school would build Leadville's Grant Smelter and move on to become governor of Colorado.
Goodell, shown here while postmaster in Leadville, had lost a lot of money in the Great Chicago Fire. He washed up here and understandably seems a bit tired. Of course, time is a sly devil all by itself.
Goodell's daughters were not the only Victorian ladies in Leadville. Lucy Virginia (Harmon) Goldthwaite, upper left, is identified in a directory of American women as an "authoress and dramatist." It gets better: "Mrs. Goldthwaite has written many songs that have received public approval, and a tragedy for Lillian Lewis, which that actor pronounces exceptionally fine, and several other plays for leading actors. Mrs. Goldthwaite is a thorough scholar, a fine artist, a proficient linguist, and reads, writes and speaks fluently several languages. She has a high soprano voice of great sweetness and power. She was a pupil of the German composer, August Newmayer. She is happily married, and is the wife of George Goldthwaite, a prominent judge, an able lawyer, a nephew of ex-United States Supreme Court Judge, John A. Campbell, and son of ex-United Slates Senator, George Goldthwaite Mrs Goldthwaite resides at present in Leadville. Col."
(Frances Willard and Mary Livermore, Great American Women of the 19th Century, 1897, p. 338; photo from Carnegie Channing Davis, Olden Times in Colorado, 1916, p. 181.)
Yes, it's a jolt, but we've come down to Leadville's big cemetery because I wanted to show you husband George's gravestone, topped, appropriately for a judge, with law books labelled Solon and Justinian.
The cemetery, by the way, is in a pine forest, and many of the graves are elaborately fenced.
Here's a group of young men from the boom year, 1879. Apparently it wasn't just bookstores that did a good business. Style makes the man, even if all the clothes either came with the men themselves or were shipped in on freightwagons. Leadville was still a year shy of a railroad.
(Carlyle Channing Davis, Olden Times in Colorado, 1916, p. 265
Here, a generation later, is a photo including the town's mayor, councilmen, firemen and policemen in front of the new Carnegie Library at Harrison and E. 9th. It opened in 1905. The men seem to be dragging anchor, as my dad used to say. Maybe it's because they're older or maybe it because the town was no longer booming. I'll guess both.
(Christian J. Buys, Historic Leadville, 1997, p. 164.)
I want to look at the commercial life of the city, beginning with accommodation for the new aririvals arriving exhausted and then having to cope with mud, dust, or snow, depending on the season.
(Leslie's Illustrated Weekly, June 14, 1879).
To fight the mud, the street was sometimes sprinkled with slag from the smelters. Otherwise, boardwalks helped.
(Sandra Dallas, Colorado Ghost Towns and Mining Camps, 1985, p. 119.)
Men could buy a spot on a saloon floor for two bits a night. That's about ten bucks in today's money. Not bad for sound sleepers, though I don't know about those bare feet. "For the privilege of lying on a dirty mattress, laid upon the floor of a boarding-tent, with a suspicious-looking blanket for a cover, and the chances of proximity to a thief or a desperado, those who could afford it paid a dollar."
((R.G. Hill, "History of Lake County," in The History of Arkansas Valley, written by various authors and published by O.L. Baskin, Chicago, 1881, p. 224; drawing from Leslie's Illustrated Weekly, June 7, 1879.)
What was a gentleman to do? Or women?
This is an artist's commemorative rendition, 20 years after the fact, of the arrival in Denver in 1859 of O. J. Goldrick, founder of Denver's first school. Still, I bet Leadville had scenes like this. The naturalist Ernest Ingersoll wrote of the miners that "they have a high regard for a gentleman, but a hatred of a swell; no objection to good clothes, but a horror of 'frills'; a high respect for genuine virtue, but boundless hatred of cant; an admiration for nerve amounting to worship, but a contempt of braggadocio that often results in an impulsive puncturing of both the braggart and his boasts."
(Ernest Ingersoll, "Camp Carbonates: Ups and Downs in Leadville," Scribner's Monthly, Oct. 1879, pp. 801-816; the illustration of from Leslie's Illustrated Weekly, May 17, 1879.)
The Grand Hotel, on Chestnut, opened in 1879.
(Dan L. and Jean Harvey Griswold, The Carbonate Camp Called Leadville, 1950, following p. 50.)
A year later, the Clarendon opened on Harrison. Ulysses Grant, who visited that year, 1880, presumably stayed here. So did Oscar Wilde. Like the Grand, the Clarendon was made of wood. Both are gone, the Clarendon demolished in the 1930s. I don't know about the Grand.
(Dan L. and Jean Harvey Griswold, The Carbonate Camp Called Leadville, 1950, following p. 258.)
Here's the site of the Clarendon today, next to the surviving Tabor Opera House. The Sinclair station was ia Shamrock station in the 1970s.
The house held an audience of 800, and Oscar Wilde declaimed for an appreciative audience. So did John Philip Sousa (with band), Buffalo Bill, Sarah Bernhardt, and Harry Lauder. The place became the Elks Opera House in 1902 and was taken private in 1955. The city bought it in 2016. Note the bridge that connected the building to the Clarendon next door. It allowed Horace to easily move between the opera house and his hotel suite.
(Dan L. and Jean Harvey Griswold, The Carbonate Camp Called Leadville, 1950, following p. 258.)
The opera house today.
In 1885, Tabor opened the town's second Grand Hotel. This one was made of brick and stands today at the corner of Harrison and 7th. It was designed by George King, a British architect addicted to mansard roofs. (He put one on his own house at 212 W. Ninth.) The hotel was sold to the Kitchen brothers in 1878 but in the 1890s became the Vendome Hotel. It operated as a hotel under that name into the 1970s, then fell vacant in the 1980s until restored in the 1990s as apartments.
(Sandra Dallas, Colorado Ghost Towns and Mining Camps, 1985, p. 120.)
The hotel in 2026, converted in the 1990s to a combination of apartments and offices. The octagonal tower apparently never rose any higher.
Sturdy staircases.
External detailing with both classical and contemporary motifs.
Groundfloor tenants in 2026 included a realtor, a tattoo artist, and an acupuncturist.
Another hotel opened in 1886 across the street from the Tabor Grand. Its lower floor became almost immediately a dry goods store.
(Christian J. Buys, Historic Leadville, 1997, p. 78.)
Yet this one, the Hotel Delaware, is still in business under its original name..
Even out in the wilds of Colorado, hotel owners and managers wore stiff collars appropriate to their social standing: Tom Walsh, upper left, was owner of the first Grand Hotel, Howard Chapin, upper right, was owner of the Clarendon, W.H. Bush, lower left, was manager of the Clarendon, and C.W. Kitchen, lower right, was owner of the Hotel Kitchen (formerly the Tabor Grand). Pride of place goes to the owner of a posh Denver hotel.
(Carlyle Channing Davis, Olden Times in Colorado, 1916, p. 112.)
The architect of both the Tabor Grand and Delaware was George King, who was born in London in 1852 but arrived in the United States at 19. Seven years later, in 1878, he was working in Leadville, where he stayed about a decade before leaving to practice in El Paso and Mexico City. He seems to have had no formal architectural training.
He left behind his Leadville house and his reputation for admiring mansard roofs.
He also left behind the Lake County Courthouse from 1880.
That's Justice up top. She looks lonely.
(I bet at least some people in Leadville preferred snow to mud and dust.)
(Don L Griswold and Jean Harvey Griswold, History of Leavdill and Lake County, Colorado, 1996, vol. 1, no page number.)
The courthouse was partly destroyed by fire in 1942 and finally demolished in 1955 to be replaced by this. What is that line by Keats that fits perfectly here? Something about Grecian urns.
For a while, there was a so-called Millionaire's Row along West 4th Street. Here, at 127 West 4th, is Eugene Robitaille's house from 1879. He was a carpenter specializing in trim, and he built four adjacent houses here.
(Christian J. Buys, Historic Leadville, 1997, p. 103.)
His own survives as a museum.
By 1880, people with money were clustering instead around the absurdly misnamed Capitol Hill, which was around West 8th and 9th between Spruce and Leiter. Here's the home there of John McCombe, who made a fortune for himself and others but died broke. Seven years later, in 1909, his mansion in Denver was auctioned to help clear his debts. For details, see The Rocky Mountain News for November 7th of that year.
(Dan L. and Jean Harvey Griswold, The Carbonate Camp Called Leadville, 1950, following p. 258.)
Remember August Rische, one of the two prospectors who struck it rich with the Little Pittsburg? Here's the house he built a few miles from town, down by the Arkansas River. I think it's gone.
An immacutely maintained older home.
Augustus Engelbach, who developed some of the machinery used in processing Leadville ores, built this house on Harrison at 8th in 1895. The best bit may be these massive stone piers, which will surely outlast the house.
The colors are surely a much later addition, but Engelbach was apparently not wedded to functionalism.
James Martin house, 1899.designed by Herbert Dimick, who made the detailing in his own shop.
Interiors could be of Mrs. Marion Smith's house built in 1893 at 200 West 9th.
(Christian J. Buys, Historic Leadville, 1997, p. 105.)
This was the house of Horace and Augusta Tabor before they got rich. Originally, it was on the site of what become Tabor's opera house. It was built in 1877, when Tabor was still a storekeeper and when it probably ranked as one of the town's fancier places.
(Christian J. Buys, Historic Leadville, 1997, p. 238.)
It's a museum now.
Most places into the 1880s were much simpler. You can make out the old courthouse here, which means that the image has to be from 1880 or later.
We're looking toward the northwest. That's the Annunciation Catholic church in the background.
(Christian J. Buys, Historic Leadville, 1997, p. 174.)
The houses could hardly be plainer.
Many of them survive, but nearly all have been prettified, most often with paint.
Paint plus decorative trim.
Lots of trim, this is the Lace House from 1880, and the lace is original.
Tobitialle Theater.
Some have been made whimsical.
An early balloon frame building, part shop, part boarding house, with partly surviving boardwalk. 1878, elm at loomis
Here's an oddity: a very large house surviving without electricity and smack on Harrison St.
1501 Poplar St: A house from 1898 that became an Amoco gas station about 1960 and reverted to a residence sometime after 1983.
Harrison at Chestnut in 1879, when the First National Bank is still a heap of rocks. The cabin in the middle of the street belonged to Pap Wyman, a saloon keeper who refused to move. The town is said to have moved the cabin for him.
(Dan L. and Jean Harvey Griswold, The Carbonate Camp Called Leadville, 1950, following p. 50.)
The bank stood on the site of what today is a Circle K convenience store. The massive brick building behind it is Tabor's opera house; Tabor's Grand Hotel can be seen on the side of the street in the distance with its octagonal roof ornament.
When did Harrison get paved? We can track it a bit. Here's the west side of Harrison Avenue in the early days.
(Dan L. and Jean Harvey Griswold, The Carbonate Camp Called Leadville, 1951, following p. 50.)
The streetlight isn't very helpful, because Leadville had a power company by 1883. The Delaware Hotel is more diagnostic, because it opened in 1886. The massive building on the right was the Callaway Block, which burned down. The Callaway brothers later built the Delaware Hotel. The street seems as t hough it's been rolled and swept.
John McRobbie came to in Leadville early on but worked at the Chicago Square Dealing House on East Chestnut. Late in the 80s, he opened his own place in the DeMaineville Block on Harrison at 6th (demolished and replaced by a modern bank building). If those young men are any indicator, business was pretty good.
Christian J. Buys, Historic Leadville, 1997, p. 139.)
A 1913 image Tabor's Grand Hotel, by then called the Vendome, with automobiles and, hiding behind them on the left, a stagecoach that brought guests to the hotel from the railroad station.
(Christian J. Buys, Historic Leadville, 1997, p. 201.)
Here's Harrison in 1926, when it was graded but unpaved.
(Christian J. Buys, Historic Leadville, 1997, p. 233.(
At last: concrete by the 1930s
(Christian J. Buys, Historic Leadville, 1997. p. 230.)
A bit of Harrison at that time.
A similar image of Harrison as seen by Marion Post Wolcott in 1941. That's the Tabor Opera House on the right.
(Reproduced from the Library of Congress collection by George F. Willison in Here They Dug the Gold, 1941, p. xxix.)
The biggest building we've overlooked so far is the American National Bank, which with its decorative red sandstone opened at Harrison and 5th in 1891.
(Christian J. Buys, Historic Leadville, 1997, p. 115.)
Interior of another Leadville Bank, the Carbonate Bank in the 300 block of Harrison.
The bank today, with the adjoining Quincy Block, 1880, George King, architect.
Here they are in 1923, with the bank under its conical cap and the town's Chrismas Tree on the right. The town's population had fallen from 12,000 in 1900 to 5,000 in 1920. It would keep declining until finally stabilizing at 2,500 in 1990. The Mund sign belongs to Fred Mund, a jeweler renting space in the Howell Block.
(Christian J. Buys, Historic Leadville, 1997, p. 218.)
Not much has changed except the paint job.
The businesses have changed, of course. "Guided Fishing," for example. The red building was awaiting redevelopment of some sort in 2026, and the building beyond it was a coffee shop.
The variously named Iron or Fearnley Building of 1893, with the signage tamped down and paint job boosted.
The Delaware Hotell next to the firehouse general store and the Blosfelt Building (Rock Hut).
A view of Harrison Avenue from the early 1950s, with the Vendome Hotel on the right..
(Colorado Encyclopedia, https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/↗ ,"Leadville".)
Masonic Temple
Meet Arthur Van Wint Foote, an engineer who spent two years at the Adelaide Mine on Iron Hill. He left because the mine owner decided that the ongoing litigation with neighboring claims wasn't worth the trouble. The mine's manager, meanwhile, was Ferdinand van Zandt, who went on to what appeared to be a brilliant career. Things didn't work out, and while staying in Brown's Hotel in London in 1892 and getting ready for a trip to defend a Montana property, he shot and killed himself with the pistol he always kept under his pillow.There's an obit in the Engineering and Mining Journal for March 12, 1892.
Foote had a happier ending. Retired in California's Grass Valley, where for many years he had managed the North Star Mine, he was interviewed by T.E. Rickard, an engineer himself, as well as an editor. Consider this Q & A about the time Foote spent as a young man working in Deadwood for George Hearst, father of William Randolph. "Q: Was Hearst a good miner? A: His principal business was lawsuits... He himself was dirty, slovenly, and extremely vulgar." Rickard adds a note: "The interview shows that he is direct and outspoken, eschewing periphrasis.... He could look any man in the face, and, if necessary, tell him to go to hell, but he did not say it too often, and he never said it without cause."
(T.E. Rickard, Interviews with Mining Engineers, 1927, pp. 171-189.)
Foote's wife, Mary Hallock Foote, is better known today than her husband. A prominent artist and writer in her lifetime, she has found a second life through the inadvertent courtesy of Wallace Stegner, parts of whose Pulitzer-winning novel Angle of Repose (1971) were swiped from her reminiscences.
She was the woman who, coming over Mosquito Pass in a wagon, feared that she would die. She didn't. Her husband, Arthur, then bought one of the town lots of the Stevens and Leiter placer claim and built a one-room log cabin there alongside a ditch.
They had no neighbors that first year, though the site now is the very proper 216 West Eighth. "Quick! The cow is in the well." That's what Mary said to the surprise of one visitor. He understood her better a moment later when "we saw in a shallow ditch which ran past the cabin, a contented, lazy cow calmly chewing her cud.... When Mr. Foote yelled, the animal switched her tail and lumbered off.... 'There,' said Mrs. Foote, 'she'll be safe for another hour. That ditch is our well, our water supply from the hills. That wretched cow sneaks in there ten times a day....'"
Mary wrote: "The man [husband Arthur] broiled steak and made coffee ... before breakfast: he was a much better cook than his wife and he had the hardy unspoiled habits of a good camp mate. He leapt out half-dressed in the cold austere mornings and filled his pails with snow water from the ditch...We dined at the Clarendon with the mob... We smiled at each other and consumed our food."
Helen Hunt Jackson, who would go on to write the once-famous novel Ramona, visited and told Mary to leave Leadville because "grass would not grow there and cats could not live.... We smiled: we were not cats--nor grass, as yet!... Leadville agreed with us, we said."
(Mary Hallock Foote, A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West, edited by Rodman W. Paul, 1972. Chapter 14 deals with her two years (minus a winter) in Leadwood.)
The Footes created a bedroom by hanging a curtain. The log walls were covered with paper, including colorful geological maps. Arthur had an office in town, while "I went on with my little job--those engravers' blocks to cover with drawings." It wasn't so little. She worked for major publishers, and at times during her life with Arthur she was the breadwinner.
Here in Leadville, she wrote, "the man [husband Arthur] broiled steak and made coffee ... before breakfast: he was a much better cook than his wife and he had the hardy unspoiled habits of a good camp mate. He leapt out half-dressed in the cold austere mornings and filled his pails with snow water from the ditch...We dined at the Clarendon with the mob... We smiled at each other and consumed our food."
Helen Hunt Jackson, who would go on to write the once-famous novel Ramona, visited and told Mary to leave Leadville because "grass would not grow there and cats could not live.... We smiled: we were not cats--nor grass, as yet!... Leadville agreed with us, we said.
(Mary Hallock Foote, A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West, edited by Rodman W. Paul, 1972. Chapter 14 deals with her two years (minus a winter) in Leadville. The drawing, by Hallock, is reproduced at p. 176. The quotation about the cow in the ditch comes from Thomas Donaldson, Idaho of Yesterday, 1941, p. 360.)
"For company he [husband Arthur] brought to the cabin such men as he saw fit... and in that odd little room, in a place which, the year before, had been nowhere, we had guests who would have been distinguished anywhere.... 'What do you do with all those people,' my mother asked, in one of her letters, 'when you have only five chairs!' Five were more than enough... the others were just from campfire seats themselves and had no quarrel with the floor."
"We reached the height of our preposterous social brilliance that summer in Leadville when Clarence King arrived from Washington." He offered Arthur a job, but the couple said no, because the job would have kept them apart too much.
Geologist Sam Emmons came by, with "his tall, conspicuous figure in these beautiful white buckskins... He was always good tempered, always imperturbable; he prowled about all summer doing important things silently... He was as fond of people as he was of rocks, which is saying much for an eminent geologist.... When he rode he was one with his horse and went cogitating along, rolling cigarettes and lighting them with the flint and steel in a little silver box that he always carried. His whole attitude towards Leadville and the life there was so different from the feverish states of mind around us... yet it pleased him to know that his big book was used as a guide by... the practical miners consulting it."
(Photo from https://www.illustrationhistory.org/artists/mary-hallock-foote↗↗)↗↗
It's now a community center. Please! No drooling.
Here are the Footes late in life at the house in California's Grass Valley where they lived while and after Foote managed the North Star Mine. The North Star House was designed by Julia Morgan, the first women licensed to be an architect in California. It was built in 1904, the year she got that license.
Here's the front side. Eleven thousand square feet for two people. It's an awful lot of space, but I think I could manage, and I know for a fact that my wife could.
extras...
1882. California Creek is still on the right and Harrison Avenue marches off to the left, where a couple of trains approach a graceful curve. The town itself sticks to its Jeffersonian grid, even though the town is on a slope and the grid is oriented to the compass points, so that there isn't a level street anywhere in town. Before the town lots were built up, people improvised diagonal footpaths, so they could stay more or less on the level.
Main (now Third Street) at Harrison.
The tallest building is the Annunciation Catholic Church on Poplar Street, one block east of Harrison.
The Sawatch Mountains rise beyond the valley of the Arkansas River, while Leadville has more smelters than steeples. The steeple just right of the fold belongs to that same Annunciation Catholic Church, completed in 1881 on Poplar, a block east of Harrison. The photo is from about 1890.
(Dan Abbot, Colorado Midland Railway, 1989, p. 16-17.)
Leadville had lots of fraternal organizations, like this Masonic Temple at Harrison at 7th. Built in 1910.
(Christian J. Buys, Historic Leadville, 1997, p. 185.)
Let's try a panoramic view, courtesy of USGS Professional Paper 148, plate 1. You can't see anything? Fine. We'll take a few closeups.
We're starting at the left edge and looking toward the northwest.. The cupola belongs to the Carbonate Hill Schoolhouse (East 2nd at North Toledo), which was ready for students in late 1881. See that bright building at the right edge?
Here it is on the left. It's the Old Knights of Columbus Building at 140 East Fifth. The building with the pyramidal tower is the County Courthouse, which we saw a moment ago in a winter scene. See that pile of sand at the right?
Here it is on the left. It came from the mine just below the center of the picture. The spire belongs to the Annunciation Catholic Church.
The spire is at the upper left, but the headrig of the Old Alice Mine stands smack in the middle of a residential neighborhood.