The Cripple Creek district sits inside an ancient volcanic caldera—the eroded remnant of a volcanic collapse that occurred roughly 28 million years ago. The caldera geology is what created the gold deposits that drew 50,000 people to this corner of Teller County in the 1890s. It is also what the archive considers the first fact worth knowing about the district: the ground here is not ordinary ground. It was formed by a catastrophic event. It has a specific character that is geological before it is historical, and the archive treats it accordingly.
The fires came in August of 1896. The first started in a dance hall on the morning of the fifth. By evening it had consumed most of the central business district of Cripple Creek. The second fire started two days later, before the first had been fully extinguished, and destroyed what the first had left standing. The cause of the second fire was never conclusively established. The archive notes that the interval between the two fires—not two days after, not one week after, but forty-eight hours and fourteen minutes after, by the most precise contemporary accounts—is the detail that prompted the original inquiry.
The labor wars of 1903 and 1904 are documented history. The Western Federation of Miners organized the district. The mine owners responded with the state militia. The resolution involved the deportation of union leaders and the physical removal of hundreds of workers from Colorado at gunpoint. The archive is not revisiting the politics of that conflict. It is reviewing the deportation records, which are incomplete, and cross-referencing them against the post-conflict employment records, which are also incomplete, and noting the names that appear in neither.
The Tunnel System
The mines of the Cripple Creek district produced a tunnel network beneath Victor and Cripple Creek that extends for hundreds of miles by conservative estimate. The operative word is conservative. The archive has reviewed the available survey records and found that the surveys themselves disagree on the extent and configuration of the system. Early surveys were conducted by the mining companies for their own purposes, which included concealing the locations of productive veins from competitors. Later surveys attempted to reconcile the earlier ones and found contradictions that were never resolved.
The result is an underground geography beneath two occupied towns that has not been authoritatively mapped. Engineers who have reviewed the available surveys for structural purposes have noted, in reports the archive has been able to obtain, that the surveys account for significantly less volume than the known excavation history of the district would suggest. Where the remainder is has not been answered.
Branch Investigations
The Cripple Creek district archive is among the most document-dense the Obscura maintains. The following threads are in active development.