Peabody Placer
One of the most prominent mines in the vicinity of Hamilton was the Peabody Placer, named after its proprietor Leland, or Lelon, Peabody, who moved to the area in the latter half of the nineteenth century.[1]The Peabody Placer, and its neighboring Fortune Placer, were two of the most lucrative claims in the county well into the twentieth century.[2] Combined, the worth of the gold extracted between 1850 to 1938 is estimated to be around one million dollars.[3] Early on, Leland Peabody hired a team of fifteen white American and immigrant miners but, after deciding that he needed a larger number of skilled workers, he began to hire laborers from China.[4] For a time, nearly all Chinese miners living in Hamilton worked for Mr. Peabody at his placer mine on the Tarryall.
In a personal letter written by one of his grandchildren, it was suggested that Leland Peabody was the first in Park County to employ Chinese laborers.[5] For the entirety of the 1880s, Leland hired miners from China almost exclusively and enlisted Alfred S. Turner to supervise them.[6] According to the 1885 state census, there were seventeen Chinese men living in the enumeration district two, which included Hamilton, Como, and King. The majority of them were probably working the Peabody Placer.[7] All seventeen of these men were designated as miners, and four were also listed as servants.[8]
Information about the Chinese miners that worked for Leland is sparse. Mostly there are simply brief mentions, verbal accounts from Como residents, and newspaper articles attesting to a handful of events.[9] In 1893, after an attack on the Chinese quarters in Como, the assailants appear to have succeeded in their mission to expel all Chinese men from residing in Como and working at the Peabody Placer.[10] Five years later, Leland Peabody died at the age of 64.[11] While he may have been one of the earliest mine owners in Park County to employ laborers from China, it appears to have been purely a business arrangement in light of how quickly he cast them off under the pressure of anti-Chinese violence. Apart from the tenuous, single-sentence affirmations of their presence found in various texts and oral histories, it is almost as though people from China never existed in Hamilton aside from the remnants of the terraced garden walls.
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[1] “Lelon Joseph ‘Leland’ or Leon Peabody,” AncestryLibrary, accessed 2022, https://www.ancestrylibrary.com/family-tree/person/tree/69278931/person/32234229447/facts.
[2] Quentin D. Singewald, “Gold Placers and their Geologic Environment in Northwestern Park County, Colorado,” in Contributions to Economic Geology, 1947. United States Department of the Interior, (Washington, DC: 1951), 164, 146.
[3] Singewald, 145.
[4] Simmons, 162.
[5] “Lelon Joseph ‘Leland’ or Leon Peabody."
[6] Gerald E. Rudolph, “The Chinese in Colorado, 1869-1911” (dissertation, 1964), 63; Simmons, 162.
[7] People of Chinese descent were often left out of census records for a variety of reasons. It is likely that this number presented here most likely is inaccurate.
[8] Secretary of the Interior. Park County Colorado 1885 State Census § (1885), 24.
[9] George W. Champion, “Remembrances of South Park,” Colorado Magazine, January 1963, 29, https://www.historycolorado.org/sites/default/files/media/document/2018/ColoradoMagazine_v40n1_January1963.pdf; Rudolph, 65; Fairplay Flume (Fairplay, CO), June 14, 1894, Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection, https://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org; “The Chinese Must Go,” Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO), Aug. 2, 1893, Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection;“Mining Summary,” Mining and Scientific Press 68, no. 1 (1894): 333-334, Internet Archive, accessed September 18, 2023, https://archive.org/details/miningscien68unse/page/n337/mode/2up.
[10] “The Chinese Must Go,” The Rocky Mountain News.
[11] “Lelon Joseph ‘Leland’ or Leon Peabody”; “Another Pioneer Gone,” Fairplay Flume, Apr. 15, 1898.