Lulu City, Grand County, Colorado, USAi

Regional Level Types
Lulu City	Residential Area (Historical)
Grand County	County
Colorado	State
USA	Country

In the early 1880s there was a bustling of activity on the headwaters of the Colorado River below Specimen Mountain as miners searched for gold and silver lodes and dreamed of striking the big one.

How it all began is not perfectly clear, but the evidence indicates that J. E. Shipler prospected the area as early as 1873 and by 1880 he, or so he said, had located seventeen lodes in the Lead Mountain Mining District between Michigan and Jack Creeks. In 1878 or 1879 Benjamin Burnett of Fort Collins heard of a silver strike Shipler had made in the vicinity of what became Lulu City, and dispatched an old prospector friend, John Rigdon, to look the area over for precious metals. Rigdon found a good vein, and when he had the ore assayed, Burnett decided he would visit the site and look it over. Burnett was pleased with what he saw, and, according to his son who was with him at the time, began to lay out a town that he named Lulu City.

Lulu in 1880 was booming. In addition to the construction activity, a road was opened to Lulu about the middle of August. The news of the strikes on the headwaters of the Colorado River drew miners from North Park and by July a reported 200 miners were busily staking out claims in the hills around Lulu City.

During the first winter, that of 1879-80, only ten or twelve miners remained at Lulu to carry on their activities, and these men had their problems, not the least of which was running out of food in February and having to snowshoe over the mountain to Estes Park. The following winter men remained behind, but this time roads had been laid out and the miners made arrangements to have food sledded into Lulu.

The new season opened in the spring of 1881 with high hopes and the smell of riches in the air. Prospectors roamed the hills around Lulu and dug holes in the mountain sides. They gave their mines such names as Wild Rose, Rustic, Friday Night, Reindeer, Tiger, Bonanza, and Pioneer. One of the most promising was the Southern Cross owned by Ben Dunshe. It received considerable publicity from the local reporter of the Colorado Miner, and the Rocky Mountain News carried a story that a new type of ore was found at that mine. A miner, the story went, held an ore-bearing rock over a campfire and the silver melted out.

During the main working season of 1881 and the following winter many miners spent their time developing those mines that looked promising. By May of 1882 the Carbonate mine had a 400-foot drift, the Southern Cross had one of 125 feet, the Triumph of 115 feet, and the Greensboro 85 feet.

The gold and silver deposits were only in pockets, and the ore for the most part was low grade. Although there was talk off and on about bringing a smelter into the area, one never was set up, and the miners had no way of extracting the metal from the ore. In the absence of a smelter the only alternative the mine owner has is to transport the ore to the nearest smelter, but there were no railroads near the Lead Mining District, and wagon transportation was not economically feasible for such low grade ore.