Hardscrabble

Hardscrabble. . Alexander Barclay , Like so many early Colorado settlers, Alexander Barclay came here in search of fortune but found something else entirely. The British-born corset-maker arrived in 1836 and spent the next nineteen years chasing his dream. He dabbled in fur trading, bison ranching, and whiskey smuggling, basing the latter operation in 1844 at a settlement called Hardscrabble, on the nearby creek of the same name, in what was then Mexican territory. There he met and married a well-known beauty named Teresita Sandoval; but she, like wealth, proved an elusive catch. Shortly after Barclay built his own trading post, Fort Barclay, in New Mexico in 1848, Sandoval left him for a man with better prospects. The trading post fizzled, and Barclay died in December 1855, his fortune still unclaimed. But he had reaped other rewards, independence, experience, perhaps even wisdom, that the West conferred in abundance., The Hardscrabble Mining District , The name "Hardscrabble" accurately described the mining district southwest of Wetmore , for the wealth came hard, and its denizens were always struggling to get by. The region attracted prospectors as early as 1863, but it did not produce a major strike for more than a decade. Its richest veins, the Possirontas-Humbokit and the Dessick, eventually coughed up several million dollars' worth of silver and gold, sparking steep population booms in nearby Rosita and Querrera during the 1870s. But low-grade ores, high transportation costs, labor unrest, and mineral claim disputes undermined profits in the district. The Possirontas shut down in the late 1870s while the Dessick hit its peak in 1884 but sputtered along thereafter. If nothing else, the Hardscrabble district lured prospectors into the vicinity of richer veins whose discovery and development spawned the historic towns of Westcliffe and Silver Cliff.