What came before us
Mel McFarland died in September. I found 604 of his columns and indexed every one. Eight digs, from the capital that got away to the forgotten cemetery.
Mel McFarland died on September 21. He was 81. He grew up over here, taught art and drafting for twenty years, spent summers as a conductor on the cog railway, and kept a real working caboose in his backyard for forty years as a writing room. Half the town knew him as the Caboose Guy. For fifteen of those years he wrote a column in the Pioneer called Cobweb Corners about whatever was under the sidewalk: the glass works that bottled Manitou water with two hundred men until the furnace fell in at midnight in 1892, the territorial capital we held for one session and lost to Denver (by one account for being too rowdy, which, fair), the cemetery on the mesa where the stones came out in the 1940s and the graves didn't. I found 604 of those columns and indexed every one. The one-line summaries there are software drafts until a person checks them. I'm checking five a week, so yes, that's going to take a while. Who writes the Westside's past now that Mel's gone is a real question, and the honest answer is us, badly at first and then better, and by us I mean you too.
So here's what I want, and I want all of it: how people first lived here and how it went from nothing to twenty-seven saloons and back, the funny stuff and the shootouts, the jail time for crimes that make us laugh and the ones that make us cry, the mysteries and the murders (there's at least one shooting on the record already, so, yes). What we used to do and stopped. What was here and isn't. What was going to be here and never was. The digs I can't do alone are the ones in your family, your church, your block, the shoebox under the bed with the photos nobody labeled, so send them, and send the photo too. Especially the photo.
What we found first:
- The capital that got away. Colorado City was founded in August 1859 to outfit gold seekers, was the county seat by 1861, and held the territorial capital just long enough to lose it to Denver. One account says the town was deemed too rowdy.
- Zero to four thousand. Mel has the town past 2,000 by 1890; the 1892 fire-insurance map (the Sanborn) writes 2,000 on its own cover, and the 1902 sheet writes 4,000. The town voted itself dry in 1913, lost the saloon money, and voted to be annexed by Colorado Springs in April 1917.
- Four saloons to twenty-seven. By the Pioneer's 2009 count (a feature, not one of Mel's columns): four in 1884, twenty-three by 1888, twenty-seven in 1902 plus thirty-some gambling halls, on a main street that also had the churches.
- Laura Bell McDaniel. From the Pioneer's 2011 profile, not the index: queen of the tenderloin; her last house was the Tribley House in the 2600 block of West Cucharras. She married Tom McDaniel in April 1887 in Salida; a month later he shot a man five times while she watched, and was acquitted. She divorced him in 1893. Accused in November 1917 of stealing liquor and acquitted; the historian who wrote her up thinks it was a set-up. Died in a car crash in January 1918. The elk were O'Byrne's by Mel's column (bought in Aspen in 1888); a 2006 Pioneer piece has her riding beside him in the carriage.
- The Glass Works. Full production in 1889 with 200 men on the south edge of town, bottling Manitou water. The furnace top collapsed just after midnight on September 9, 1892. Wheeler promised to rebuild; the Silver Panic of 1893 and the lost customers finished it. One of Mel's columns says it closed in 1895, another says by 1900; one puts a fire in 1893 as well.
- The Midland shops. The Colorado Midland started here in 1886 and quit in 1918; the Midland Terminal ran the line to Divide until it was scrapped in 1949. Hundreds of men in the shops at the peak, under a hundred by 1925, about fifty by 1948; the office burned in 1953. The fourteen-stall roundhouse is the one that lived: Van Briggle pottery, then the shops you walk through now.
- The mills. The Colorado-Philadelphia came first, in 1894 by one of Mel's columns and about 1897 by another, near 31st and U.S. 24. Golden Cycle took over the Telluride mill in 1906, rebuilt it with cyanide after a 1907 fire, and ran it until 1949; the smokestack is still there.
- The forgotten cemetery. Colorado City's Pioneer cemetery, on the mesa, used from about 1860 to 1917. Not every burial was moved; the stones came out in the 1940s and it became Pioneer Park in the 1950s. Graves were mapped with metal detectors in the 1970s, a project Mel joined, and a cast-iron coffin may still be there. Who is in it is still the question.