A Brief History of Telluride

A Brief History of Telluride is a small book full of large characters. The description introduces Lucien Nunn, who almost single handedly saved Telluride's mining industry with the first commercial use of alternating-current electricity in the world. It also brings in dashing and conceited Bulkeley Wells, who managed the Smuggler-Union Mine and also led the Colorado militia against his striking workers.

Then there is Charles Waggoner, who was reported to play Robin Hood during the Depression, stealing from rich eastern banks to protect his local depositors. The description calls these 'fascinating residents,' and the book is built around them rather than around dates alone. It reads as a set of portraits of a town through the people who made its choices.

This is a short book, 88 pages on our record, from a 2003 edition published by Western Reflections Pub. Co. Open Library files it under history. Telluride is now famous for skiing and festivals, so a history that starts underground, with ore, power and labor, is a useful counterweight.

This book is for people who know Telluride as a ski town and want to know what was there first. Visitors walking Colorado Avenue, history readers interested in labor conflict, and anyone curious about early electric power will find a short way in. Teachers looking for local stories to enliven a Colorado unit can use the three portraits as starting points. It is brief by design, so readers who want a legal or technical account of the strikes will need a longer book, but as an introduction it is hard to beat for the price.

Christian J. Buys wrote this book and four others we publish, among them a photographic book on Leadville and a collection of nineteenth-century Colorado illustrations. We could not find a biography of him that we can trust, and we will not make one up from a name on a cover. Everything we can say is on the books themselves, and his author page lists all five together.

More about Christian J. Buys →

The Colorado Encyclopedia says Telluride was founded as a mining center in 1878, first under the name Columbia, and that the post office changed the name to Telluride to avoid confusion with a California town. Silver drove the boom of the 1880s. In 1891 Lucien Lucius Nunn threw the switch at his Ames Power Plant on the San Miguel River, which the encyclopedia calls the first station to deliver alternating-current power for commercial use. That power reached Telluride in 1894.

By 1895 the population had risen to almost 2,500. Wikipedia notes that around the turn of the twentieth century there were serious labor disputes in the mines, that the Colorado National Guard was called out, and that there were deaths on both sides. It also records that Butch Cassidy robbed the San Miguel Valley Bank in Telluride in June 1889, his first major recorded crime. A flood in 1914 hit the town but did not stop it.

Source: Colorado Encyclopedia, Telluride