Town of Silver Plume, Colorado
Elevation: 9116 Population: 203*
*Population figure may include dogs, drop-ins, and ground squirrels (quote it with caution).
Part of the Georgetown-Silver Plume National Historic Landmark District
Silver Plume is a Home Rule Municipality located in the Rocky Mountains on I-70, about twelve miles east of the Continental Divide and some thirty-five miles west of Metro Denver, in Clear Creek County, one of seventeen original Colorado counties.
A brief history of the town is recorded below.
Town Clerk: Jodi Candlin(303/569-2363)
P.O. Drawer F, Silver Plume CO 80476
Silver Plume is a very small, old, rural mining town dating from the Colorado gold and silver rush of the last four decades of the 19th century. In 1859 gold was discovered at the confluence of Clear Creek and the Platte River near what is now Denver. Inspired by the 1849 California gold rush and by Horace Greeley’s immortal if misguided promotional admonition to “Go west, young man, go west,” literally thousands of fortune-seekers headed up Clear Creek into the Rocky Mountains, seeking the veins of ore that were the source of the nuggets and dust found in the waters of the Creek. The fortune hunters and miners came from several European countries as well as the east and midwest of the United States, and for a time Silver Plume was a very cosmopolitan, multi-cultural and multi-lingual town.
The sought-after veins of ore were (and are) part of the east-northeast Colorado ore belt running roughly from Boulder, Colorado southwest to the vicinity of Silverton and Telluride. The ore belt came into being millions of years ago when what may be the third version of the Rockies thrust upwards. See rockymtn.html for an interesting introduction to “orogeny,” the creation of mountains. Minerals including auriferous (gold-bearing) pyrites and argentiferous (silver-bearing) galena (lead sulfide) were dissolved in extremely hot water heated by the earth’s underlying mantle and forced into cracks in the metamorphic schists, gneisses and igneous granites of the mountains. When the water cooled, the deposited minerals solidified as veins of ore.
It is believed that originally some two miles of overburden covered the ore veins. Erosion caused by wind and water wore away the overburden down to the upper level of the ore--just in time for the mid-19th century prospectors to “strike it rich,” sell their claims to mining companies, and trigger the creation of towns like Silver Plume.
Although gold was the original metal sought in the Silver Plume area, by about 1864 some bright soul recognized that the grayish rock everyone had been kicking around and cursing was in fact silver ore, and the boom era for Silver Plume began.
The principle buyer of the silver was the United States government. America’s money at the time was based on a “bimetal” standard of gold and silver. However, in the midst of the economic “Panic of 1893” the nation switched to the gold standard, and Congress revoked the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. The price of silver tumbled, and Silver Plume’s boom era ended. American history buffs will remember William Jennings Bryan’s famous “cross of gold” speech, reiterated countless times in Chautauqua assemblies across the country . For an interesting discussion of the gold standard and monetarism click these links.