page_title: Granite, Colorado
section_title: Early history
hierarchical_section_title: Granite, Colorado / Early history
context_page_description: Granite is an unincorporated community with a U.S. Post Office in Chaffee County, Colorado, United States. The zip code of Granite is 81228. According to the 2010 census, the population is 116.
  Situated between the Mosquito and the Sawatch mountain ranges, Granite is a
  high mountain town located on the Arkansas River midway between Leadville to the north, and Buena Vista to the south. It is in close proximity to the second and third highest peaks in the contiguous United States, Mount Elbert and Mount Massive.
  The town has a rich history from its days during the Pike's Peak Gold Rush, when it began as a mining camp and quickly boomed into a city of 3,000, holding the county seat. Early prospectors, such as Horace Tabor, were attracted to the area.
context_section_description: The Pike's Peak Gold Rush that began in 1859 brought an unprecedented number of people into the Colorado Territory.  Among the earliest gold discoveries in Colorado were placer deposits near the headwaters of the Arkansas River in Oro city.  In 1860, Cache Creek, a mining camp near Granite, became the first settlement of note with a population of about 300.  By the following year, Granite, located on either side of the Arkansas river, exploded to a population of 3,000.  The settlement included a three-mile stretch of river and extended two-miles up Cache Creek.  In 1867 free quartz gold was discovered and a mill was built. In 1868 the county seat was moved to Granite from the neighboring town of Dayton near present-day Twin Lakes, no longer in existence.
  1874 and 1875 brought the "Lake County War", a war involving a group of men from the nearby town of Nathrop known as "The Regulators", to Granite. The war reached its climax  when members of the “Committee of Safety” killed Probate Judge Elias Dyer, the son of the well-known minister John Lewis Dyer, in his own courtroom. The vigilante committee had been trying to rid the county of "lawbreakers"  using illegal arrests, coerced confessions and forced exile as tools in its campaign.  No one was ever convicted of Judge Dyer's murder.  Murders were common, but convictions were not.   More than one hundred homicides occurred during this period without a single conviction; it was almost impossible to get witnesses to swear to the killings.
  The early prospectors included Horace Tabor, who later moved up the valley to Leadville where he was to find his fortune in the Colorado Silver Boom that swept Leadville in 1879. In a much-publicized scandal Tabor divorced his wife and married young and beautiful Elizabeth "Baby Doe" McCourt, twenty years his junior. 
  The Tabors had two children, Lily and Silver Dollar.  They lost their wealth when the price of silver dropped in 1893 and Tabor died in 1899 with a final request of Baby Doe that she maintain the claim to their silver mine.  Baby Doe lived in squalid conditions in the tool shed of the mine for thirty years and was found dead in 1936.
  Until 1879 the village of Granite was located in Lake County, once one of the two largest of the Colorado Territory’s original 17 counties.  As the site of some of the richest placer gold strikes in Lake County, Granite held the position of county seat,  but in 1878 they lost out to booming  silver-rich Leadville, 17 miles to the north.  However, Granite did manage to remain the county seat, but not of Lake County.  They redrew the county lines creating  Chaffee County, with Granite as the  county seat.  But a year later an election was held resulting in a win for Buena Vista, 17 miles to the south of Granite, with 1,128 votes out of a total population of  1,200 (when women couldn’t vote). Granite declared the election fraudulent and refused to give up its position,  so late one night a group of men from Buena Vista took matters into their own hands. 
  Buena Vistans voted to make their town the county seat, but Granite refused to give up the records. So a group of men led by Ernest Wilbur "borrowed" a locomotive and flat car and went up to Granite late on the night of November 12, 1880. The men built a siding to the Granite Courthouse and kicked in the door.
  Sheriff John Mear and his wife investigated the noise and were forced at gunpoint to watch the removal of all the county records by the Buena Vista men. Furniture was unbolted from the floor, including the railing. Even the heat stove, with embers remaining in it from the day's use, was loaded onto the flatcar. —Buena Vista Heritage Museum
caption: Pack train bound for the Dyer mine
exif: {}