Bachelor City
When gold and silver were discovered in the nearby mountains, these meadows at 10,500 feet in elevation became home to nearly 1,200 people. Between 1892 and 1896, this was the bustling community of Bachelor City. In January 1892, an eighty-acre town site was surveyed into twenty-four blocks with twelve streets. By March of 1892, nearly 100 ramshackle houses had been hastily constructed.
In its heyday, Bachelor City had a dozen saloons, four hotels, five grocery stores, a meat market, two barber shops, two bakeries, several restaurants, a school, a jail, city hall and a Catholic Church with a parsonage. Bachelor City had a doctor and a dentist and the town newspaper, the “Teller Topics.”
“The camp was a bustling one, and its citizens composed ... of the rougher reckless types of Westerners, men who neither feared nor shunned danger, and to whom 'knockdown and dragout' fights were merely ordinary recreation. Brawls and pistol-play were a nightly occurrence in the numerous saloons and gambling dens that infested the place ... the character of Bachelor remained tough.” -- Bachelor City - 1892
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