Editor’s note: This is the final installment in a three-part series on one of Aspen’s most influential early characters, B. Clark Wheeler. Read part one here and part two here.
Though a brash name in Colorado mining, B. Clark Wheeler never made the list of successful mining barons. He did not erect any buildings in downtown Aspen with his name on the pediment, nor did he leave behind a historic Aspen house with his onetime residency attached.
While he was state senator and an Aspen newspaperman, the April 11 and 18, 1896, Rocky Mountain Sun followed up on an incident, headlining, “Horse Whipped Editor Makes Denial.” Wheeler had indicted Pitkin County Commissioner J.C. Compton through a grand jury in Denver for selling business favors and charging illegal fees, accusing him of being “a boodler.” Compton “assaulted him with a horsewhip” in front of the Hotel Jerome “and Wheeler received an unmerciful beating,” the Sun wrote.
Wheeler said, “It’s all a lie. … He rode up beside my buggy with a whip, struck the carriage … my horse frightened and ran home.” Compton chased him on his swift mount while wielding the whip. Wheeler ran into his house and came out with a gun, “and Compton ran like a whipped dog,” Wheeler said.
As a man on the make about town in the 1880s, county clerk in 1885, mayor in 1890, state senator between 1892-1900, and as proprietor of the Aspen Times from 1883-1909, he punctuated his time with travel about the state. In the 1890s he sought opportunities to start other mining companies in Nevada, Alaska, and later in Mexico. After his wife Isabel died in 1898 — and infant son in 1895 — he was mentioned in society columns as living in Glenwood Springs and Denver hotels, and at his ranch in Eagle. His solo travels and lack of family mention then implied that he was somewhat estranged from his in-laws.
The June 24, 1894, San Francisco Call highlighted those tensions between B. Clark and his father-in-law Davis Waite, who served as Colorado governor from 1893-1895. Running for reelection in 1894 (and losing), Waite needed state Sen. Wheeler’s endorsement. John McGilvray, a Denver friend of the governor, said, “B. Clark Wheeler is one of the most erratic men, a hustler. They hate each other cordially and preserve a speaking acquaintance for the female members of the family.”
Two days later in a gaggle of politicians in Denver’s Windsor Hotel lobby, B. Clark was asked if he supported Waite, the Call wrote. “Support him? I’ve done not a blinkety-blank thing else but support the dishdasted old son of a sea cook for the last 10 years!” The governor died peeling apples on Thanksgiving Day 1901 in his Aspen house, which still stands at 234 W. Francis St. He is buried in Red Butte Cemetery.
On Oct. 16, 1897, B. Clark announced in the Times that he was going to Alaska for eight months to “pay all debts of the Famous Mining Tunnel,” stating, “I have no intention of deserting Aspen and Pitkin County, but will return to develop the mother contact of this county. … Parties with claims against myself or the company can trade them for other properties offered.” As his explorations for alternate mining opportunities expanded — seemingly outrunning his failures — he leased The Aspen Times to “Thompson and Breach” in December 1899.
The next day he listed a fire sale of assets in the Times to finance the Alaska trip, offering everything from his family horse “Barney” with carriage and his deceased wife’s sidesaddle, to 500,000 shares of Little Annie stock, his Highlands Ranch (near today’s Conundrum Road), the Famous Tunnel concentrator and equipment, which he valued at $100,000 total. “Debtors will be given preference over cash buyers … as free silver coinage will return,” the ad read. Yet somehow he held onto the Little Annie and the Famous Tunnel properties.
The May 11, 1900, News Reporter of Leadville summarized, “the crash of silver made Wheeler a poor man and Aspen a dead town.” The Sept. 9, 1900, Aspen Democrat reported Wheeler would not seek a third term as senator. “Boring oil wells in Routt County, managing three gold mines in Cripple Creek and the Richmond Hill properties, and two newspapers is enough without public affairs,” the paper quoted him as saying. But in trying his same formula in Cape Nome, Alaska, “he will have a wide and healthy field for his vigorous promoting ability, backed by a newspaper [his], he may redeem the thousands he lost in Aspen,” the News Reporter said.
Throughout May 1902 in the Aspen Democrat, a foreclosure sale on the Pitkin County Courthouse steps of shares of the Famous Tunnel company and other mining claims belonging to Olive Isabel Wheeler’s (née Waite) estate were advertised for auction to pay off 1896 loans B. Clark had defaulted on. Yet, somehow Wheeler settled the debt and kept control of the Famous and Annie.
After departing without explanation from Alaska, Wheeler was next reported as back from Durango, Mexico. The Dec. 11, 1902, Aspen Democrat wrote of his return to contend with “court actions in Denver investigating the whereabouts of 1,548,500 shares of his Vancos San Marcos Mining and Milling Company, belonging to a Mrs. Mary Grace of New York.” Wheeler’s nephew, the treasurer, had taken the books to Mexico, and Grace alleged they had transferred the stock to Wheeler who then sold 849,500 shares at $1 a share, after vacating his Denver office.
B. Clark’s third act
With varied returns to manage court actions, and his Aspen projects on hold or leased, hyperbole tailed “Professor” Wheeler like a strong perfume. While his mining ventures made headlines and he had many critics, he retained supporters throughout his near-30-year career who had benefitted from his Colorado boosterism.
On Nov. 17, 1905, his lessees at the Aspen Times’ front-page headlined “THE MAN OF THE HOUR … Fortune Smiles Sweetly on Aspen’s Friend, B. Clark Wheeler, formerly of Aspen, Colorado.” The 58-year-old old war horse was slated “to marry an immensely wealthy widowed countess” in the state of Sonora, Mexico. And, “as if the fickle goddess of fortune were making amends for his former treatment,” his gold mines in Sonora would be “the richest that have opened in the treasure house of Mexico since the Spaniards first arrived.”
The former senator’s “old friends in Denver” said the widowed countess “has thousands of acres of grazing land with countless herds of cattle, a castle and hundreds of natives to rule over that go with the widow’s hand,” the Aspen Times said. In addition, “his assays have shown fabulously rich returns,” and “he is perfecting the titles … until the day he will have full sway over the countess and her effects.”
In a parallel story, the Nov. 17 Aspen Democrat, edited by Charles Dailey — a thorn in B. Clark’s side for years — wrote up comments from the streets of Aspen on the nuptial news: “Why the lucky old cuss,” “Isn’t B. Clark a nervy old guy,” and “Won’t he make things hum with a million head of cattle.” Dailey concluded, perhaps implying manure, “Good luck, senator, and may you bring the million to Aspen and turn it loose,”
Turn it loose he did. After trips to Mexico in the 1890s, and then basing himself there after 1900, he returned to Aspen to resurrect his obsession of finding the great vein under Little Annie via the Famous Tunnel. No more was reported on B. Clark and the countess, except for a “No countess for me” quote in a December 1905, Aspen Democrat town column.
Possibly his betrothal hit a snag, or the countess puffery may have been a set up for a pretextual return to Aspen in 1907, when he took back control of the Aspen Times, announced he was running for the state House of Representatives and trumpeted reopening the Little Annie and Famous Tunnel. He even proposed a spur of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad to run up to Ashcroft, conveniently passing the Famous.
B. Clark’s return played out in a series of articles in the Times and the Democrat from 1907 through 1910. A few employees were preparing the Annie and Famous to hire and dig in April of 1908. He touted great new ore samples, while looking for capital to start things rolling again. Once back, he reinvented himself as the man who would restore Aspen to its pre-crash eminence.
On Dec. 12, 1908, Dailey wrote of the would-be prodigal son’s return in the Democrat, “B.C. Wheeler is expected home today in all his glory and several trunks of hot air will come along with him. … The Little Annie will employ several hundred men, another sawmill and lumberyard will start, and BC’s Aspen Times will advertise his properties in Rawhide, Nevada.” Sure enough, weeks later, Wheeler advertised stock in 10 gold claims in the “great camp of Rawhide, Nevada,” in the Times.
His obsession took him to new extremes. With no restart materializing at the Annie and Famous, B. Clark splashed a new company creation in half-page ads in his reclaimed Aspen Times through November and December 1908: “The Montrozona Gold Mining Company,” which bundled Wheeler’s mining interests far and wide, including gold in Cripple Creek and Rawhide, and claims around Aspen.
He floated 300,000 preferred shares in Montrozona that could be purchased at $1 per share with a 7% dividend, coupled with one share of common stock. Notable Aspen names had “endorsed the idea” in the ad. The professor’s playbook strategy was to entice investors into yet another company to raise money for another company — this time for the Annie and the Famous.
Meanwhile, as the 1908 “Independent Citizen” candidate for the state House of Representatives, he joined William Jennings Bryan’s third populist presidential ticket (Wheeler had run in 1896 for lieutenant governor of Colorado on Bryan’s first presidential ticket). Like Dickens’ in-debt-optimist character Micawber, who habitually declared “Something will turn up,” former senator Wheeler knew another seat in the legislature in Denver might yield some dollars. But Bryan lost handily to William H. Taft, heir apparent to Theodore Roosevelt’s progressive reforms, rendering the populist free-silver-coinage movement obsolete.
Down-ticket, Wheeler lost to J.N. Ashley, a Democrat and an “old-time home person” who collected nearly twice the votes as Wheeler, the Nov. 5, 1908, Aspen Democrat said. Editor Daily headlined on the results of the entire Pitkin County slate of offices, “Old Gang is Ousted,” and commented on Wheeler’s loss that “People of this county like to vote for home people” — insinuating that B. Clark’s sudden return to town was opportunistic.
At the same time, Wheeler and Dailey shot accusations back and forth in their newspapers after Wheeler bought the Aspen Times printing plant, which also printed Dailey’s Democrat. Wheeler then got an injunction against the Democrat for unpaid bills at the plant, which Dailey fought in court. Restraining orders flew back and forth. Wheeler then threatened to sell the plant to recover the debt, and the state Supreme Court sent the unresolved fight back to the Pitkin County court, the Times wrote on May 9, 1908.
Food fight
Still unsettled, they went to the trenches. Dailey accused Wheeler of overcharging the county for publishing public notices, while Wheeler shot back that Dailey was sore because he didn’t get a fair share of tax lists to publish. A few catty touchés in their respective papers in 1909 are worth quoting.
On Jan. 7, Dailey published records showing that B. Clark overcharged the county over the course of 1908 for page space, concluding that Wheeler and “Commissioners ‘skinned’ taxpayers out of $1,029.76 ($36,000 today).” Followed by, “Friends of B. Clark are solicitous of his mental condition. His massive dome of thought is about to ‘bust.’ It would be too bad to have that mighty thought machine explode all in one explosion. … Keep your hands on your pocket book, B. Clark is back in town.”
Wheeler replied via the Times with: “Cap Dailey blows hot wind one day and cold the next, toward any person friend or foe” and, “The little tin shoulder cuss is temporarily presiding over the sanctum sanctorum of the Aspen Democrat” and, “Crazy Snake Dailey with his one employee is trying bury Cain.”
Dailey replied as if B. Clark were in the street making a pitch, “Listen! I have only a few shares left. Listen! I own the Little Annie Mine that produced millions of silver. But listen! The Aspen people didn’t get much of it; a few of them think they did.”
Wheeler then slam-dunks with: “Cap Dailey is at the typesetting machine after a five- or six-day’s knockout from inhaling the obnoxious gasses of that invention. Had we known his hide was stuffed with zinc, bismuth, arsenic, lead and the molten mixtures of type metal, nothing derogatory to his anatomy, mental or moral ability would have appeared in the Times, and apologies are in order and extended for hitting a man when he is down and out”
But by the spring of 1909 Wheeler found his machinations catching up. After having lost his recent run for state representative and the dollars that might have trawled, and with no capital, his idle mines’ values plummeted. On March 4, 1909, in the Times he started running a daily half-page ad: “FOR SALE— The Cowenhoven Tunnel, Little Annie Tunnel, Famous Tunnel and Mill; The Montrozona Gold Mining company; and all contracts, leases, easements belonging thereunto B. Clark Wheeler.”
Several months later he wholesale quit the newspaper business, abruptly changing the world of ink in Aspen. Through unpublicized dealings, Dailey bought the Aspen Times and its printing plant on sale from Wheeler, and debuted his new combined first edition on June 6, 1909, as the Aspen Democrat-Times, nicknamed, “The Little Humdinger.”
As Aspen’s only newspaper from then until 1926, the Democrat-Times became the Aspen Times Weekly in 1927, and went daily as The Aspen Times in 1986. According to “A Guide to Colorado Newspapers,” a 1964 compilation by Donald E. Oehlerts of Colorado State University, Aspen had 18 newspapers come and go between 1880 and 1909. In 1913, Colorado had nearly 50 dailies and 130 weeklies.
In frontier newspaper writing, editors’ opinions often gilded collected facts. Local newspapers then served as a focal point of interest, of record, news and entertainment. This contrasts with today, wherein shrill partisan critics constantly parse syntax for perceived slant and demand court-stenographer-like reporting, lest minds be swayed.
Yet, in that bygone era of newspaper writing, different editors wielded their clever quills freely, interjecting quips into reported events and writing lurid details of accidents, especially during Aspen’s early mining years. From those accounts — some 7,000 old news clips on the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection site, along with the Library of Congress historical newspapers site — jigsaw together the life and times of B. Clark Wheeler, there being no other biographies.
As B. Clark retreated from prominence, Dailey wrote in that first 1909 Aspen Democrat-Times, “There is no whip long enough to be cracked to make this paper squirm or to bow down to dictation. … B. Clark Wheeler has had a stormy experience ever since the founding of the camp. … Journalism no longer appeals to the senator’s peculiar disposition.” He finds “agony in strenuous efforts to make the ‘ghost walk’ more nerve wracking than training fleas to walk as sedately as the gentle and unsophisticated bed bug. He will do things and prevail upon outsiders no one doubts, and that his efforts may be crowned with success is the hope and desire of all.”
Big dreams fade
B. Clark’s desperate sale of his assets in mid 1909, as he reckoned with his cantilevered hopes, led to capitulation without fanfare in the Democrat-Times on Jan. 17, 1912, when Dailey printed a summation of major transactions filed with the county clerk.
Abruptly, Wheeler’s hard-fought mining portfolio was completely transferred to the just-formed Hope Mining, Milling and Leasing Company, a budding cooperative of Aspen townspeople who still believed in the Little Annie bonanza-vein. Included in the deal were Wheeler’s companies: Famous Mining, Little Annie Mining, Montrozona Gold Mining, Los Angeles Gold Mining (of Cripple Creek) and scattered other claims.
With that, Aspen collectively financed one last campaign to find the great paydirt under Richmond Hill. By renaming the Famous Tunnel the Hope Tunnel, the town looked to spark a silver-mining renaissance in the onetime “Crystal City of the Rockies.”
The July 8, 1912, Democrat-Times reported that Wheeler was in Glenwood Springs “taking the baths” after a stay at the Citizens’ Hospital (where he had placed the cornerstone as mayor in 1890), “having been attacked with ptomaine poisoning” and surviving pneumonia months earlier. Prior to that, he had spent the winter in Washington, D.C., and New York on business. That October, the paper said he had taken up residence at his Famous Ranch on Castle Creek, located near today’s Conundrum Road — possibly where the Bavarian Lodge would later be located. From there, he watched the nearby Hope Mining enterprise try to do what he hadn’t been able to do with the former Famous.
In March 1913 the Democrat-Times noted that Wheeler “has been in bad health for some time, making his home at the Denver Hotel for the winter,” and then residing in Glenwood Springs. In March 1914, the Democrat-Times updated that Wheeler was in Los Angeles, “very much alive and in good health and spirit,” and that his physician had advised him to move to sea level for his health. “With relatives and friends there, he finds it more pleasant than elsewhere … and he is still on deck.”
But, alas, a telegram dated June 19, 1914, from “E. B. Lavie, Secretary 99, B.P.O. Elks, Los Angeles, California,” informed “Frank M. Yates, Secretary 224, B.P.O. Elks, Aspen, Colorado,” that Brother Benjamin Clark Wheeler died in Los Angeles on June 18, and would be buried on June 20 in the Elks’ pavilion, Woodlawn Cemetery, Santa Monica. His serious condition had been known to his brother Elks for several months. The cause of death was sepsis, secondary to prolonged ptomaine poisoning, a bacterial gut infection historically linked to consuming decaying protein-rich foods.
However, a sad mystery remains. The July 29, 1898, Aspen Times wrote that his wife Isabel’s best friend and “sister” Carrie Nobel, who died after a long illness of consumption (tuberculosis), was buried in the same Aspen Grove Cemetery lot near Isabel. But today no stone or marker for Mrs. B. Clark Wheeler can be found in Aspen Grove, yet Noble’s stone is there. Nor does Isabel rest near her father, Governor Davis Waite, in Aspen’s Red Butte Cemetery, nor by her infant son in an unmarked grave in Ute Cemetery. Somehow history cast this family apart. B. Clark and his wife Isabel remain estranged in death, buried 900 miles apart, she in a location in Aspen lost to time and he in California, while their infant son rests alone.
A June 20, 1914, obituary in the Democrat-Times, still run by B. Clark’s onetime enemy in pens, Charles Dailey, wrote, “B. Clark Wheeler loved Aspen and its every rock and rill; its every street and avenue and home; it’s every man woman and child. And why not?”
Along with sporadic mining efforts on Smuggler Mountain, Aspen Mountain and in the Little Annie basin, Aspen settled into its quiet years, wherein a nostalgic era of self-sufficiency and strong community segued into the promising ski era in the mid-1930s. During that quiet period, merchants, miners, ranchmen, stockmen and families of the Roaring Fork Valley lived the unaffected dream, when possibilities, population, and land — though taken from the Ute Indians — existed in a naïve balance of unlimited opportunity.
While B. Clark Wheeler had big dreams, but never quite acquired the money to make them happen, he gave as much to Aspen as he took. To construe that he was Aspen’s first larger-than-life character in its long lineage of big personalities would not be a stretch. As the indomitable man who trekked through driven winter snows to hammer a few stakes into pristine wilderness and name that 1880 mining camp “Aspen,” he lit a long fuse in time that begot today’s bastion of billionaires.
This is the final installment in a three-part series on one of Aspen’s most influential early characters, B. Clark Wheeler. Read part one here and part two here.