Jerome Wheeler and the Gilded Camp

Before Jerome Wheeler arrived, Aspen was a collection of tents and muddy streets occupied by men hoping to get rich from the mountains above. The silver ore discovered in the late eighteen seventies had drawn thousands of miners into the Roaring Fork Valley, but it was Wheeler who transformed the camp into a city.

Wheeler had made his fortune as a partner in the Macy's department store in New York. He first visited Colorado in eighteen eighty-three and fell for the mountains, though he kept his Macy's stake until eighteen eighty-eight, when he sold it and moved his ambitions west for good. He built the Wheeler Opera House, which opened in April of eighteen eighty-nine, designed to bring legitimate theater to a mining town that had more saloons than schools. He opened the Hotel Jerome that November, a four-story Victorian building that cost a hundred and fifty thousand dollars and offered electric lights and indoor plumbing to guests who had been sleeping in canvas tents just six years earlier.

By the early eighteen nineties, Aspen was producing more silver than anywhere else in the country. The population had grown past ten thousand, with two hundred twenty-seven operating mines in the surrounding mountains, six newspapers, and performances by touring companies from New York. It was one of the most improbable cities in the American West: a velvet-curtained civilization perched at nearly eight thousand feet, built entirely on ore from the ground. Wheeler never fully profited from what he built. The silver crash came before he could recover his investment, and he died in nineteen eighteen, largely forgotten.