Ashcroft, Colorado: The Silver Camp Where Everyone Came Back Crazy

Horace Tabor, the silver king of Leadville, made a joke of the place. "I'm afraid to go and look at this big vein," he told The Denver Tribune in September 1881, speaking of the Tam O'Shanter. "Everybody who's been up there has come back crazy. I think it's safer to stay here, if I want to keep my head." He paid $100,000 for a half interest in the mine.

01Crazy Culver and the Forks of Castle Creek

In the spring of 1880 Charles B. Culver and William F. Coxhead came over from Leadville to prospect the forks. They filed claims in May, and Coxhead went back to Leadville to spread the news. By the time he returned, 23 more prospectors had joined his partner, a man known as "Crazy Culver." They called their camp Castle Forks City.

The selling started before the digging had proved much. In August 1880 the townsite company offered 864 lots at $5 apiece, and the 97 members of the Miners' Protective Association got first pick. By 1882 a lot could bring $400. Among the promoters who laid out the streets was T. E. Ashcraft, who bought Coxhead's share in 1881 and lent the town a version of his name. The census taker of 1880 wrote it "Ashcraft." The post office, whose first postmaster was John R. Nelson, used "Ashcroft" from August 1880, and that spelling stuck. Looking back on those first seasons, History Colorado's archivists judged that early development "depended more on promotion than on a profitable mining enterprise." Some of the rock, all the same, assayed as high as 12,613 ounces of silver to the ton.

02Over Taylor Pass

For the first years the only way into Ashcroft was over Taylor Pass. Wagons had to stop at the cliffs, where they were taken apart, raised or lowered over 40-foot drops, and put back together. The Carson Brothers Stage Line started service in 1881 and charged $2 to Buena Vista.

B. Clark Wheeler, a promoter and newspaperman, made the mountains pay. He oversaw a major stretch of the trail from Taylor Park into Ashcroft and built a toll wagon road over Independence Pass, at 25 cents a horse and 50 cents a wagon. His real-estate ads in the Ashcroft Herald and The Aspen Times offered land "within a gunshot of Aspen." His father-in-law and law partner, Davis H. Waite, started the Ashcroft Journal. By May 1882 it was listing mining claims and boasting of a phenomenal camp. Waite later served as governor of Colorado, from 1893 to 1895.

At its height the town held about two thousand people. It had six hotels and twenty saloons, a female faro player, and a suburb called Hunley's Addition. In 1882 Ashcroft built a three-cell jail. Its prisoners went down to Aspen for court.

03What Happened to Ashcroft?

Tabor bought into the Montezuma as well as the Tam O'Shanter, and in town he built a house hung with gold wallpaper. In 1883 he and Baby Doe treated Ashcroft to a banquet, a ball and free drinks at every saloon. He had his Montezuma ore packed by mule to the railhead at Crested Butte, and a new wagon road went over Pearl Pass to the same railhead.

Residents were already leaving that year. By 1884 the veins had proved smaller and poorer than anyone expected, and by 1885 about a hundred people remained, with $5.60 in the city treasury. Many moved to Aspen and took their cabins with them. Over about five years, snowslides took out boardinghouses, tram towers and outbuildings.

In 1887 seventy people were left. That year and the next, the Denver & Rio Grande and the Colorado Midland built into Aspen, and neither came up Castle Creek. The silver crash of 1893 struck next. By 1900 Ashcroft counted 75 residents, three of them women.

In 1906 a New York syndicate bought the town. That year a tramp miner named Carroll H. Coberly came up to help clear an ice-blocked tunnel at the Montezuma. Writing in The Colorado Magazine in 1960, he recalled that an inexperienced manager had built the mill at "the wrong place."

04The Last Mayor and the Ski Troops

By the 1930s Ashcroft belonged to a few old bachelors who gathered at Dan MacArthur's saloon and, every so often, held elections among themselves for mayor and justice of the peace. The last of them was Jack Leahy, a pioneer of 1878 and a poet, who had appointed himself mayor. He died in 1939.

Before then he sold the townsite to the partners behind the Highland Bavarian Lodge: Ted Ryan, Billy Fiske, Tom Flynn and the Swiss avalanche expert Andre Roch. Roch preferred Ashcroft, and the others adopted his recommendations. The lodge, built in 1936, folded the old camp into one of Colorado's earliest ski resorts. Flynn arranged Reconstruction Finance Corporation money, and in 1941 he went to the state legislature for $650,000 in bonds to build two lifts.

Ryan, who had suffered a serious skiing injury, offered Ashcroft to the 10th Mountain Division. In the summer of 1942 the ski troops trained there under an Army lease of one dollar a year. Fiske was killed in combat, and Flynn died in 1947. Ryan was still hoping for a resort into the 1960s.

Stuart and Isabel Mace came later, running the Toklat lodge and a team of huskies. When the dogs were cast in the television series Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, Ashcroft's buildings got false fronts so they could pass for a Canadian town. Stuart built the Sunnegga gift-shop cabin in 1957. He died in 1993, and Isabel in 2006.

05What Remains of Ashcroft Today

Several of the original buildings survive. Ramona Markalunas began leading the Aspen Historical Society's work at Ashcroft in 1974, and on May 12, 1975, the town was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Society still operates the site, which is open year-round, with interpretive tours in summer. It lies about ten miles south of Aspen on paved Castle Creek Road. In winter that road serves as a cross-country ski and snowshoe route.