  Map Tin Cup was “a wild ’un.” Probably Creede, Leadville and Tin Cup attained the worst reputations (and rightfully) of Colorado’s many mining camps. Tin Cup was particularly hard on marshals. The first two officeholders were weak and completely under control of the vice element who ran the gambling dens, sporting houses and saloons full tilt. The marshals’ orders were to give an appearance of law and order so as to make it easier to fleece the suckers. Finally conditions grew so bad that a sincere attempt was made to straighten up the corruption. The first strong marshal, Harry Rivers, was shot in a gun battle. His successors were shot, resigned, went insane, or got religion and changed their calling to that of the pulpit. Their infamous story has been very ably portrayed by Rene Coquoz, Leadville historian. “Frenchie,” the saloon keeper who shot one of the marshals, ran a place across from the Town Hall at Washington and Grand Streets. The saloon still stands. Tin Cup’s history begins very early in 1861. A prospecting party that consisted of Jim Taylor and two companions was camped on the Taylor River. One of the men brought back to camp some promising looking gravel in a tin cup which suggested the idea of a name for the region. They did a little placering; but in the next years the Civil War curtailed mining activities throughout Colorado. Nothing much happened in the region until the late 1870’s when strikes were made on the Gold Cup, the Tin Cup, the Anna Dedricka and the Jimmy Mack. Immediately there was a rush to the area, and in 1879 the town of Virginia City was surveyed and platted. Unknown, 1906; D.P.L.
Bryant McFadden, 1960 Frank Hall, one of Colorado’s most eminent historians, says in Volume IV of his comprehensive work that the surface ores were high grade silver, ranging from 114 to 600 ounces of silver per ton, and that all had admixtures of gold. In addition there were some excellent placers and gold lodes. In 1880 the Gold Cup mine sold for $300,000, and the town was firmly on its way. By 1881 when George Crofutt wrote his Grip-Sack Guide of Colorado he reported that Virginia City had changed its name to Tin Cup to conform with the name of the region. He added that Tin Cup was a prosperous mining town of six hundred population with twelve stores, several hostels and one smelter. (He omitted the more flagrant business emporiums.) He stressed that game was very abundant and gave the fare for the daily line of sleighs running to St. Elmo. The Colorado Business directory puts the population figure for 1881 at five hundred, a hundred less than Crofutt. It is interesting to note on this matter of population that present-day writers have a habit of enlarging the figures enormously, especially so-called historians of ghost towns who generally add a zero to any number they encounter. If Colorado’s hundreds of mining camps had as many people living in them as is claimed by post-World War II writers, the state would have been as populous then as it is now. But it was not. Tin Cup, despite the fact that it has had enormous publicity through Pete Smythe’s radio and TV show of the same name and through the building of an amusement park west of Denver called East Tin Cup, must be seen in the same light. It was just another mining town, although colorful in its own way, and by the late 1880’s was very much in decline. In 1891 it had a revival and kept going fairly well through that decade. It picked up even more after the turn of the century when the gold mines put on larger crews and when dredging machinery was moved in to operate the placers. But following the usual pattern of these towns, World War I ushered in a growing paralysis, and by 1917 the Gold Cup mine, Tin Cup’s mainstay, shut down. Tin Cup slumbered on in a complete trance except for an occasional sportsman. Little by little its quaint charm, including fire hydrants that date from 1891, attracted more people. By 1960 it was a substantial summer resort with more people taking over the many deserted cabins and buildings and telling of its unique wild past.... Gothic is reached by returning down the Taylor River to Almont and taking the road up the East River to its junction with Copper Creek. Crofutt described it in 1881 as the most important mining camp in Gunnison County with a population of nine hundred and fifty. It was established June 8, 1879, and made rapid progress, having many large stores, hotels, restaurants, saloons, shops of all kinds, a public school, a smelter (which Frank Hall says never operated), three sawmills and a weekly newspaper. Shortly its population rose to fifteen hundred. But, as one old-timer recalled, the Gothic district was the paradise of prospectors but not of miners. It was streaked on every mountainside with protruding veins of quartz. A blind man could locate a claim. But the ore values were not high enough for exploitation. The district had only its unusual beauty amid its surrounding peaks—Treasury, Cinnamon, Galena, Baldy, Belleview and Italian—and to the north the towering Elk Mountains. Gothic died. Only one resident remained until Dr. John C. Johnson, a former dean at the Western State College in Gunnison, saw its possibilities in 1928 for a fully accredited six-weeks summer school—the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory—and bought the two-hundred-acre town. Each year its distinguished staff of scientists invites other eminent scholars in the biological field to a conference and symposium at the end of the regular teaching session. Such topics as “The Living Balance Between Flora and Fauna” are discussed. The laboratory has brought Gothic into a national prominence never attained by its mines. The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory with its nine hundred and five acres of primitive spruce and fir land, which sweep up the side of Baldy Mountain, made Gothic unique in 1960. It was the only ghost town that had turned into a school. Bryant McFadden, 1958
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