The Telluride
Historical
Museum (formerly
San Miguel
County Historical
Society
- formed in
1965) provides
a rich and compelling
experience
to visitors,
offers learning
opportunities,
rewards curiosity,
and encourages
a deeper understanding
of
our past --
all by exploring
the events,
artifacts, and
personal accounts
of Telluride's
cultural
heritage
.Click Here for More
Settlement at the head of the San Miguel River began in earnest in 1875. By 1879 a placer
operation at Keystone at the west end of
the park was washing the gold dust from the
gravel deposits above the river bed.
There may have been gold dust in the gravel
but it was the veins of silver bearing ore
high on the steep mountain slopes above the
upper San Miguel River Valley which shaped
the early history of Telluride.
The town, temporarily known as Columbia,
was founded in 1878 and assigned a post office
in 1880. The name Telluride is taken from
an ore combining the element tellurium with a high gold content and some silver.
Ironically, tellurium the ore does not occur
in the immediate vicinity of Telluride the
town.
Despite the wealth hidden beneath the surface
of its mountains, Telluride and the San Miguel
region suffered the usual slow start resulting
from isolation. In 1881 the Russian immigrant
and builder of the Rio Grande southern Railroad,
Otto Mears provided some relief when his
toll road from the town of Dallas in the
Uncompahgre River Valley reached Telluride
before continuing on to Ophir and its intended
destination, Rico. With the completion of
each of his toll roads, wagons loaded-with
ore could go where only burros and mules
packing ore had gone before. But hauling
unprocessed ore by wagon was still expensive
and continued to eat into mine owners' profits.
The first Rio Grande Southern train rolled
into Telluride in 1890. Telluride, in the
valley below the mines, boomed. Those mines-the
Tomboy, the Smuggler-Union, the Sheridan,
among many-became legendary and their managers
and absentee owners became fabulously rich
and powerful. Their local legacy is the beautiful
Victorian architecture that survives in Telluride
to this day.
The miners worked deep below the surface
in mines whose portals were as high as 12,000
feet above sea level. They worked ten or
twelve hour shifts in mines and mills that
ran around the clock. They lived in boarding
houses precariously attached to plunging
mountainsides. In the winter the snow buried
the landscape and the trails down to the
towns.
The miners lived always on the brink of
death ... premature dynamite blasts, fatal
gas, underground fires, avalanches, falls,
cave-ins, pneumonia. Many died young, leaving
widows and orphans in tents and shanties
with nothing. The miners earned $3.50 a day
... or less. They had no mansions, private
rail cars, nor power. They are often absent
from the history of the mining camps.
But in the history of Telluride there is
a chapter about the working man written by
the working men. In 1896, the Western Federation
of Miners chartered a union in Telluride.
In 1899, most of the mines granted workers
$3 a day for an eight hour day less $1 per
day boarding costs. Millworkers did not benefit
from this "windfall."
One mine, the Smuggler-Union, held out against
the better pay and working hours. On May
4,1901, union members at the Smuggler-Union
Mine went on strike. They wanted $3 a day
for an eight hour day. The management of
the Smuggler-Urdon ignored the strikers and
hired strikebreakers for ... $3 a day for
an eight hour day. That should have been
the end of unions in Telluride. It wasn't.
The impasse triggered years of management-labor
conflict.
A shoot out between strikers and strikebreakers
on July 3, 1901, left one striker and two
strikebreakers dead and three wounded including
the mine superintendent. After a truce disarmed
the strikebreakers, they were beaten and
run out of the valley by union members. In
1902, the manager of the Smuggler-Union was
assassinated in his living room.
In 1903, millworkers walked off the job
and sympathetic mine workers soon followed.
Six carloads of state militia men were sent
by Colorado's governor into Telluride. Strikers
were loaded into railcars and dumped at Ridgway
with warnings not to return. Many did. The
strike continued until November 29, 1904,
when the Western Federation of Miners conceded
defeat. The mine owners and sympathetic merchants,
backed by armed militia men, had outlasted
the by then poverty stricken mining families.
Even so, the workers of Telluride had written
themselves into history.
Today the mines overlooking Telluride are
silent. The decline began soon after the
strike was broken and lingered for decades.
Today, the aerial trams leading up the mountains
do not carry ore and miners. They carry skiers
up one of the world's best ski mountains.
The parks and halls that once rang with the
oratory of Populists, Socialists, and union
leaders today resound to bluegrass, jazz,
film, and mountain festivals. Snow, the bane
of miners, is cheered in modern Telluride
and ideas, not silver, are the new source
of wealth.
Settlement at the head of the 
