B. Clark Wheeler, a nimble man in his time

“Yesterday was a regular B. Clark Wheeler day — windy!” 

“About the City” column, The Aspen Democrat, 1909

Editor’s note: This is the first of a three-part series chronicling the life and times of B. Clark Wheeler, one of the most influential figures in Aspen history. Parts 2 and 3 will run next weekend.

Benjamin Clark Wheeler (1849-1914), a tall, burly, dark-bearded man of imposing stature with a talent to persuade others to invest in his leveraged mining schemes, who lost two older brothers during the Civil War, followed by the deaths of his wife and children in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and later a second wife and infant in Colorado, galloped nevertheless through a dog-eared life of Aspen notoriety as if leading the charge of the Light Brigade. 

Sometimes variously called “the father of Aspen,” “B. Clark” or “The Professor,” he laid out the town’s first county-registered plat in 1880 and named the idyllic spot for the rattling aspen trees, while rejecting the original “1879er” pioneers’ name of Ute City. But not without a ruckus. As a middleman and promoter of his mining enterprises, he marketed Western resources to Eastern capitalists. (B. Clark Wheeler is neither related to nor the same person as Jerome B. Wheeler, who built the Wheeler Opera House and Hotel Jerome, although they shared some mining interests.)

In the book “Aspen on the Roaring Fork,” Frank Wentworth described B. Clark as “having the restless energy of a wildcat and as tough as a white oak knot.” He was Aspen’s ninth mayor, a state senator and a candidate for lieutenant governor on the Free Silver ticket, and he was later nominated (but withdrew) as a candidate for U.S. Congress. Hagiographic obituaries after his death praised him as Aspen’s and Colorado’s biggest booster of silver mining and economic opportunity. Yet, during his life, more than a handful of critics dogged him for his manipulative business tactics and self-promotion.

The Montrose Daily Press wrote this after his passing: “He was a trailblazer, a community builder, a man of progress, a brilliant writer and history will record his name on the roll of one of Colorado’s strongest citizens.”

As the owner/editor of The Aspen Times from 1883-1909, Wheeler regularly exchanged barbed salvos with editor Charles Dailey of The Aspen Democrat. In tit-for-tat disputes in their dueling papers, Dailey called Wheeler an “itinerant preacher editor” and “the greatest self-praiser on the face of the earth,” saying his B.C. initials stood for “Bull Con.”

Dailey, whom Wheeler had called “Tinhorn Dailey” and “Crazy Snake Dailey,” had been stricken with a case of roup — a bacterial disease found in spring chickens and which Wheeler characterized as “an ossified incrustation under the tongue of a chicken.”

Later, Dailey obliquely praised Wheeler in his Jan. 20, 1914, obituary for putting every dollar he made in Aspen mining back “into Old Mother Earth to bring prosperity and wealth to his hometown and people … while spending thousands on his pet scheme, the Little Annie and Famous tunnel.” B. Clark hyped the Famous as a lower-access to T-bone the vertical Little Annie shaft and beyond, to find the elusive higher-grade silver contact under the Annie basin.

Much later, mining magnate David Hyman — an Aspen pioneer and owner of the Durant and Smuggler mines — for whom Wheeler originally brokered Hyman’s initial 1880s Aspen mining claims, reflected circa 1920 on Wheeler in his autobiography, “Romance of a Mining Venture,” that Wheeler was “a man of wonderful energy, of great professions, but whose character I never admired and whose knowledge of mining matters was not at all equal to his profession.”

In the early 1880s, in a retro-Craigslist of pioneers’ needs that ran in the Ashcroft Herald and The Aspen Times, Wheeler advertised real estate “within a gunshot of Aspen,” goods and services, $50 onsite assays, grubstaking of claims and property management of mines for absentee owners. He stoked the national mining-stock frenzy with multi-listings, brokering shares — particularly his own — as if each were close to a windfall. 

From the mid-1880s through the 1890s, he applied his skills as an apprentice-trained lawyer, a newspaperman and a self-taught mining engineer. Although he never became notably rich, his Smuggler Mountain mining interests, Little Annie claim on the back of Aspen Mountain and other speculations episodically made money, until the Panic of 1893. That financial reshuffle trapped him in his own self-Ponzied reality, rejiggering for new options.  

Aggravated by a railroad construction bubble that burst, which led to the withdrawal of government subsidy for unlimited silver coinage and default to the gold standard, the crash upended the mining industry. Although B. Clark had blazed a three-decade path of achievements and controversies in Aspen, punctuated by mining deals in Alaska, Mexico and Nevada, his search to hit the jackpot eluded him. 

The weight of grief  

That quest began in Colorado during a record snow year in February 1880. The yarn is often spun of Wheeler’s Herculean mid-February 17-day roundtrip snowshoe odyssey from Leadville to Ute City over Independence Pass to inspect mining prospects and lay out a town. His party consisted of Capt. Isaac Cooper (who founded Glenwood Springs), William L. Hopkins, Dr. Richardson and Jack King, several of whom suffered snow blindness, according to a chapter on Pitkin County in a leatherbound 1895 “History of Colorado,” by Frank Hall, archived at the Pitkin County Library.

Named after Colorado’s second governor, Fredrick Pitkin — whose racism toward Native Americans was so animating that he advocated shooting those off the reservation on sight — Pitkin County was carved out of Gunnison County in 1881. The budding county not only designated the new mining district after the Utes were banished, but it also enabled Aspen’s first big real estate development, Roaring Fork City. Located on the plateau between Maroon and Castle creeks, lots were hawked to outside investors by Leadville’s famous bonanza king Horace Tabor, who was also Colorado’s lieutenant governor at that time under Pitkin. The town never materialized because it was surpassed in interest by B. Clark’s mushrooming Aspen townsite.  

Before his triumphant arrival, Wheeler had already experienced deep losses. Born on Aug. 11, 1849, in Delmar, located in Tioga County, Pennsylvania, he grew up on a farm with numerous siblings. His parents, William and Mary, had migrated from New York state. Ancestery.com lists a brother, Pvt. Samual A. Wheeler, born in 1841 and possibly killed in the Civil War. The Tioga County Historical Society cites another brother, John Henry Wheeler (1845-1865), who died in the brutal Florence Stockade, a confederate prison in South Carolina.

Educated in Tioga County schools, B. Clark attended the University of Pennsylvania and apprenticed in Philadelphia to become an attorney. Soon after, he became a teacher and high school principal, first in Tioga and then in the Black Hills, where he moved with his wife and three children, the Aspen Democrat-Times reported in his obituary June 20, 1914. In the 1870s, “misfortune overtook him, losing his wife and children.” Although available sources revealed no details, there was a smallpox epidemic in the Black Hills during that period.   

Reckoning with his grief, he then traveled up and down the Rocky Mountains to Mexico, where he caught the mining bug and found his way to Leadville in 1879. Reconfigured, Wheeler gave lectures in Denver on his newfound knowledge of mining exploration, right before his winter pilgrimage over Independence to investigate Ute City.

Several parties preceded Wheeler. A French-Canadian trapper was said to be the first, in the mid-1870s, to come over Independence Pass — known then as Hunter’s Pass —  before the first prospectors Phillip W. Pratt, Smith Steel and W.L. Hopkins in June 1879. The latter group staked out the first mining claims: the Spar, Pioneer and several others. Close on their heels that July, the Charles Bennett party of four crossed into the new camp, inspired by the 1879 publishing of Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden’s 1877 mapping of western Colorado. (Hayden’s group came up the Colorado River watershed.) That November brought H.B. Gillespie over the pass to purchase the top-producing Spar, naming the town Ute City, Hall wrote.

The Bennett party staked the Durant mine on Aspen Mountain where an apex of the north-south silver vein breached near the top of today’s Silver Queen Ridge ski run. Roughly 30 mining levels horizontally catacomb Aspen Mountain, from the top of today’s Spar Dumps to below town. Across the Roaring Fork on Smuggler Mountain, Bennett acquired the Smuggler Mine from Pratt, who traded it from a man called Fuller — said to be the first claimant and known to be a drinker — for $50 and a burro, legend says. The Durant, Smuggler and Spar claims principally launched the Aspen silver mining stampede of the 1880s, leading to hundreds of claims and wildcat shafts in the area. Few made money or paid dividends, while fewer made fortunes for a handful of investors.

The original Ute City

Prospectors, speculators and settlers infiltrated the Ute territory, violating the 1868 treaty that promised the Utes most of  western Colorado, demarcated by a north-south boundary bisecting the Roaring Fork watershed near Snowmass. Tensions exploded in September 1879 when Ute warriors killed evangelist Nathan Meeker and 10 whites at Meeker’s White River Ute Indian Agency during a hellish six-day battle of attrition against U.S. troops at nearby Milk Creek. Pitkin then dispatched a courier to the budding Ute City camp warning of Ute retribution. Most of the 30-odd pioneers departed. 

A few returned in November after the Meeker incident simmered, comprising the “original 13” uber-locals who survived that first winter of 1879-80. However, Wentworth, in a May 9, 1935, Aspen Times recollection, called those “mystical numbers skullduggery,” saying there were 31. Hall’s “History of Colorado” recounted how a few of them dug a shaft straight down looking for gold in the flats of Ute City, but they ran out of gumption at 40 feet. 

In Denver that fall of 1879, Wheeler and Charles A. Hallam — agents and partners for Cincinnati capitalist Hyman — encountered Ute City prospectors who had skipped that first winter in the camp, Hall wrote. Meanwhile, the prospectors who had hunkered down, joined by some evacuees, had already laid out a Ute City town plat, kept in Newt Hall’s cabin, Warner Root wrote in an April 23, 1881, account in the first edition of the Aspen Times (then published by founder and editor W.F. Crosby). Each of the 1879ers — numbering about 35, whether there or not that first winter — had agreed on two lots apiece in the new Ute City. They also agreed to respect one another’s mining claims and to sort details in the spring.   

But Wheeler had other plans. Through legal legerdemain, he secured a bond for the Durant, Smuggler and six other claims, and a W.L. Hopkins and Charles Bennett ranch claim located in town. Sight unseen, he and Hallam, as agents for Hyman, paid $5,000 down and agreed to pay $160,000 additional, pending “certain conditions,” Hall’s book said. This hearsay investment preceded Wheeler’s February trek into the new camp to check out his properties.  

Bearing deputized credentials from the surveyor general of Colorado, Wheeler superimposed his town plat on top of the original Ute City grid and called it Aspen. He then formed the Aspen Town and Land Co. The few hunkered-down residents watched the interloper in disbelief as Aspen’s first wintertime visitor, super athlete and developer staked out a town.

This conflict ripened the next summer, when Col. George A. Crittenden, an attorney, demagogued a crowd of 150 on Deane Street in June 1880, asserting the property legally belonged to them, not the bold B. Clark and his backers. The July 9, 1881, edition of the Rocky Mountain Sun detailed those events in the burgeoning camp of about 900 people. 

Threatening to lead the rowdy crowd to take possession of the original lots, Crittenden proclaimed that Wheeler’s land company was “irregular and not in conformity with the General Land Office principles” and “The first people who settled on Uncle Sam’s domain and improved the ground” had first claim to the land.  

Not knowing the laws, the original settlers had let the land company “do as they pleased,” said the April 23, 1881, edition of the Aspen Times. But those with skin in Wheeler’s game — Thatcher, Judge J.W. Deane, W.L. Hopkins and city magistrate Warner Root — backed Wheeler and “told the boys that AT&L Co. would make Aspen the finest camp in the west,” thus quashing the dispute. 

Yet, a comprehensive story in the Feb. 2, 1882, edition of the Aspen Times — called “The Townsite” and written by Aspen’s second mayor, James Tanfield — registered dissent. Many, including the City Council and Aspen’s first mayor, G.W. Triplet, came out against Wheeler et al.’s legal end run. Tanfield wrote about how townsite partner Deane went to Washington, D.C., in 1881 and patented the AT&L’s town plat in the brand-new county of “Pitkin,” just then conveniently carved out of Gunnison County. Deane argued that since the original settlers, known as the “Jumpers Association,” had claimed their plat in a now-void part of Gunnison, their town claim was invalid. 

Later, Root reflected in the Aspen Times that “So much was said … about AT&L Co. building toll roads and smelters that ‘the boys’ were disposed to wait and assist, while the company only accomplished a steam sawmill for their own profit, apologies for a toll road, and no sign of a smelter.” Wheeler’s town plotting scheme thus sketched a first impression on the handful of settlers.

The upshot of the conflict left those with original lots they had settled on remain uncontested, while others of the original settlers who preceded Wheeler’s dominion caved to his promises of prosperity. Had Crittenden and his followers pressed his legal position, the town might still be called Ute City today.  

Women confront B. Clark

Access to the town was also on B. Clark’s early agenda. By Henry Staat’s recollections in Wentworth’s book, in 1880, when there was only a hefty log felled over the Roaring Fork that served as the first Mill Street bridge, B. Clark added a railing and charged 25 cents to cross. He also oversaw a major part of the trail from Tayler Park into Ashcroft and built a single-track wagon road over Independence, charging tolls of 25 cents for horses and 50 cents for wagons. 

Next, B. Clark cornered the town’s water supply, which the Ute Spring once supplied for free into a pool near the bottom of the skier’s right of today’s Little Nell run at the top of Spring Street. That clean, cold water from deep in Aspen Mountain ran down the east side of Nell, where it fed town ditches randomly dug to stock pens and residents’ lots. Kids dammed ditches and wandering stock had their way, causing ditch water to become putrid. 

This led to a town ordinance reported by the May 6, 1881, edition of the Aspen Times that “No dead animals or brute or foul or nauseous substance” could be disposed of in the water ditches, followed by another barring sawdust dumping. At the same time, outhouses cantilevered out over the Roaring Fork.

B. Clark claimed the Ute Spring per “ownership by discovery,” reinforcing the pool and installing spouts. He then cut a deal with town “watermen” who filled barrels and delivered “table water” for a fee about town in “donkey-hydrant” carts. Townspeople objected, saying that nobody owned the spring water. A letter in the Aug. 30, 1881, edition of the Aspen Times said “the great Ute Spring in its quiet beauty pouring forth its crystal flood … was put there by the great creator for all to use.”

Fearing Wheeler’s water monopoly, Tanfield incorporated the municipal Aspen Irrigation and Ditch Co. Citizens traded labor for water and trenched a ditch from the Roaring Fork at the end of Waters Avenue, which flowed through a flume over Wheeler’s operation and into town ditches, the May 5, 1882, edition of the Aspen Times reported. What remains of that city-built ditch is now called the Wheeler Ditch Trail — which might correctly be called the “Aspen Ditch Co.” trail.  

Incensed, Wheeler tore out the bypassing flume and threatened to build a locked shed over the spring and prosecute those who disrupted his operation. At a stalemate, the Sept. 16, 1882, edition of the Aspen Times wrote that the “attempted subversion of the existing order of things at the Ute Spring by B. Clark Wheeler … the water rustler” incited a group of angry Aspen women to confront him at the spring. He backed down, and the newspaper concluded, “If the men couldn’t manage him, the women could.” 

With that, Wheeler formed the Aspen Ice and Water Co. to compete with the city’s water company to supply town, while the watermen price-fixed table water, sabotaging others’ carts if anyone undercut. A few years later, mining operations on Aspen Mountain altered the Ute Spring’s flow and the conflict dried up. The Jan. 2, 1886, edition of the Aspen Times reported that townsmen H.C. Cowenhoven and D.R.C. Brown franchised a new city water supply from Castle Creek and Hunter Creek, forming the Aspen Water Co. A crew would build flumes, excavate ditches and install piped water mains about town by that March. Soon after, upscale west-enders had Victorian flush toilets.

Thousandaires discover Aspen

B. Clark and dealmakers who came to town convened at the “finest and most elegantly furnished” Clarendon Hotel — located along the southeast side of today’s Wagner Park — which opened with a grand party on August 6, 1881, and quickly became the beehive of business and frontier upscale. Wheeler exhibited his town plat at the hotel, selling lots and mining shares, according to Root’s 1881 account. New city street names of Cooper, Hopkins, Hallam and Hyman honored Wheeler’s original AT&L board.

With Aspen silver strikes fueling the mining frenzy in the American West, brokering mining stocks became a middleman’s playground. At this game, Wheeler excelled in the 1880s. Living for an early spell at the Clarendon and then in a house on Cooper Avenue, he traveled to Denver, Chicago, New York and wherever else eager ears perked to his lectures on Colorado silver mining.

He etched a positive reputation in many newspapers as Colorado’s first unbridled booster. Utilizing his orator skills, he gained his nickname as “The Professor” — although to many he was a faux professor. With his legal skills, he used his own promissory notes to shuffle mining claims among his numerous mining companies like a shell game — comparable to today’s phantom-Aspen-owner limited liability companies. While preaching migration to the new state, he chummed out-of-town mining investors like a gilded-age Bernie Madoff.  

An early example of this happened with his Wheeler Consolidated company, centered on the Chloride mine, which straddled today’s Spar Gulch and Grand Junction from Rayburn’s Gully ski run, according to an old Aspen Ski Corp. map. By floating a note with a payoff due for $25,000 ($790,000 in today’s dollars), he purchased the claim “on credit agreement with the owners of the claim,” according to a story headlined “Wheeler’s Woes” in the April 16, 1881, edition of the Leadville Herald. He then folded the Chloride into his Wheeler Consolidated company with other claims in different locations.

After extracting ore from the narrow Chloride claim, he shipped 2,100 pounds on a jacktrain of 18 burros to Leadville that yielded 144 ounces per ton of silver, said a story in the Oct. 26, 1881, edition of the Rocky Mountain Sun. Another jack shipment taken to Denver by the Leadville train yielded 547 ounces per ton. High-grade ore was considered anything over 300 ounces per ton. Not until trains came to Aspen in 1887 did low-grade ore in quantity become profitable to ship.

Brandishing such results, Wheeler sold Chloride stock in Denver and dispatched representative E.T. Butler to New York to sell more shares. As Wheeler dug deeper — looking for the contact near the paydirt Spar and Durant mines off today’s Kleenex Corner ski run — he sneaked up to the Chloride with a crew to resurvey and widen his perimeters around the mine, the April 16, 1881, edition of the Leadville Herald recounted. 

By “dodging around and making their observations behind trees … without attracting nearby owners’ attention,” Wheeler superimposed his new claims over his neighbors’ claims. But a nearby owner, A.H. King, discovered his scheme and sent 20 men with rifles to surround the area near Grand Junction. When Wheeler showed up to work his “expanded domain,” he balked at “a long blue barrel of a rifle, protruding over a boulder behind which a marksman had taken a position.” King, an attorney, seized the Chloride by “right of jeopardy” to become de-facto owner. He employed three shifts and exhausted the mineral, while the two silver-bug-bitten lawyers brawled in court.

Wheeler came up short, and his investors wanted their money back. In his back-and-forth trips to Denver court, Wheeler boasted of a record eight-hour ride from Leadville to Aspen on his horse Dick. The resulting foreclosure unraveled on the front steps of the Pitkin County Courthouse, when Sheriff Andy McFarlane auctioned off Wheeler Consolidated to recoup $7,000 ($222,000 in today’s dollars) plus damages for his aggrieved partner E.T. Butler, the Oct. 27, 1883, edition of the Rocky Mountain Sun reported. 

Three days later, an undeterred Wheeler, 34, married Olive Isabel Waite, 22, the daughter of Davis Waite, his then-law partner and future Colorado governor (1893-95). 

That December, B. Clark took over the Aspen Times from his father-in-law, whose Waite Publishing company had bought the Aspen Times that past June from W.F. Crosby. Wheeler’s decades-long presence as a newspaperman began when he brought the first printing press to town in July 1881 and, with Waite, distributed the Pitkin County Journal, whereas the Aspen Times, which first ran in April 1881, was initially printed in Leadville and delivered over the pass.

Smuggling money in petticoats 

Wheeler started the Glenwood Echo in 1885 and the Aspen Daily Chronicle in 1888. With his press power, Wheeler never met a mining report he didn’t like. As editor of the Aspen Times, he baited mining stocks with splashy ore assays, exhibiting stellar samples from his properties in the Times office. While brokering shares from the office, his aggrandized columns ran daily, highlighting wildcat holes as if mere feet from the contact. 

At one time or another, Wheeler had interests in mines on Aspen Mountain, Little Annie, Smuggler and Hunter Creek — where he had hoped to connect his mines to the 4,000-foot Cowenhoven Tunnel that drained water and accessed the bulk of Smuggler Mountain mines, including the iconic Mollie Gibson. On Aspen Mountain, he had shares in the Emma and Vallajo mines at the bottom of today’s Silver Queen ski run. The Emma famously became the Compromise Mine at the top of Little Nell after a historic legal battle between “Apex” and “Sideline” opponents. 

His enterprise knew no end. Ads in the Aspen Times offered his legal work, mining engineering and stocks through his Wheeler Mining Exchange company. In the Oct. 6, 1890, edition of the Aspen Daily Chronicle, associates B. Clark Wheeler and Jerome B. Wheeler reflected on Aspen’s first banking obstacles at a gala banquet. The two related anecdotes about smuggling cash and coins into Aspen for the first bank in town, J.B. Wheeler & Co., which J.B. Wheeler started in 1883 upon his arrival. Because of the risk, the Kit Carson stage company charged a flat-but-costly 2.5% to transport cash of any amount.   

Starting Wheeler Banking with $5,000 ($165,000 in today’s dollars) in cash, backed by Denver funds, J.B. Wheeler quickly ran out when Henry Gillespie — Aspen’s first silver millionaire, and Free Mason nomenclator of “El Jebel,” his onetime ranch — struck big ore in the Spar Mine and needed payroll cash. Caught short, J.B. Wheeler looked for quick ways to sneak money in on the stage to restock his tills. The two jovial Wheelers related their anecdotes to the banquet revelers. J.B. Wheeler recollected hiding money in women’s layered petticoats, while B. Clark told of receiving weighty coins in wooden crates labeled as lead type for the Aspen Times, which were meant for Wheeler the banker. 

Often called out for his bombast, B. Clark squabbled with then-editor C.G. Noble of The Aspen Democrat, calling him “a whiskey-soaked bloat,” the Central City Register-Call wrote on Aug. 21, 1885. Noble challenged Wheeler to meet at Aspen’s Bob Pierce Saloon “to drink bug juice together and the man who falls first pays the bill. Bob says he will close the doors and give them a show.” The next editor of the same paper, Charles Dailey, later alleged that in two decades B. Clark had bundled 20 different mining companies, none of which ever paid a dividend. 

But Wheeler’s finale to find the payoff lay in his determined pursuit of the pure silver contact deep under Richmond Hill in the Little Annie Mine via an alternate route called the Famous Tunnel. The Sept. 11, 1889, edition of the Aspen Times reported him as the majority Annie owner, pledging to find the contact. But that prized strike evaded him, if not defeated him a decade later.

Nevertheless, during Wheeler’s various designs for wealth, he employed hundreds of workers, attracted myriad businesses and services to town, and primed Aspen to become a booming industrial mining city by 1892. Known then as “The Crystal City of the Rockies,” Aspen seemed unstoppable, until the Panic of 1893. Engineered by the “goldbugs”— politicians, bankers and too-big-to-fail plutocrats — the crash ended the unlimited minting of silver coins. Caught in that riptide with his credibility in question and claims devalued, B. Clark found himself offshore of solvency in a leaking financial boat. 

Editor’s note: Parts 2 and 3 of this series will run next weekend.