A town of former glory and undying hope

CREEDE • At age 66, Paul Dunkel walks with a cane, breathes with an oxygen tank and is partially deaf, battle scars he attributes to the 22 years he spent in the silver mines.

Still, he has no regrets, mostly because of the camaraderie he experienced with his fellow miners.

"If I was a young man and had it to do over again, I'd go back," said Dunkel, while working as a mining museum guide here. "I wouldn't trade the experience with the people to be CEO of Wal-Mart. People are more important to me than money."

Such is the mixed blessing of mining in this historic town in the San Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado. Though water from the mines pollutes their creeks, and though the area was left in economic ruin when the last mining company shut down 25 years ago, Creede remains inexorably linked with mining.

At its 1890s peak, 10,000 miners lived here. Dozens of mines - 29 named, many others not, including some of the best-preserved mine buildings anywhere in the West - dot the hills north of town. From 1889 to 1985, the mines produced about 85 million ounces of silver, 155,000 ounces of gold, 5,480 tons of copper, 160,000 tons of lead and 50,000 tons of zinc.

When representatives from mining company Rio Grande Silver recently held a public meeting to discuss plans to renew silver exploration here, literally half the town - 200 people - showed up to applaud them.

"Anything that happens to Creede is a good idea. We almost died in the ‘80s," said Jan Thompson, owner of JThompson Gallery in Creede. "If the mining comes back, that will just add to it. The tourists will still come."

Outside the gallery, on a recent summer afternoon, Main Street was thronged with visitors. Its nationally-acclaimed Creede Repertory Theatre and dozen art galleries, as well as camping, hunting, hiking, fishing and rafting in the area, have all helped Creede develop into a popular vacation site.

Creede's mining boom began in 1889, when prospector Nicholas Creede struck silver, and, on seeing how rich it was, proclaimed, "holy Moses!" - which became the name of his mine.

Word spread quickly. Bat Masterson opened a saloon. Calamity Jane played poker here. Robert Ford, who killed Jesse James, was gunned down and buried here.

Though the silver panic of 1893 marked the end of the boom, mining remained the chief employer until 1985, when Homestake Mining Co. shut down the Bulldog Mine, putting Creede's last 90 miners out of work.

"My last thought is that we here at Homestake do have faith in this property and we are coming back," general manager Tom Robertson said, in the Mineral County Miner newspaper, on announcing the mine's closure.

They never did, and Creede lost nearly half its 610 residents. Some feared it would become a ghost town.

Creede's lifeline was the Creede Repertory Theatre, which opened in 1966, garnered a national reputation and became, in 1985, the town's biggest summer employer.

The mines, most of them crumbling ruins perched precariously on mountainsides, remain one of the area's biggest tourist draws.

The first time Jack Morris saw the Last Chance Mine, high above Creede, he was struck by the majesty of the old buildings, and the unpreserved history of what occurred there.

So the legend goes, two prospectors were combing the hillside in 1891 when their burros wandered off. Theodore Renniger, a prospector down to his last coins, found them on a cliff side, and when they wouldn't budge, he sat down and began to chip away at rocks, frustrated. He struck silver, and founded the Last Chance Mine, which became one of Creede's richest, operating until the 1970s.

The story of how Morris, a truck driver who lives in Cañon City, came to own the mine, is also worthy of legend. During a 1998 trip, he spoke to the mine's owner, a descendant of the original miners. He had already worked up in his mind a lofty plan to restore the mine and open it to visitors for free, but he never imagined he could afford it.

After hearing his plan, the owner, Nancy Granger Schallen, offered to sell the mine to him for just $2,900.

"My friends, my neighbors, when I told them I'd bought a mine in Colorado and I planned to go live in it, they thought I was nuts," said Morris, who was living in Missouri at the time. "I look across these mountains and I think, if this is insanity, I'll take it."

He has spent the better part of a decade restoring the buildings himself, and today opens Last Chance to tourists. They can dig for minerals, stay overnight for no charge, and he hopes to someday let them tour underground.

"Many, many people come to Colorado for what we offer in ghost towns and mining camps," Morris said. "The mining industry was instrumental in opening up this whole region and making it grow and flourish and the old mining industry is what keeps a lot of these towns open today."

Visitors who take the well-traveled Bachelor Loop road above Creede are enthralled by the old buildings.

"Can you imagine coming up here on horseback? Pulling a wagon?" said Ron Hanna, of Arvada, visiting the Last Chance Mine. "We don't appreciate what they did years ago."

It's a different story in winter. With no skiing to bring in tourists, the town becomes desolate, and only a handful of businesses stay open.

Charles Muerhoff, project manager for Rio Grande Silver Inc., a subsidiary of Idaho-based Hecla Mining, set up shop here this spring. Much of his time has been spent "narrowing expectations."

"I don't want to dampen anybody's optimism, but one of my roles here is to make them aware of the reality of an exploration project," Muerhoff said. "The rewards are great but disappointments come frequently."

The price of silver is around $18 an ounce - up from about $5 when the Bulldog Mine closed. The company will spend the next two or three years drilling, and, depending on what it finds, could open a new mine. The company has mineral rights to 21 square miles, including most of the former mining district around Creede.

Meanwhile, Dunkel, the retired miner and museum guide, will continue to spend his summers in Creede.

He wants people to know about the mines, so that this part of history is never lost.

"I'm afraid nobody will know what we did here and why we done it," Dunkel said.

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