A Portrait of Colorado Springs
The Gold Boom
Cripple Creek gold changed Colorado Springs in the 1890s, while creating 30 millionaires by 1902.
Gold was first discovered in a 9,000-foot high cow pasture by an obscure prospector named Bob Womack in October of 1890. The camp eventually produced $125 million in gold during its first decade.
As opposed to Palmer and his friends, Cripple Creek gold produced two new and very different kinds of millionaires, both of whom affected the future of Colorado Springs: Spencer Penrose and Winfie
ld Scott Stratton.
Spencer Penrose, who had come out west from a rich Philadelphia family, began his mining career in Cripple Creek in 1892 processing the ore others had dug, investing the money he made there - as well as his family's and friends' money - into other mining interests until he hit it very big.
Financially dragging along Charles Tutt, another eastern immigrant (though more circumspect and conservative), Penrose made millions for the both of them from investment in a copper mine. As for Tutt, he bequeathed to the city he grew to love a philanthropic legacy, which continued on with his son, Charles L. Tutt, and his extensive family, which continues today.
The Broadmoor Hotel's opening, in 1918, was one of Penrose's greatest achievements.
Penrose had decided to build a hotel that melded the finest qualities of all those he had been a guest at. He committed $1.1 million to the venture. In the end, Penrose spent in excess of $3 million. As it rose from the ground, most locals saw it as an impending failure: The wealth of hotels in the area had combined with an economic slump, and existing hotels were hard-pressed for business. In the end, the Broadmoor took the others' business away, and Penrose relentlessly continued to expand his hotel to include greenhouses, a golf course, hiking trails - even a first-class polo ground.
At the same time, he began to further exploit the region's Rock of Gibraltar - Pikes Peak.
In 1806, when Lt. Zebulon Pike had first seen the mountain that would bear his name, he had predicted nobody would ever reach its summit. It was only 14 years later that Edwin James conquered it. Katherine Lee Bates was so impressed by the view from the top that she penned "America the Beautiful" after a visit in the summer of 1893.
By 1913, Penrose got the wheels turning for a highway to the top, capitalizing on the new popularity of 
motorcars. The top of the Peak was marked with a memorial to little Erin O'Keefe, eaten in 1876 by pack rats on a visit to the mountain with his "father," Army Sgt. John O'Keefe. The world heard the grisly news, and mourned the "child's" death; and it was only a few who later heard Erin was actually a black cat, part of the sergeant's hoax.
Penrose decided the summit of the Peak, and his highway could use better publicity than that; he initiated the Pikes Peak Auto Hill Climb the year after the highway opened.
Later, he started the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, featuring the largest elephant in the world. Yet, by all accounts, the charitable El Pomar Foundation is one of his greatest legacies, still promoting non-profit organizations and community projects with infusions of money into the 1990s.
Winfield Scott Stratton, another millionaire of the Cripple Creek gold fields, was an entirely different story. A $3-a-day-carpenter and occasional prospector, he discovered gold on Battle Mountain in Victor near Cripple Creek in 1891. Stratton extracted $4 million worth of gold from it in less than a decade. When he sold the mine in 1899, he received $11 million for it. In between, Stratton changed the face of Colorado Springs.
If Penrose's career showed the town how a blue blood from Philadelphia could playfully invest his money and enjoy the ride, Stratton showed the town how a poor man from Indiana who learned the carpentry trade in order to prospect on the side could turn into one of the town's most tragic figures.
One of the first things he did with his newfound wealth was buy bicycles for every laundry girl in the Springs. He bought land and then gave it to the city for a new post office and city hall. He spent $2 million on a streetcar system and another million on a Mining Exchange Building, where dealers in Cripple Creek stocks eventually built up a larger trade than Wall Street. He even started the town's first professional baseball team, aptly titled "The Millionaires."
He felt bad for Bob Womack, the one who started it all, and gave him $5,000, because the gruff cowboy had sold his original El Paso Lode for a pittance and never after had any money. Yet it was Womack who perhaps knew Stratton well enough to say of him, "Poor old man Stratton! All that money to worry about!"
Stratton died at the age of 54 in his modest home at 116 N. Weber St. of a liver ailment brought on by drinking. Yet, even in death, he gave most of his money to the community to build the Myron Stratton Home for the penniless elderly and orphans, named after his father and still going strong today.
Continued in Part III
