The Price of Idaville
A town gave up a woman's name to get an oil man's
There are about thirty of us in Guffey most of the year, and not one of us is named Guffey.
They do turn up, though. Every so often somebody comes through with that name on their license, and it is a small event around here. Some of them saw it on a map and could not drive past it. Some believe they are related to the man the town was named for and want to see what he got out of the deal. A few are not sure why they stopped, which I understand completely. You find your own name on a sign in the middle of Colorado and you pull over.
What none of them has been able to tell me yet is much about him. That is partly my fault for not asking better questions. It is mostly because the story the rest of us have been handing them is thin, and I have started to think it is wrong.
The version you get around here, and the version you get in every ghost town book on the shelf, is that a camp in the hills above Currant Creek wanted a rich man's attention in 1896, borrowed a rich man's name, and the rich man never noticed. That is a common enough story in this state. Half the Colorado map is named for men who never came. Speculators, senators, the brother-in-law of whoever filed the plat. You look up your town's namesake and find somebody who saw the place once from a train window, or never at all.
James McClurg Guffey was a Pittsburgh oil man. In 1896 he was moderately well known in a business that had not yet made anybody famous. Five years later he financed the Lucas well at Spindletop, the gusher that ran wild for nine days and produced more oil per day than every other well in the United States put together, and for a while he was one of the most talked-about businessmen in the country. The company he founded became Gulf Oil. His partners, the Mellons, eased him out in 1907. He took three million dollars, lost most of it, and was in receivership by 1910.
Good story. Nothing to do with us, supposedly.
Except that I have been sitting with a stack of Park County deeds, and here is what Book 62, page 555 says. On the first of January, 1901, a man named W. C. McKelvy conveyed to J. M. Guffey of Pittsburgh, County of Allegheny, Pennsylvania an interest in seven lode claims about a mile north of town, and a piece of the townsite itself. Nine days before Spindletop.
Three years after that, Guffey's name is on the location certificate for the Irene Mill Site, a rectangle of ground 350 by 600 feet, just under the five acres the law allowed. Not as a buyer. As a co-locator, which means somebody walked that ground, set corners, and put his name on the paper alongside the two people who did the walking.
And in October of 1928 a widow in Cripple Creek started running a forfeiture notice against him in the Cripple Creek Times and Victor Record. She ran it three months, paid the publisher twenty-two dollars, and swore out an affidavit that he had never paid his share of the assessment work. The court found him in default in 1929. He died the next year.
So the man held ground here for twenty-eight years. He did not merely lend his name. He was a co-owner of record, and at the end of it a woman in Teller County had to advertise him out of the claim like any other deadbeat partner.
None of that is in any book about Guffey. It is not on the historical marker. It is not in the National Register paperwork. It has been sitting in the county clerk's records the whole time, waiting for somebody to go pull the book.
But it does not explain the name, and I want to be straight about that, because it took me a while to see it.
The town became Guffey in May of 1896. That deed is dated January of 1901. Four years and seven months apart. Whatever put his name on the sign, it was not that piece of paper.
Which makes it better, not worse.
Here is what I think happened. The Post Office turned down Freshwater because California already had one, so the camp had to produce a name on short notice. And they already had a name. They had been Idaville, after Ida, who was living right there and buying up claims with both hands. They threw it over and reached two thousand miles east instead.
You do not rename a town for a man you already have. You rename it for a man you want.
And in May of 1896, James McClurg Guffey was not somebody you would name a town after for the glory of it. Spindletop was five years away. He was an oil and gas operator in Pittsburgh, comfortable, not famous. Which means somebody up on that hill knew exactly who he was, and knew he was the sort of man who would send money a long way from home on somebody's word. That is not a coincidence you can shrug at. That is a specific person with a specific address book.
I have a guess about who, and I will get to him. The short version is that the people holding the best ground on that hill were Pittsburgh people themselves.
The other thing worth knowing is that 1896 is precisely when Guffey was doing this. That same year a Colonel named William Dewey talked him into funding a short railroad out of Nampa, Idaho, toward the Silver City mines. Construction started that September. By March of 1897 the crossing where that line hit the Snake River was already being called Guffey, and it still is. There is a steel truss bridge out there with his name on it.
Both Guffey place names come out of the same twelve months of his life. Same mechanism both times. A western mining man short of capital, reaching a Pittsburgh oil man through an introduction. Neither one required him to own a square foot of anything first.
So the name was an ask. The deed, five years on, is the answer coming back.
I should say that I can be wrong about this, and there is a small, specific thing that would prove it either way. The Park County grantee index, surname Guffey, from 1895 to 1901. If his name is not in there before that New Year's Day deed, I am right. If it is, I have some rewriting to do. That is a morning's work at the courthouse in Fairplay and it is near the top of my list.
That is the first thing I want to say about this series. The stories a place tells about itself and the records the place actually generated are two separate bodies of evidence, and where they disagree, the records usually win. Not always. A deed can be wrong, a clerk can transpose a number, a surveyor can label his own corners backwards, and I have examples of all three in the pile. But a deed is written by somebody with money on the line, at the time, under oath. A ghost town book is written eighty years later by somebody working from another ghost town book.
The second thing is that the good material is almost never about the famous man.
Take the woman who ran Guffey out of his claim. Her name was Ida, and before this town was Guffey it was Idaville, and it was Idaville because of her. Ida Etta Borland, out of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. In February of 1895 she deeded a placer claim to two men, one of whom she married ten weeks later. That was right in the middle of the three weeks W. C. McKelvy spent staking seven lodes on the hill north of town, one every few days, Hesperus and Caliph and My Sisters and Lucern and Pompadour and Edinburgh and Eurydice.
The post office opened as Idaville that April. She married McKelvy in May. So when this town got its first name she was still Miss Borland, a few weeks out from becoming Mrs. McKelvy, and somebody thought enough of her to put her name on the place.
Go through the deeds and it is her name on nearly all of them. Four separate sellers in 1895. Five tax deeds in 1904. Town lots bought in her own name in February of 1897, the same day her husband bought his, recorded on the next page of the same book. She buried McKelvy in 1925, married a man named Wagner in 1927, was still swapping parcels with the county in 1942 at seventy-eight, and took a deed from them in 1944, three years before she died.
She has never had a paragraph written about her. She has had one sentence, in the Flume, last November.
Or take Red Ruth. That was the name of the mining district before it was Freshwater and long before it was Guffey. Everybody who runs into it assumes it is a garbled version of something else, some Ruth mine that got mangled in the retelling. It shows up in three separate documents from 1895 and 1896, and one of them spells it as a single word. Redruth.
Redruth is a town in Cornwall. And among the first families up West Four Mile you have Tremayne and Grosse, both out of Cornwall, and Richard Tremayne kept a post office on his own homestead that he called Truro, which is the cathedral city eight miles from Redruth.
Two Cornishmen, three thousand miles from home, naming the ground after home. Then a clerk who had never heard of Cornwall wrote down what he was told and put a space in the middle of it, and a hundred and thirty years later we are all saying Red Ruth and wondering who Ruth was.
There is more where that came from. A pair of German brothers who came through Ontario, went out to the California rushes, stopped in Colorado on the way back east, and one of them never left. A rancher named Witcher who built an empire out of West Four Mile and has a mountain named for him, and his kin who rode up on what they took for a silver nugget and had instead found the largest meteorite ever picked up in Colorado, six hundred and eighty-two pounds of it, which sits in a hall in New York now. A Pittsburgh oil refiner whose son may be the man who staked our hill.
Some of it will hold up. Some will not, and I will say so when it does not, because a research file that only records its wins is not worth keeping.
Which brings me back to the visitors.
If you are a Guffey, come by. It does not matter whether you can trace yourself to James McClurg of Pittsburgh or whether you just liked seeing the name on a map. Bring what you have. A name, a date, a family Bible, something your grandmother said that never quite made sense. If your line does run back to him, I would like to hear it, and I have a few things you have probably never seen. If it does not, that is an answer too, and worth having, and you would not be the first person to come looking for one connection and leave with a different one.
Either way, you will have been to Guffey. Which is more than we can prove he ever managed, and it took him five years and a fair amount of coaxing just to put his name on the title.
I am going to chase these wherever they go. Into the county books at Fairplay, into the newspapers, into the land office records, into Pennsylvania if that is where they lead. The deeds are already pointing east.
More soon.