From Cripple Creek
Next to Leadville, the Cripple Creek district has the most fascination for the preterist. It had the most fabulous gold production of any camp in Colorado—nay, in the United States. According to historian Marshall Sprague, the district created twenty-eight millionaires as a modest estimate. One of those who made a million was lumberman Sam Altman. Formerly he ran a sawmill in Poverty Gulch but in 1893 he founded a town, Altman.
His town was close to three big producers, the Pharmacist, Victor and Buena Vista, and to his own mine, the Free Coinage on Bull Hill. By November of 1893, the town was supporting four restaurants, six saloons, six groceries, several boardinghouses and a telephone. A school house and two hundred frame or log houses had been erected, and the loyal citizens claimed a population of twelve hundred.
From its high perch Altman could look down on Independence, Goldfield, Cameron and many another mushrooming settlement that burgeoned in the Cripple Creek excitement of the early ’90’s. It was not a dressy camp, but a workaday place peopled solely by miners. These miners were workers—hard workers—and they thought they should be more justly rewarded for their labor.
One of Altman’s miners was John Calderwood, a Scotsman and a graduate of the McKeesport School of Mines in the class of 1876. He elected to be an organizer for the Western Federation of Miners, a newly formed union born in Butte, Montana, in May, 1893. He was no firebrand but a dignified conscientious worker. Within two months he had signed up every Altman miner for his Free Coinage Union No. 19, W. F. M., and promised them a standard eight-hour three-dollar day.
T. H. Routh, 1894; D.P.L.
ALTMAN CLAIMED TO BE THE HIGHEST TOWN
Altman was platted by Sam Altman in 1893 on the short saddle between Bull Hill and Bull Cliff and soon had a population of fifteen hundred (including Midway a hamlet to the northwest). Its altitude was 10,620 feet. It claimed to be the highest incorporated town in the world and probably was, in North America. Both upper and lower shots were taken near the crest of Bull Hill with Pikes Peak looming in the background. Bull Hill was the scene of one of the early skirmishes of labor-capital battles and was notable as the first significant victory for labor. Part of the maneuvering was comic opera and part, raw violence.
