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Perched on the side of Battle Mountain at
nearly 10,000 feet elevation is Victor,
Colorado,
a village steeped in history. Filled with vintage buildings and gold
mining structures, this semi-ghost town is one of the most preserved
mining camps in
Colorado.
Before the town was even officially
platted in 1893 it had already become known as the City of Mines
because the largest and richest gold mines of the
Cripple Creek Mining District were located on Battle Mountain just
above the camp.
The
Cripple Creek gold rush began when cowboy and part-time
prospector, Bob Womack, found gold on his cattle ranch in 1890. The
ranch, bisected by a small stream called
Cripple Creek, would be just the first of many locations in the
Cripple Creek Mining District to be filled with rich veins of gold
ore. When Womack first found the rich vein, there were less than two
dozen people living in the four by six mile long area that would be
called home to more than 50,000 people in less than a decade.
When word of Womack’s
find got out, the area was soon crawling with prospectors seeking out
their own fortunes in the remote area on the southwestern side of
Pikes Peak. Literally overnight, the town of
Cripple Creek was born, along with almost a dozen other mining
camps including Victor , Goldfield, Elkton, Altman, Independence,
Anaconda, Gillette, Cameron, Beaver Park, Arequa and Lawrence.
The first gold was
discovered in Victor in 1891 by Winfield Scott Stratton who soon began
the Independence Mine. This area, too, immediately filled up with
miners. Warren Woods and his sons, Frank and Harry, soon formed the
Woods Investment Company and purchased a 136-acre site at the foot of
Battle Mountain, where they platted a town site and named it Victor ,
after an early homesteader named Victor C. Adams. Marketing their lots
as "gold mines,” the Woods sold them quickly to the many prospectors
and businessmen, who built homes, stores, hotels, and a number of
saloons, along with hundreds of mines.
In addition to the Independence Mine, other mines, including the
Portland and Ajax Mines, were doing a brisk business just north of
Victor on Battle Mountain, called the "richest hill on earth.”
And, in the very center of town the Woods
Brothers, who were excavating the foundation for the much needed Victor
Hotel in 1894, discovered a rock that was rich in ore. The Woods brothers
wasted no time in finding another lot for the hotel and began to build the
Gold Coin Mine at Diamond and Fifth Streets, which would become one of the
richest in the area, producing more than $50,000 per month in gold ore.
However, the Woods faced a problem -- that of
where to dispose of their mine waste. Undaunted, they created a dump and
the Economic Mill some 4,000 feet away in Arequa Gulch. To reach these
locations, they then built a series of tunnels beneath the streets of
Victor.
In the meantime, the Woods Brothers completed
the Victor Hotel just in time to accommodate travelers arriving on the
newly completed Florence &
Cripple Creek Railroad. The large two-story wooden frame building was
a showplace with its cone-shaped tower and enclosed balconies on its
second and third stories. The "modern” hotel even featured electricity.
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