Editor’s note: This is part two of a three-part series. Part one ran on April 12 and part three will run Tuesday.
In an endorsement with gracious caveats, news of the 1890 mayoral election in Aspen, Colorado’s second biggest industrial mining city, provoked opinion even in the Denver newspapers. The March 29, 1890, Aspen Daily Chronicle excerpted from the Denver News-Report a capsulation of favored candidate B. Clark Wheeler that captured the man in his time.
Republican “B. Clark Wheeler is a rustler. He is an editor, miner, prospector, public speaker, and capitalist, and has now been nominated for Mayor of Aspen. If he succeeds in running Aspen and keeps all the other irons he has in the fire from burning, he will be voted a dandy. Without reference to his politics, which are all wrong, or to his numerous eccentricities, which have frequently called forth criticism, Mr. Wheeler is a man of tremendous energy and ability. He is the pioneer of the sunset side of the mountains.”
Riding his peak, B. Clark was elected mayor in 1890 by 835 to 724 votes, the April 2 Aspen Daily Chronicle reported. Accounts said he went into saloons and dropped a $20 gold piece on the bar to buy drinks for all when running for office. In 1891, he ran for reelection — terms then were for one year — and lost, 812-612, to Democrat Dr. E. P. Rose, the April 8 Aspen Daily Chronicle reported. Consensus expected Wheeler to win reelection, but the next morning his loss surprised many. As owner of the Aspen Daily Chronicle and The Aspen Times, he attributed the loss in the Times to “vest pocket votes” — those who kept their opinion secret.
While mayor, he was the first to advocate for employee housing, proposing 50-cents-per-night boarding houses to accommodate more mine workers. He expanded the county jail chain gang and put tough Martin Sullivan in charge. He facilitated Aspen’s first hospital, The Citizens’ Hospital (by today’s Lone Pine Road), and laid the cornerstone on July 4, 1890, with completion following that September, the Aspen Times wrote in a hospital history story on Nov. 22, 1963. A dollar per month subscription extended free services for citizens.
His wife Olive Isabel, daughter of town attorney and future Colorado Gov. Davis Waite (from 1893-1895), worked with Aspen women to organize the first hospital benefit. Up until the late 1970s, the Aspen hospital benefit — featuring donated wild game, and last held at the Red Onion — was an annual deep-local event.
B. Clark cared for two young “silver tip bear cubs” (grizzlies), “Jim” and “Nelly,” in a pen next to his Times office in an empty lot at Cooper and Monarch (opposite today’s Limelight), the Aspen Daily Chronicle wrote on Nov. 5, 1891. The cubs were “captured along Frying Pan Creek.” Wheeler offered $15 ($500 today) to anyone “who would muzzle them or chloroform them and fit new larger collars around their necks.” The maturing ursine duo had become fattened by onlookers tossing food scraps. “Their necks were nearly as large as Grover Cleveland’s” — our second stoutest president at 280 pounds, undercard to President Taft who topped 340 pounds and had a jumbo bathtub installed at the White House.
Bear with the digression. First up, a “brawny Irishman put one brogan over the edge of the pen,” the story told, and “quickly retreated when the brute [Jim] untelescoped himself at the joints, uncorking ‘a wouf,’ with Nellie acting as referee.” A second contender, “Der Kid, attempted to box Jim,” but bear claws drew blood and “he scooted minus a part of the caboose of his trousers.” Last up, “Ed Clemons, their old trainer, and C. F. Webber of the Times force and all-around athlete, maneuvered for an hour and effected a change of collars, not linen, not without several scars.”
In 1893, as publisher, Wheeler’s Aspen Times printed the iconic birds-eye view poster of Aspen, detailing the streets, buildings and adjacent structures. That same year he publicly backed women’s suffrage, which passed by a statewide referendum. Colorado was second in the nation to Wyoming, which passed the same in its territorial legislature in 1869.
Little Annie and the Famous Tunnel
Leading up to his run for mayor, his attempt to follow through with a large-scale mine began in September 1889, when he managed the Little Annie, the Feb., 2, 1892, Aspen Times wrote. Wheeler’s story boasted that between those years The Aspen Consolidated Mining Company, which was his latest package of mining interests, shipped 6,061pounds of ore netting $71,048.88 from the Annie, but the vein petered out and his crew battled water draining under Little Annie basin from Aspen Mountain. He and many believed that the elusive, high-grade silver vein continued in a deeper, northerly course.
The first filing of a Little Annie claim was cited by Louis Pelow of Leadville in the Aspen Times on May 20, 1882. A July 26, 1884, Times story said owners Russell and Bourquin found “200-once mineral” in their “Famous tunnel,” and “float mineral high up in the thousands [of ounces per ton].” “Float” means random pockets of ore, which stokes the proverbial miners’ mania that you’re either three feet from a million dollars or a million feet from three dollars.
By 1886, lessees had dug a sizable shaft and put in a hoisting plant. Working a vertical shaft of ore down and up is the most dangerous type of mining, as opposed to a horizontal tunnel. By fall of 1887, the Rocky Mountain Sun reported that the Annie had struck “very fair grade ore,” while contending with “an immense flow of water.” With heavy snows, pack trains of jacks could not get in or out, nor could coal be delivered to keep the engines running.
In the summer of 1890, under B. Clark’s management, the Aspen Daily Chronicle reported 120 to 200 jacks were making trips from the Little Annie to outgoing Leadville/Denver trains in town. He then ran ads in his papers looking to purchase more Annie stock, increasing his controlling interest. He put in a road, brought in better water pumps, a better hoist to raise ore, and a concentrator to bust up the low-grade ore to ship more concentrated product.
He brought in reputed town assayer Capt. Thatcher to attest to high-grade finds, and then declared no more Annie stock would be sold for $3, but priced at $3.50 a share like the renowned Mollie Gibson on Smuggler Mountain. As his operation gained debt, while fighting water, coupled with no big silver strike yet, he looked for a solution. He attested in the Aspen Daily Chronicle, on Aug. 25, 1891, that “This Little Annie is now B. Clark Wheeler’s pet enterprise in Pitkin County and he will stay with it as he did the Bushwacker (on Smuggler) until he has the confidence of everybody.”
Belief in the pursuit of the lost silver contact under Little Annie basin had possessed miners’ minds before B. Clark. That high-grade seam had already exposed its backbone along Aspen Mountain and Smuggler in its rollercoaster path between Lenado in the north to Crested Butte in the south. Along that bonanza vector, speculative logicians such as B. Clark gambled on where to dig.
To gin up funds, he spun off yet another mining company, the Famous Tunnel and Improvement Company alongside his Little Annie Mining Company, and advertised shares for each in daily half-page newspaper ads. The Famous Tunnel, uphill of today’s Conundrum Road, accessed the Little Annie shaft and beyond from Castle Creek. He solicited other mining groups in the Annie basin to donate and drain their water problems out the Famous into Castle Creek, while contracting his tunnel access for their ore.
Wheeler publicized the Famous project in the June 27, 1892, Aspen Daily Chronicle, headlining: “FIFTY MEN WANTED,” followed by, “Gigantic Enterprise Well Under Way for Working 10,000 Feet of the Great Mother Vein of the Richmond Properties — Manager Wheeler’s Liberal Proposition.” His proposition — a characteristic masterpiece of his reputational schemes built upon a teeter-totter of pledged stock buybacks after two years, IOUs for workers’ paychecks hitched to company stock, and room-and-board chits— all rode on his promise to find the treasure trove.
His first offering of 100,000 shares to pursue the dig would be sold for cash or labor at 10 cents a share, followed by more shares at rising prices. He backstopped his “liberal proposition” with a list of over 40 other mine holes he had interests in. This included the nearby Midnight and others close to the Annie. He cited equipment in place valued at $8,000 ($290,000 today), “24 head of mules, 4 milk cows, 7 heavy ore wagons,” and an operating sawmill with ongoing contracts.
By sales of other stocks, he funneled money from his different operations into the Hail Mary project. As hyperbolic assay reports portrayed his success, his wife Isabel invested money in shares of mines near the Annie — or he devised them in her name. As icing on the silver cake, he announced another grandiose project in town, where he would spotlight western Colorado mining and industry.
The Aspen Mineral Palace
Wheeler announced in the March 2, 1891, Aspen Daily Chronicle that he had leased the Turley building on Cooper Avenue to outfit a 4,000-square-foot Aspen Mineral Palace. His inspiration came from the just-opened, extravagant Pueblo, Colorado, Mineral Palace (1891-1935), a Brobdingnagian 60,000-square-foot building with 21 gold-leafed domes that showcased Colorado’s mining wealth.
The Pueblo Palace, billed as the eighth wonder of the world, exhibited what many thought was a copy or a stripped-down version of Aspen’s original 18-foot-tall “lost” Silver Queen sculpture, after its grand showing at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. The original that went to Chicago was mostly made of silver, while the one at the Palace — according to visitors in the 1920s — was made of plaster, and stripped of its valuable adornments. Yet, that question and the location of the original sculpture still remain an unsolved Aspen mystery today.
Written in the future tense, Wheeler’s Palace announcements would feature displays from mines in western Colorado, including coal, marble, petroleum and building materials displayed upon a patriotic red, white and blue floor. Various accounts in the Times and Denver’s Rocky Mountain News that year anticipated floral and agricultural displays, a reading room, a laboratory, an auditorium to seat 300, and even “a gymnasium with all the physical appliances for the manly art and physical feats.”
Wheeler kicked off the ambition with $2,000, while lobbying for other business sponsors and exhibits. He wrote in the Times, “Some will say that [the Palace] is the hallucination of a diseased brain that prompts the promotor, but that will not mar the effect on the thousands who live and visit here to see the kaleidoscope university of wonderful western wealth.”
While highlighting high-grade ore from his Little Annie and surrounding mines, a more modest Aspen Mineral Palace opened to reduced fanfare in 1891. That July the Aspen Times reported Wheeler’s baby grizzlies “Jim and Nell” (seven months older) were on display there and that they were “daily becoming more trustable and evince their cleverness when a little loaf of sugar be held out … and the little folks of town have made this discovery” — yikes, Victorian moms.
News coverage of the Palace projections dropped off in 1891, but resurfaced after a brief closure and reopening. The Aug. 6, 1892, Aspen Times, reported 3,450 square feet of floor surface and 4,500 of wall space available “for western resource display. … There will be hundreds of visitors in the next three months and the citizens of Aspen should not be backward in making the Mineral Palace complete and great.” No further mention of the project appeared in the newspapers.
Silver on the rocks
As B. Clark and the mining industry were peaking in the search for ore under Aspen, a perfect financial storm had been brewing around the silver market for some time. Prior to 1873, gold and silver currency prices remained stable at a fixed-value ratio. But that year the U.S. suspended using silver as coinage, called “the crime of ’73” by silver interests.
After 1873, the government bought gold bullion and copper for coins, not silver bullion, relegating silver to be a fluctuating commodity. This created a de facto gold standard of coin and bills, preferred by bankers and governments at the long-term fixed gold price of $20.67 per ounce. Because of this and other factors, the economy ebbed and flowed for several decades, before imploding in the “Prash of 1893,” just as silver mining was peaking.
With the western boom and hundreds of railroads being built to transport commodities, goods, and more population, that prosperity was leveraged on borrowed bank money. The high supply of commodities, including silver and agricultural, depressed prices for producers, while debts could no longer be paid in silver.
Leading up to the crash, the populist cry of farmers and workers was to return to unlimited silver coinage, believing that more silver coins in circulation would put more money in the hands of the people and debts would be cheaper to pay than in scarcer gold currencies. In 1878, to appease that sentiment, the U.S. dipped its toe back into buying and minting silver coinage again, and then upped the amount to $4.5 million of silver per month in 1890 with the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. Eastern money-gnome theorists, a.k.a. “goldbugs,” called this inflationary, because people would hoard gold while plentiful silver would become less valuable.
But the many-limbed economy toppled in 1893, followed by President Grover Cleveland’s repeal of the Sherman Act to mollify the monied class, even though he had campaigned to uphold silver. Prices of the “white metal” fell. Mining and infrastructure debts became due. Note holders wanted payments in gold, especially European investors, causing a drain on U.S. gold reserves. By 1895, banks could not keep up with gold withdrawals, prompting J.P. Morgan and the Rothschild bankers of Europe to loan the treasury $65 million ($2.5 billion today) in gold to bailout the banks.
Except for a few well-managed mines and diversified investors, silver mining and surrounding jobs went bust in Aspen. Investors lost their wealth and workers their livelihoods. This included B. Clark Wheeler, whose margined gambles never hit the jackpot. Yet he still had a parallel political career and other venues in Mexico, Alaska and Nevada for his mining schemes. Meanwhile, across the country, thousands in “Coxey’s Army” of the unemployed marched from the west to Washington D.C. to demand jobs.
With that, in 1896, free-silver-coinage populist William Jennings Bryan won the Democratic nomination for president. At the convention, Bryan demagogued for silver in his “Cross of Gold” speech, proclaiming, “… you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!”
On his coattail, Wheeler ran a populist campaign for Colorado’s lieutenant governor against the “Shermanian monometalists.” Bryan — and down-ticket Wheeler — lost badly to Republican William McKinley, and the gold standard remained secure until the Great Depression nearly four decades later.
Defendant again
By fall of 1893, court actions required B. Clark to sell deflating stocks to meet unpaid debts, yet he had successfully run for state senate in 1892 and was reelected in 1896 as a crusader for silver interests. In September of 1898, he won nomination for U.S. Congress as a “Silver Republican” in Colorado’s second district, but withdrew to back incumbent “fusion candidate” John C. Bell — only months after Wheeler’s wife Olive Isabel, née Waite, had died that past May 13.
Mrs. Wheeler had gone to the Excelsior Springs Health Resort in Missouri. A nighttime fire there drove her and the guests from their hotel. They walked for hours in cold, rainy weather to find shelter, she having suffered smoke inhalation. Upon returning to Denver, she entered St. Luke’s Hospital and died of respiratory complications. According to the May 14, 1898, Aspen Tribune, B. Clark was with her until the day before she died, leaving for a “business trip to Aspen” after doctors said she would recover. The next day he received a telegram that she had died on Friday the 13th.
After an open-casket service at the First Presbyterian Church (today’s Aspen Community Church on East Bleeker Street), B. Clark followed in a procession to the Aspen Grove Cemetery, where Isabel was buried. Months later her best friend, widowed Carrie Noble, who died from a long illness of consumption (tuberculosis), was buried next to her.
Senator Wheeler’s loss came on top of the burial in Evergreen Cemetery (Ute Cemetery) of their infant son, from a premature birth in 1895. The Aug. 18 Aspen Times reported, “Mrs. Wheeler is quite seriously ill, having been taken sick two months too early. Mr. Wheeler is still confined to his bed with a broken leg and a dislocated ankle” (From a flipped horse cart on way to Famous Tunnel). B. Clark had already lost two brothers in the Civil War, three children and his first wife — possibly of smallpox — in South Dakota in the 1870s, where he had been a school teacher before seeking his fortune in Colorado.
Throughout his mining days in Aspen, newspapers in the state and beyond reported more about his many court cases than his two papers in Aspen did, with him more often a defendant than plaintiff. As a gutsy risk taker, he skirted the edge of business ethics with his legal knowledge, often facing adverse judgements. Perhaps financial pressure, coupled with so much suppressed personal loss, manifested in Wheeler’s reported temper. With no peer-support groups or hotlines for help in the 1890s, it is not a stretch to conclude that in the frontier days, hardened characters — often called “choleric” — acted out repressed psychological damage with only law enforcement as a backstop.
For example, the Feb. 9, 1889, Aspen Daily Chronicle reported that in the case before Judge Withers on complaint of Dr. A. Graham Miller, in “city [Aspen] vs B. Clark Wheeler, charged with foul and abusive language in the street,” the matter was “taken under advisement.”
As Aspen’s just-elected mayor (1890-1891), the July 29, 1890, Herald Democrat of Leadville reported a “determined army of creditors” confronted Wheeler on the street. Stressed over a grocery account bill, Harry Hull, a miner at Wheeler’s Bushwacker Mine on Smuggler, whom Wheeler had not paid, confronted him for money. “Wheeler became enraged and began abusing Hull, who shed his coat and made for the newspaperman. … Bystanders ended the difficulty … .Wheeler tried to climb a telephone pole.”
A crowd formed and another creditor, Patrick Welsch, demanded “settlement on an overdue account.” Invective yelling occurred. As mayor, Wheeler had Welsch “taken to jail and charged with disturbing the peace.” The next day, said the Herald Democrat, a suit was brought against Wheeler for an overdue $1,000 note he had given a bank cashier, and properties were attached. “Immediately following,” plaintiff D.R.C. Brown Sr. brought two suits, one against Wheeler and one against his wife, for a claim of $1,966 ($71,000 today) — a number of Wheeler’s mining shares were in his wife’s name. Wheeler properties were attached “and property levied upon.”
With his projects adrift after the 1893 crash, especially his favored Little Annie mine and Famous Tunnel, he tacked from the Republican party to the ascending free-silver People’s Populist Party, aligning with his father-in-law, Governor Davis Waite. While many said Wheeler was pursuing his own interests, he traveled widely to promote unlimited silver coinage, preaching the gospel of the white metal’s comeback.
But lawsuits continued to hound him. The Jan. 21, 1893, Salt Lake Herald wrote that the Union National Bank in Denver sued Mr. Wheeler to sell $188,000 of “price-inflated” stock to realize $52,000 ($1.8 million today) he owed the bank. Judge Allen ordered stock sales of the Little Annie and other mines, 1,000 shares of The Aspen Times, and $50,000 in other collateral within 30 days for restitution.
On the same date, the Rocky Mountain Sun reported that Wheeler had earlier become president of the profitable Pontiac Mining Company on Smuggler, by acquiring the most stock and setting up a “dummy board” of his employees. He then raided the Pontiac’s account of $16,000 in cash and 200,000 shares by selling them to his Continental Divide Mining and Investment Company on his credit from the latter company, pocketing $10,000 from the deal. Pontiac shareholders were livid, and J.J. Hagerman of the Midland Railway and famed Mollie Gibson Mine of Aspen, holder of much of the Pontiac stock, took Wheeler to court in a separate suit.
In volume, newspaper accounts — not just in Colorado — reported claims against Wheeler, painting a pattern of manipulation and a life under pressure. But in the frontier era, when physical distance from problems created more insulation, Wheeler put off what he could by traveling and conducting state senate business, as he delayed and jockeyed assets. On top of that, miners he had employed at his various holes were unhappy with the deflating value of his stocks that he had paid them with in lieu of cash. Returning to Aspen offered little rest for B. Clark, where he even received a reported “horse whipping” from a county commissioner in front of the Hotel Jerome.
Editor’s note: This is part two of a three-part series. Part one ran on April 12 and part three will run tomorrow.