Buckskin Joe, Park County, Colorado
Buckskin Joe, also called Laurette or Lauret, is a deserted ghost town in Colorado, United States. It was an early mining town, and county seat of Park County, Colorado. History. The area was first inhabited by Non-Native Americans in 1859 during the Pikes Peak Gold Rush, when gold was discovered along Buckskin Creek, on the east side of the Mosquito Range. At the time of its first settlement, the town was in the western part of Kansas Territory. The town was formally organized in September 1860 and named Laurette, a contraction of the first  names of the only two women in the camp, the sisters Laura and Jeanette Dodge. But it was always more popularly known as Buckskin Joe, after Joseph Higginbottom, an early trapper and prospector. Little is known for certain about Higginbottom. Some accounts refer to him as an African-American; some accounts say that he was the one who first discovered gold in the vicinity of the town. Mining shifted to rich hardrock deposits in the Phillips lode and other veins. By 1861, when the Laurette/Buckskin Joe Post Office opened, in the newly formed Colorado Territory, the town boasted two  hotels, fourteen stores, and a bank. On January 7, 1862 the county seat of Park County moved to Buckskin Joe from Tarryall, now also a ghost town. At its peak, the town was credited with a population of 5,000, but historian Robert L. Brown considers this number far too large. The placer and vein gold deposits were rich, but were quickly exhausted. By 1866, the town was reported to be deserted, and the courthouse building was moved down the valley to the new county seat of Fairplay. In the late 1950s, Horace Tabor's general store was dismantled, hauled away , and reassembled at the tourist attraction and movie set also called Buckskin Joe, away from the original site. It remained there until 2011 when it, along with the entire tourist attraction and movie set, was sold to a private collector and moved to a private ranch in western Colorado. Location. The site of Buckskin Joe is about west of Alma, Colorado, at , at an altitude of above mean sea level.