Telluride, Colorado

Telluride sits in a box canyon at about 8,750 feet, walled on three sides by the peaks of the western San Juan Mountains, with the San Miguel River running out the open end. Prospectors began working the surrounding basins in the mid-1870s, and a camp took shape in 1878 under the name Columbia. There was already a Columbia in California, so when the post office opened on July 26, 1880, it took the name Telluride instead — a nod to the tellurium-bearing ores that carry gold and silver. The town was incorporated in 1887 and formally became Telluride that same year. Silver drove the first boom, but gold, zinc, copper, and lead all came out of the peaks above town, and by the 1890s Telluride was a hard-working, hard-living mining town at the end of a long, high wagon road into the mountains.

Two outsized stories came out of that boom. On June 24, 1889, a young Robert LeRoy Parker — soon known to the world as Butch Cassidy — and his accomplices walked into the San Miguel Valley Bank on Colorado Avenue and rode off with roughly $21,000; it was the first bank robbery of his career. Two years later, engineer Lucien L. Nunn needed cheap power for the stamp mill at his Gold King Mine and gambled on a brand-new technology. Working with George Westinghouse and using a motor built on Nikola Tesla's patents, Nunn built the Ames hydroelectric plant on the San Miguel, which went online on June 19, 1891 as one of the first systems anywhere to transmit alternating current over distance for industrial use — a direct forerunner of the AC power that would later light Niagara Falls.