Review by Ed Quillen
History – May 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
Mining, Mayhem and Other Carbonate Excitements – Tales from a Silver Camp Called Leadville
by Roger Pretti
Published in 2003 by the Vail Daily
ISBN 0-9746164-0-0
SOME YEARS AGO, Leadville writer Steve Voynick observed that whether the big mine was running or not, the “Rumor Mill” at Climax never shut down. Much the same might be said of Lake County in general: There may not be any ore in the ground, but there’s always more Leadville Lore to be mined.
Mining, Mayhem and Other Carbonate Excitements is a brief (78 pages) collection from that rich vein of lore, broken into about two dozen chapters that mostly focus on the most notorious aspects of Leadville’s past: prostitution, gambling, murder, and the many ways that mines kill miners.
Some of it was new to me. I had long known that John Henry “Doc” Holliday, the tubercular dentist of Tombstone and OK Corral fame, had passed through Leadville en route to his deathbed in Glenwood Springs. And I presumed that he played a few hands of cards in Leadville, since he was a professional gambler.
But I had no idea that Holliday lived there for more than two years (1882-85), and that he was involved in at least one gunfight, which led to his arrest on assault charges, and acquittal on grounds of self-defense.
Other Leadville characters included here aren’t nearly as notorious, but they may be even more interesting. Elizabeth Brown, for instance, was “a State Street prostitute with a reputation of being a bad woman when she was drunk.” She also had a reputation for consorting with Satan, which gave her the nickname “Voodoo Queen” and the alleged ability to cast spells on men — James Palmer kept seeing red monkeys dancing in the bottom of his whiskey glass.
Leadville’s geography also gets some explanation. This is as good an account of the building and operation of Yak Tunnel as I’ve ever read, and there are several chapters which could serve as a guidebook for the Mineral Belt Trail, starting up California Gulch and coming down Evans Gulch.
These pages give the history of some of the mines, among them the Crown Point, which in 1885 was in a boundary dispute with the adjacent La Plata:
“The ore from both properties was good, and the mines were under constant guard to prevent thefts. To keep each other honest, the owners of both mines put up $1,000 in case someone was caught trespassing. Distrust and threats continued until the day the Prince of Darkness showed up to settle matters.
“The La Plata miners were wrong, and they knew it, when they broke through into one of the Crown Point drifts and decided to smoke the opposing miners out of the ground. They filled several old boots with sulfur and gunpowder, put them on the Crown Point side and fired them up. The Crown Point workers thought they had broken through the gates of hell as the drifts filled with sulfurous fumes. All workers were hoisted to the surface except for two, who remained below to guard the mine. At a depth of 400 feet, the pair ‘inhaled the breath of Pluto,’ said a local newspaper, and waited for the appearance of Lucifer himself. They said they never met him as they hugged the ground to avoid breathing the vapors, but described what they thought was the ‘region of the Plutonian shore.’ … Both men recovered, and the La Plata paid the fine.”
The writing is smooth, and the book’s chaste typography makes it quite readable. Not every chapter has a picture, but many do, and they complement the text.
I encountered a few errors. It has a Leadville in a Carbonate County in 1873. There was no Leadville in 1873; it wasn’t incorporated until 1878. Then as now it was in Lake County; Carbonate County existed for only a few days in 1879. Nor did the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fé Railroad ever get within two miles of the site of Leadville; Cañon City was the closest it came.
Granted, those are quibbles. But they’re part of why you wouldn’t want to use this for a reference book. It also lacks an index and any list of source material.
–Ed Quillen
