Fairplay
The origin of the town of Fairplay starts with one David Pound, a prospector brought to the area by the promise of gold along Tarryall Creek.[1] Following the "financial panic" of 1857, a steady stream of individuals from the east headed towards the Rocky Mountains in search of better prospects. "Good placers" were confirmed in 1859 and the stream became a flood pushing its way further north into the mountains. As the first prospectors infiltrated the heart of Park County, stakes were claimed along Deadwood Gulch and Tarryall Creek. From Tarryall, David Pound and others began to explore further afield, eventually arriving at Beaver Creek where Pound stumbled upon "scales of gold as big as watermelon seeds."[2] While this story has been consigned to the realm of rumor and hearsay, a rumor was all that was needed to bring more prospectors running. The claims at Tarryall Creek were already apportioned using a strict first-come-first-served policy, which earned the camp the disdainful nickname "Graball" (grab all). The disgruntled prospectors who moved on to Beaver Creek audaciously adopted the name "Fair Play" for their budding encampment.[3]
The name of the camp changed many times over the next fifteen years and finally reached its current form of "Fairplay" in 1874. In 1861 there were 100 residents, with the number of active miners fluctuating with the seasons.[4] Although no Chinese individuals are reported to have been living in Park County in 1870, at least a few would have begun to arrive in the early 1870s based on the fact that in 1874 there were sixty Chinese placer miners employed by Frederick A. Clark and J. W. Smith at the Fairplay Placer.[5] By 1880, there were 124 people of Chinese descent living in Park County.[6]
The Chinese immigrants who moved to Fairplay lived across the river from the main town. The current understanding in Fairplay is that they settled on the plateau directly opposite the town, on the same level as their white neighbors.[7] Here the Chinese residents constructed approximately twenty small cabins in a row consisting of one room each, with a window and door at the front. According to the author Linda Bjorkland, they also built a two-story boarding house and "kept gardens and chickens."[8]
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[1] Virgnina McConnell Simmons, Bayou Salado: the Story of South Park (Colorado Springs, CO: Century One Press, 1982), 63
[2] Simmons, 64.
[3] Simmons, 64.
[4] Simmons, 99.
[5] Gerald E. Rudolph, “The Chinese in Colorado, 1869-1911” (dissertation, 1964), 46-47.
[6] United States Census Bureau, "Population by Race, Sex, and Nativity," in Statistics of the Population of the United States at the Tenth Census, (Washington: Department of the Interior, Census Office, 1880), 383, https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1883/dec/vol-01-population.html
[7] Anonymous, personal communication, June 23, 2023.
[8] Linda Bjorklund, A Brief History of Fairplay (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2013), 71.