< Previous Page       Next Page >    

The western slope of the northern Sangre de Cristo Mountains and the San Luis Valley have drawn people since Neolithic times. Arrowheads and spear points, lost between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago by ancient hunters tracking migrating herds of mammoth bison that loved to graze on the rich grasslands of the Valley, have been unearthed near the San Luis Lakes State Park, between the town of Mosca and the Great Sand Dunes. The people of the Taos Pueblo, which is located at the southern end of the Valley, claim one of these lakes as the sipapu, or point of emergence into this world. And Blanca Peak, just down the range south of the Dunes, is sacred to the Navajo people.
Rich hunting grounds drew many Native American peoples to the Valley. Comanche, Ute, Kiowa and Navajo people have all hunted and camped in the Crestone area. An ancient quarry was discovered near Pole Creek, where various tribes quarried rock and chipped points and tools.
The first Europeans to enter the northern end of the Valley were Spanish settlers. In 1822 the King of Spain awarded a huge grant of land to Don Luis Maria Cabeza de Vaca (Baca). The original land grant, which ran from Las Vegas, New Mexico to Crestone or Kit Carson Peak, included 496,446.96 acres of land on both sides of the Sangres. The grant shrank considerably in size, following the Mexican Revolution and the war with the USA, which, made the grant a part of this country under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1846.
Settlers were encouraged to bring their families and herds to colonize the area. Remnants of these early settlers can been found in crumbling adobe buildings. An ancient Spanish arraste, used to crush stone, possibly to extract minerals like gold, was found near Cottonwood Creek. The grant was one of five land grants in the southwest to remain intact for over a hundred years,
The end of the American Civil War brought an influx of Anglo settlers to the northern Valley. Harry Hopkins, a Confederate veteran, built the first frame house in 1868 in the area just outside the current Crestone city limits.                      

In the 1870’s the first big gold strikes were made in Burnt Gulch, east and a bit north of Crestone. Around 1874, a rich “float”, a deposit of gold “floating” free of a vein in the earth, was discovered in the gulch amid the rock and aspen. Burnt gulch buzzed for a while with gold fever. Mining cabins clung to the steep sides of the gulch. But the big load was never unearthed in Burnt Gulch, and by 1880 most of the miners had abandoned their claims there and moved down to the newly platted Town of Crestone.
The year of 1886 saw the first in a series of great gold strikes of high-grade ore. Many of these strikes were made in the southern part of Crestone District in the Baca Grande Grant. In 1859 the Vaca (Baca) family had sold the grant to their attorney. The grant had changed owners several times since.
Every now and then the owner of the grant would evict all the miners from the grant. Miners and owners of the Baca Grande were often in litigation. The owners of the grant won and miners would be evicted from their claims and homes. While violence was generally avoided, miners were forcibly evicted from the Baca Grande Grant more than once.
At its peak around 1900, the Town of Crestone boasted a population of 2,000, and the entire district had an astounding 10,000 residents. Businesses thriving in Crestone in January 1901 included: five general stores, two lumber yards, seven saloons, one assay office, two butchers, one bakery, one barber, one bank, three doctors, one sign painter, four pool halls, two livery stables, four restaurants, two drug stores, one dry goods, one feed store, one printer, one laundry, two lawyers, two real estate offices, and two blacksmiths. The spacious, two storey Hotel Crestone was erected in February of 1901, on the corner of Cottonwood Street and Silver Avenue.
A local festival was held in 1901 to attract residents to the new boomtown of Crestone. According to a local newspaper account from the time, a local cowboy, Juan Fernandez, took full and perhaps unfair advantage of the free food and libations. He ate three cans of pig’s feet, three cans of baked beans, two cans of salmon and topped this off with liberal consumption of liquor.
Well it turned out to be Juan’s last supper! He died that very night of indigestion. His epitaph written on a board and nailed to a tree near his grave read: “Here lies the body of Juan the Glutton, who could eat a beef and a couple of mutton, to fame and fortune quite unknown, he brought a famine to Crestone.”
The momentous year of 1901, marked the coming of the railroad, as a spur line was laid for the Sangre de Cristo Railroad from Moffat to Crestone, and from there to the settlements of Cottonwood and Duncan on the Baca. It took ten hours then by rail to go from Denver to Crestone. During the heyday of the Independence mine, $80,000 worth of gold bullion was shipped by rail monthly to the Denver Mint.
By 1910 many of the smaller mining camps and towns in the Crestone District had become ghost towns. Crestone was down to one doctor and one minister. The town revived again in the early 1930s when the mines on the Baca Grande were reopened briefly. Crestone remained quiet again until the development of the Baca Grande Subdivision in the 1970s.