Cripple Creek, Colorado May 14, 2020.On this warm spring day, Colorado Highway 67–the twisty two-lane mountain road that winds between Divide and Cripple Creek–is deserted, except for a couple of cyclists. It reminds us of the days, 30 years ago, before casino gambling revived the historic mining town of Cripple Creek, bringing new life and prosperity to the long-moribund city.
The 2020 pandemic has closed casinos and visitor attractions throughout Colorado, and Cripple Creek has been especially hard-hit. The historic buildings along Bennett Avenue, many repurposed as casinos, are all shuttered. The bars, hotels and restaurants are also closed, and no pedestrians enjoy the crisp mountain morning.
Once more, Cripple Creek is a ghost town. And that’s strangely fitting since we’re here to commune with the friendly ghosts of Cripple Creek.
We were inspired to do so after visiting the St. Nicholas Hotel, a beautiful 1898 building that originally served as a charitable hospital for the miners, prospectors, bunco artists, gamblers and entertainers who flooded the town in the 1890’s. Transformed into a beautiful boutique hotel, the St. Nicholas links the cheerful present with the rip-roaring past. Opening the curtains on a fresh mountain morning, you wonder about the lives and dreams of the men and women who looked out these windows so many years ago.
A mile or so west of the city on Teller County Road 1, we pass through open iron gates, park the car, get out and stretch. We’ve come to visit John, Kitty and Mabel Barbee, three remarkable people who are interred in Cripple Creek’s historic Mt. Pisgah Cemetery.
As its name implies, the cemetery isn’t a level burial ground, but steep and hilly. At 10,000 feet above sea level, scrambling through it in search of three graves among 1,799 can be a little challenging.
The cemetery dates from 1892, the same year that the city was incorporated and two years after gold was discovered in the ranchlands west of Pikes Peak. The last great gold rush in the continental United States transformed a quiet mountain valley into a roaring boomtown that grew, prospered, burnt to the ground in 1896 and was completely rebuilt in a few months. More than 20,000 people lived in the mining district at the height of the boom. In its day, Cripple Creek was as exciting, alive, dangerous and romantic as any city in America. Most of those adventurous souls who came to the Creek hoped to leave with a fortune, but few did.
Johnson “Jonce” Barbee had run away from his Missouri home at 17 in 1860 to join the Confederate army. Disillusioned and restless at war’s end, he headed west and took up prospecting.He spent time in Virginia City before settling in the southern Utah town of Silver Reef, where he made a modest strike, met and married Kitty Appleby, and built a fine little house. They stayed ten yearsafter the mine failed andone of their two daughters died, and headed for Cripple Creek to rebuild their lives. After staying with relatives in Missouri for several months, Kitty and 8-year-old Mabel made their way to Cripple Creek.
Jonce and Mabel thrived in the rough mining camp, while Kitty was dutiful and dismayed. Devoted to her feckless husband, she let herself believe that someday he would strike it rich and they’d build a beautiful house on Wood Avenue in Colorado Springs.
Mabel loved it. Intelligent, watchful, and deeply perceptive, “Jonce’s little girl” soon became a blue-eyed beauty courted by every bachelor in town. Kitty urged her daughter to find a suitable mate, a man with a stable job and marketable skills, not a charming dreamer like her father. But Jonce encouraged “Mabes” to remain single and get a good education. He found a substantial sylvanite vein on a claim he had staked on Beacon Hill, and sold his half interest in the property for $12,000, figuring it’d be enough to support the family and send his daughter to Colorado College for four years.
In the Spring of 1904, a pneumonia epidemic struck Cripple Creek. Kitty died in late April and was buried on Mt. Pisgah on the first of May during a three-foot snowstorm. Jonce’s tuberculosis prevented him from working his claims, but he insisted that there would be enough money for her to continue at college. A year later, he was dead, there was no money and Mabel had no choice but to withdraw from college–or so she thought.
Cripple Creek wasn’t booming any more. The mines were less productive. Bitter and bloody armed strife between mine owners and miners had taken a terrible toll, but Jonce’s many friends were determined to help his little girl. Most were jobless and broke, but hundreds chipped in to pay Mabel’s tuition and expenses at the college.
Their faith in her wasn’t misplaced. After CC, she took a job teaching elementary school at Victor, married a mining engineer who died in the flu pandemic of 1918, and then had a distinguished career in higher education at Colorado College, Radcliffe, Bennington, Whitman, and U. C. Berkeley. Revisiting Cripple Creek and the graves of Kitty and Jonce in 1951, she decided to tell their story and hers. Cripple Creek Days, published in 1958, is a moving and beautiful account of those long-vanished times, brought to vivid life by Jonce’s brilliant daughter.
Father, mother, and daughter are together in death in Cripple Creek as they were in life. Their graves in Mt. Pisgah’s Masonic section, are marked by simple carved stones. We placed some wildflowers on the stones, honoring them and the thousands of intrepid dreamers who came to Cripple Creek in the 1890’s and didn’t strike it rich but, like most of us, did the best they could.
Mabel’s fitting inscription: Mabel Barbee Lee 1884-1978 Chronicler of Cripple Creek.
