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St. Elmo

St. Elmo was originally settled in 1878 and was made official in 1880 when gold and silver began to bring many people to the area. Though it was first called Forest City, the small town's name was changed when the post office objected because there were too many towns with the same name. The new name was derived by Griffith Evans, one of the founders, who was reading a romantic nineteenth-century novel by the same name.

The town was laid out in six feet of snow and provided for the miners working in the nearby mines. Beginning with a high moral character, the settlement went the way of other booming mining towns, reaching a population of more than 2000 and taking on all the trappings of a single male population with saloons, dance halls, and bawdy houses. When the Alpine tunnel was under construction, St. Elmo became the scene of raunchy Saturday night sprees. It'srrently home to eight residents who just won't let the party die.

In 1881 it became a station on the Denver, South Park and Pacific Railroad line where the tracks continued through Romley, Hancock and through the historic Alpine Tunnel. The settlement was considered a main source of supplies arriving by train for the area settlers and eventually included several merchandise stores, three hotels, five restaurants, two sawmills and a weekly newspaper called the Mountaineer. The miners worked at several mines throughout the area that were rich in silver, gold, copper and iron. The principal mines were the Murphy, the Theresse C., the Molly and the Pioneer. The Murphy Mine, situated high upon the mountain, 2000 feet above the railroad, shipped as much as 50-75 tons of ore per day to the smelters at Alpine. Altogether, there were over 150 patented mine claims in the immediate area.

In 1881 Anton Stark, a cattleman brought a herd to the railroad and was so taken with the town that he and his family quickly took up residence. Anton became a section boss for one of the local mines and his wife, Anna, ran a general store and the Home Comfort Hotel, which later became home to the post office and telegraph office. Anton and Anna raised three children - Tony, Roy and Annabelle, who worked in the hotel and the store. The hotel was said to have been the cleanest in town, the meals the best, and the supplies at the store more plentiful than the other establishments.

The Stark family were part of Saint Elmo's elite, a high-class group that attended church regularly. Anna was said to have been a humorless woman who severely controlled the children, believing that they were better than the other townsfolk - miners, railroad men, prostitutes and hard women. The children were rarely allowed to leave home, forbidden to attend local dances or social activities and had only each other for company. In 1890 a fire destroyed the business section and the town was never entirely rebuilt.

The survival of the town was largely due to the Stark family and their descendents, who remained the sole year-round residents for many years. According to local legend, perhaps at least one of them, Annabelle Stark, still keeps a ghostly watch over the town. A skier was said to have seen a very attractive woman in a white dress framed in the second story window of the old hotel. The owner was away on vacation, so who could it have been? The young woman's eyes were focused on something in the distance and when the skier followed her gaze, she saw a group of snow mobilers who were riding through the street. The skier flagged down the group, informing them that snowmobiling was illegal in St. Elmo. The group apologized and rode away. When the skier looked back at the hotel, the woman nodded to her, then turned away and vanished. The legend of Annabelle's ghost lives on with the part-time residents of St. Elmo, believing that she continues to protect her property from vandals or trespassers.

Trinidad

In 1860, the United States Army established Fort Wise on the Mountain Branch. The next year saw the Postal Service change the mail route from the Cimarron Cutoff to the Mountain Branch. That same year saw traders from New Mexico bringing supplies over Raton Pass to feed the fledgling city of Denver. Impressed with the fertile valley of the Purgatoire, 12 families from Mora, New Mexico followed Felipe and Dolores Baca and settled here to begin the settlement that became Trinidad. The Bacas became prominent in town as farmers, ranchers, merchants, and civic leaders. Most of the other families that came with them settled up and down the Purgatoire Valley. From its' founding in 1862, Trinidad grew to be 560 citizens in 1870, 2,226 citizens in 1880.

1862 also saw the construction of Fort Francisco in what is now La Veta, in the heart of the "Valley of the Cucharas." The builder of the Fort, John Francisco, was a former suttler with the US Army at Fort Garland in the San Luis Valley. He built the Fort on the main trail leading from the Mountain Branch to the San Luis Valley. Within a couple of years the Fort was the center of a bustling community of farmers and ranchers.

In 1865, former mountain man Richens Lacy "Uncle Dick" Wootton and his partner, George C. McBride, made an agreement with Lucien Maxwell to build a toll road through Raton Pass. They blasted rock, removed road debris and built bridges for months, finally crossing the 27 mile ordeal with a passable road. Then they built a toll booth and charged $1.50 per wagon, 25 cents per horseman and 5 cents per animal from everyone wishing to pass, except Native Americans travelled free. As easy as the toll road made it, Raton Pass was still not a place for the inexperienced. The banks of the road were littered with broken parts of wagons that didn't make it. And sometimes it took up to seven days to complete the crossing.

Westward advancing rail lines in the 1860's and 1870's brought nearly all Trail traffic to the Mountain Branch. Adobe buildings and a few log structures lined Main and Commercial Streets. The town suffered a few raids from the Utes and the chronic lawlessness of a frontier town but quickly matured into a major center of commerce and agriculture for southern Colorado.

1867 saw the Christmas Day War happen in Trinidad. The weather was very warm for that time of year and the men, having nothing to do after church was over, were going from bar to bar and generally causing a ruckus in town. One particularly obnoxious Anglo was challenging everyone to a boxing or wrestling match. A Hispanic fellow took him up on the offer and immediately pinned the man. Words were exchanged and rocks were thrown. Then Frank Blue, a stagecoach driver for Barlow-Sanderson, walked out of a bar and straight into a thrown rock. He pulled his gun and shot the Hispanic challenger dead. Blue was taken into custody by Sheriff Juan Gutierrez and placed in a vacant building, guarded by 6 Hispanics and 6 Anglos. A few days later he was aided in an escape and his rescuers began firing on every Hispanic in sight. Fire was returned and every Anglo on the street rushed to hole up in P.B. Sherman's hotel on West Main at Beech Street. The sheriff and hundreds of Hispanics took up positions outside the hotel. Then 200 Utes rode into town and offered to assist the sheriff in removing the Anglos from the hotel. The sheriff politely refused so the Utes moved to a hilltop and watched from above. Blue and three companions escaped from the hotel in the middle of the night, taking most of the Anglos ammunition with them. The next morning a truce was called and the rest of the Anglos were released. Dr. Michael Beshoar took no sides and treated the wounded from both sides. In his opinion "it was a case of bad booze and bad blood."

However, word had been sent to Fort Lyon and Fort Reynolds that a war was going on in Trinidad and military forces were needed to restore peace and order. Martial law was declared and troops were dispatched. En route, the temperature dropped to 26 below zero in a raging blizzard. Acting Governor Frank Hall made a trip to Trinidad to get an eye-witness account of the affair and commented that "Trinidad has the most frontier style of living in the whole of Colorado Territory."

In 1870, John Hough, his wife Mary, and their two daughters moved to Trinidad from the Trail town of Boggsville. His mercantile firm, Prowers & Hough, boasted of carrying the "Largest and best selected Stock of Dry Goods, Groceries, Tobaccos, and Liqnors (sic), in Colorado Territory." Workers built the family a two story adobe house, using Hispanic construction techniques and English design.

Gold was discovered in the Spanish Peaks area in the early 1870's. It wasn't a big rush and it petered out quickly but by 1876 there were between 50 and 60 mine shafts operating on the twin peaks. At least one was owned and operated by one of Abraham Lincoln's sons. Trinidad was officially incorporated in 1876, just a few months before Colorado became a state. It was already evolving from a small adobe village into a Victorian jewel. That year about 15,000 tons of freight passed over Uncle Dick's toll road.

On any given day, up to 500 head of wagon train oxen would be staked out around town, grazing and resting for the journey over Raton Pass. 10,000 sheep (and their shepherds) would spend the day crossing the Purgatoire River in the middle of town. The red light district (on West Main) did a booming business with all the cowboys and freightmen passing through. In 1878, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad arrived in Trinidad. The Columbian Hotel, on the corner of Main and Commercial in Trinidad, was built in 1879. In 1882, merchant, banker and cattle baron Frank Bloom and his wife Sarah built the Victorian jewel in Trinidad that we now know as the Bloom Mansion.

Bat Masterson was Town Marshall for a year before moving further into Colorado's backcountry. While he was here, though, the Earps and Doc Holliday came into Trinidad, straight from the shootout at the OK Corral. They all holed up for a couple of days with Masterson and sorted out what they needed to do with themselves. The Earps were on their ways pretty quick but Doc had a problem: Arizona wanted to extradite him for trial in Tombstone. So Bat arrested him on a trumped up charge and made a deal with the local judge to never let it come to trial. Arizona couldn't extradite him while this charge was hanging in the air so Doc lived a free life trying the "Colorado Cure" until his tuberculosis killed him later in Steamboat Springs.

Railroads of Colorado: Your Guide to Colorado's Historic Trains and Railway Sites Colorado is a mecca for the restoration and operation of historic railroads, attracting visitors and enthusiasts each year. Railroads of Colorado explores the fascination these railways inspire and transports readers back a century, providing the history, the engineering, and the men who built and ran them. 185 photos.

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