Alice was rich in gold—particularly placer gold. But oddly and uniquely, no one found these placers until long after other Clear Creek placers had been worked out. Apparently no prospector was thorough enough in his search on upper Fall River and its little tributary, Silver Creek, to make a strike during the placer excitements of 1859 and the early 1860’s, although some silver was uncovered. When rich gold was finally found in 1881, the discovery was made by a party working west from Yankee along the road that ran from Central City, the county seat of Gilpin County, past the side of Yankee Hill, down Silver Creek and Fall River, and on to Georgetown, county seat of Clear Creek County.

Alice was described in Denver’s Rocky Mountain News August 24, 1881, as a colony of fifteen or twenty tents near Silver City, a camp slightly higher up Silver Creek. Colonel A. J. Cropsey of Nebraska was the superintendent of the Alice Mining Company, and he was banking sums of twelve and fifteen hundred dollars every two weeks in the First National Bank at Central City.

The summer and fall production proved so successful that the following February the capital stock of the company was increased from $1,000,000 to $2,000,000; a second ditch was built to bring water for hydraulic mining; log cabins and a mill were erected; the eleven-mile road to Idaho Springs was improved, and the company banked $2,500 or $3,000 in Idaho Springs every fortnight.

Hydraulic mining continued through the early 1880’s and proved consistently profitable so that Alice absorbed Silver City (if it had ever been anything more than a cluster of tents). As the placers were worked out, lode mining developed in a number of mines, especially in tunnels that led away from a pit torn out by hydraulic hoses. The population was around thirty-five until after 1903 when it rose to fifty or sixty. In 1908 a more modern mill was built, and production continued steadily until 1915 when the mill shut down. Soon the ghosts took over.

Four people lingered on, including the E. J. Harpers. He had been postmaster in 1904 (see the photo at the end of my introduction) and had conducted business from one end of their own cabin. She served meals at the other. On inspection trips to the Loch Lomond reservoir my father and I used to tie our horses outside this cabin and have a delicious lunch. In 1960 it was being used as a summer cottage but its exterior lines were identical with Father’s 1904 photo.

In 1934 Alice, like many other Colorado gold camps, experienced a renascence. (This was because of the price of gold rising from $20 to $35 an ounce.) The sturdy log cabins were re-roofed; the mill started, and the pit was turned into a real glory hole. Today Alice is unique because of its abandoned glory hole—the only summer resort-ghost town to boast of one within its town limits....

Returning to Clear Creek and driving farther up its course, is another tumbling tributary, a creek also coming in from the north. Originally this creek was called Lyon’s, but now Lion. It flows through the town of Empire about which the splendid historian, Ovando J. Hollister, said in 1866, “Of all the towns brought into existence by the famed Cherry Creek Sands, Empire bears away the palm for a pretty location and picturesque surroundings.” This statement is particularly true of North Empire, about a mile and a half up Lion Creek and its fork, North Empire Creek.

Bayard Taylor (the renowned nineteenth century lecturer and travel writer) and William N. Byers, founder and editor of the Rocky Mountain News, also visited the two towns that same year and were much impressed with their settings. Byers reported North Empire as “a hustling busy little hamlet right amid the mines. It has three or four mills.”

He also mentioned by name a number of prosperous mines, especially the Atlantic owned by Frank Peck who was later the founder of Lower Empire’s Peck House (now the Hotel Splendide). Byers was interested by an arastra in the gulch which was operated by water power and “was pointed out as a paying institution.”

Lower Empire was organized in the spring of 1860 by a band of prospectors who came up from Spanish Bar (then on the south side of Clear Creek close to its junction with Fall River). The first gold was discovered on Eureka Mountain, northwest of Empire. A find of rich placers and lodes soon followed on Silver Mountain, north of Empire. It was these mines that caused North Empire to spring up on the side of Silver and the flanking mountainside to the east, Covode.