Cripple Creek Days

After a childhood spent in a Colorado gold mining town at the end of the nineteenth century and the turn of the twentieth, Mabel Barbee Lee chronicled her experiences in a memoir titled Cripple Creek Days. First published in 1958, the book is a clear-eyed account of the town’s boom days from the point of view of a young girl who has an eye for detail. Cripple Creek Days opens with a forward from Lowell Thomas, one of Lee’s pupils when she became the town’s schoolmarm, who dubs his former teacher "The Mark Twain of Cripple Creek.”

Lee was born in 1884, and when she was eight years old, her father brought the family to a frontier town in Colorado’s Pikes Peaks region. In 1892, Cripple Creek was just a tent city nestled in the mountains at an elevation of 9,500 feet. The Lees were there just in time to witness “the whole place turn to gold.”

Lee’s father was a “gold diviner,” or prospector, who decided to bring his reluctant wife and three children to look for ore in this new hotspot. Lee describes just how difficult and hardscrabble life was in a mining camp that had few amenities or markers of civilization. Her father is loving and honest, but hard-drinking and not always the best decision maker. Eventually, he and his “divining rod” do find a paying gold claim on Beacon Hill, but the Lees narrowly miss becoming millionaires when he sells his claim short rather than fully exploring the find.



While Lee observes her father’s struggles, she is also a keen, wide-eyed watcher of the other events in the growing town. His story ends up being a microcosm for the fates of many, give or take a lucky break: “Cripple Creek, by 1902, had produced a total of $111,361,633 and between thirty-five or forty bonanza kings. But many who had stumbled into fortunes, in spite of themselves, had a faculty for shedding them.”

The town is full of all kinds of people and places, and as Lee grows older and has more independent access to what’s around her, she describes sometimes surreal points of interest such as the slum-like Poverty Gulch. the aspirational faux-European Continental Hotel that is one of the several luxury inns that open to accommodate the new wealth, and a fantastically overbuilt house called Finn's Folly. She meets characters like the promoter Windy Joe, whose job is to bring more businesses and people to Cripple Creek – and who organizes a boxing match that Lee’s father enthuses as the “fight of the century.” From a distance, she pays attention to the alluring but dangerous madam Pearl De Vere, whose brothel is a source of prurient curiosity mixed with shock. Lee gives readers glimpses of gambling dens where the newly rich can become fawned-over high rollers until they lose everything but the shirts on their backs. Lee’s powers as a clear-eyed witness come through best whenever her description dispels some of the myths that have built up around the “wild West.” For example, she shows us articulate and educated people who have chosen frontier life from a variety of options, who don’t fit the mold of movie-style backwoodsmen.

Much of the action of the book revolves around the arrival and development of trains. While putting Cripple Creek on the map, trains are often involved in wrecks that take unprecedented numbers of lives. More personally, one of the most exciting events in Lee’s life takes place on a train that is attacked by outlaws. As the bandits ransack the cargo and rob the passengers, Lee hides a silver dollar in her mouth in an attempt to get it past them – unsuccessfully. She is lucky to get away with her life.



Life at the turn of the twentieth century could be quite hard for reasons having nothing to do with business acumen. Lee matter-of-factly reports unanticipated disasters such as all-consuming fires that are almost unbelievably destructive in a town where most buildings are wood, plagues of infectious disease that ravage the inhabitants at a time before antibiotics. Some of these horrors visit Lee’s own family. Her father suffers from miner’s lung, an inflammation of the brachial tissues, while her younger sister contracts and dies from one of the flu epidemics that make its way through the town, killing indiscriminately in an age before flu vaccines were available.

Throughout the memoir, what comes through best is how much Lee loved her life at Cripple Creek despite its hardships and her family’s intermittent suffering. For her, the place is connected indelibly with her love for her father.

Lee went on to write a sequel, Return to Cripple Creek, revising some of the characters we originally met in the first memoir, putting their last days into sometimes-stark relief.