Creede, Colorado

Creede sits at nearly 8,800 feet at the head of the Rio Grande valley, tucked into a narrow slot where Willow Creek cuts down through the volcanic cliffs of the San Juan Mountains. The valley had Ute travel routes and early ranchers — Kit Carson's brother-in-law Tom Boggs farmed at nearby Wagon Wheel Gap around 1840, and the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad reached the area's hot springs in 1883. Then, around 1890, prospector Nicholas C. Creede struck a rich silver vein on Willow Creek at his Holy Moses Mine, and the quiet valley exploded. Creede became the last of Colorado's great silver boomtowns, and it boomed hard: a settlement of a few hundred people swelled toward ten thousand in barely two years, spilling into a string of overnight camps with names like Jimtown, North Creede, and Bachelor as mines like the Amethyst and Commodore poured out silver.

The boom pulled in the whole Wild West at once. Bob Ford, the man who had shot Jesse James, ran a saloon in the young camp until he himself was shot dead there in June 1892 by Edward O'Kelley. Con man Soapy Smith worked the crowds, and newspaperman Cy Warman, who edited the Creede Chronicle, gave the camp its immortal line, writing that in the electric-lit, around-the-clock town "it's day all day in the day-time, and there is no night in Creede." Fire and flood tore through the young town in 1892, and Creede incorporated that same June. In 1893 it won the county seat of the brand-new Mineral County — the story goes that residents fetched the official records by wagon under cover of night. When the Silver Panic of 1893 crushed silver prices, most Colorado camps died; Creede hung on by mining lead and zinc alongside the silver.