Twenty-Two Dollars
Ida Etta Borland bought up half a mining district and ran the town's namesake out of his own claim
In October of 1928 a widow walked into the office of the Cripple Creek Times and Victor Record and bought three months of legal notice.
She was sixty-four. Her husband had been dead three years and she had married again the year before. The notice she placed ran from the twenty-fifth of October through the twenty-fourth of January, and the publisher charged her twenty-two dollars for it. In August she swore out an affidavit that the man had never paid his share of the assessment work, and the court found him in default.
The man was James McClurg Guffey of Pittsburgh, founder of Gulf Oil, and the town twenty miles northwest of her was named after him.
I have been at this folder for a while now and that is still the sentence I keep coming back to. Not because it is dramatic, though it is. Because of how ordinary the paperwork is. Forfeiture of a co-owner's interest for non-payment of assessment work is a routine remedy. You publish the notice, you prove publication, you swear the affidavit, you take his share. She did it the way you would do it to anybody.
Her name was Ida.
The deeds are hers
Here is the thing that jumps out of a stack of Park County records once you have read enough of them. The buyer is almost always her.
Start in 1895. In October a man named George W. Beamer sells her half the Hill Top Lode, up on Gold Hill north of town, for two hundred dollars. A week later W. E. McNabb, who was the first postmaster here and owned the two-story hotel on Main, sells her a quarter of the Noble Ella for two hundred and fifty. In December McNabb is back, and this time it is the Franklin, another half of the Hill Top, half of the Raymond H and a quarter of something else, for five hundred dollars.
That is nine hundred and fifty dollars spent by one woman in ten weeks, in a camp that was about eight months old.
In February of 1897 she bought town lots from Gustave Cohen, the trustee of the townsite. Lots one through five in Block 33, and Lot 16 in Block 16, for seventeen dollars and fifty cents. Her husband bought his lots the same day from the same man, and the clerk recorded his deed on the next page of the same book. Two deeds, one couple, two separate names on the title.
In 1899 she took quitclaims from James Grizzle and a man recorded as S. Poznanowsky for a dollar apiece. In 1904 she took five tax deeds off the county treasurer and assembled most of Block 16 and Block 33 and part of Block 41, which the deed itself annotates with the word "Guffey." In 1907 she paid Ross Eichelroth five hundred dollars for an interest in the whole seven-lode survey, plus four more lodes and something called the Guffey Tunnel.
She was a co-locator on the Irene Mill Site in 1904, a rectangle of ground three hundred and fifty by six hundred feet, and one of the original locators of a claim called the Charlie J.
Thirty-some years later a man named Augustine Fromm quitclaimed six more claims to her for a dollar.
None of that is interpretation. It is just what the books say.
The part nobody has explained
Now go back further, to the beginning, because the beginning does not make sense.
On the twenty-sixth of February, 1895, Ida E. Borland of Allegheny City, Pennsylvania deeded a placer claim called the Red Bird to two men in Cripple Creek. One of them was Fred D. Hammond. The other was William Clark McKelvy, and she married him ten weeks later.
She signed it in Pennsylvania, before an Allegheny County notary named William W. Sterritt, who also stood as the witness.
Read that again. To deed a claim you have to own it. So in February of 1895, before her wedding, before the town had a name, a woman living in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania held title to a placer claim in the Redruth Mining District of Park County, Colorado.
Nothing in this folder explains how she got it. Not an inheritance, not a purchase, not a grubstake. The prior instrument is out there in the Fairplay grantee index under Borland and nobody has pulled it.
I want that document more than almost anything else on my list, because it decides what kind of story this is. If she bought that claim herself, she was in this from the start and her husband walked into something she had already begun. If it came to her through McKelvy or Hammond, she came in through him. Those are two different women and right now the record allows either one.
What I can tell you is that the timing is tight to the day. McKelvy staked seven lode claims on the hill north of town between the thirteenth of February and the second of March. Hesperus, My Sisters, Pompadour, Eurydice, Lucern, Edinburgh, Caliph. One every three or four days. The Red Bird deed is dated the twenty-sixth of February, right in the middle of that run.
Idaville
On the twelfth of April, 1895, the post office opened here under the name Idaville.
She was still Miss Borland that month. She married McKelvy in Allegheny County on the seventh of May. She was thirty. He was forty-eight, and his own father, Captain Hugh McKelvy of Allegheny, the steamboat man turned oil operator, had been dead not quite a year.
The Flume reported last November that Idaville was named for Ida E. McKelvy Wagner, a prominent woman with claims on Gold Hill north of town. That is the only published statement of it I have found, it gives no source, and I want to be straight that Part One leaned on it and this piece does too. The post office records prove the name. They do not prove the reason.
But the reason fits everything else. She had bought the Hill Top and the Noble Ella and the Franklin, all up on Gold Hill, inside that first autumn. She was the person in that camp spending money in her own name. And a year later, when the Post Office rejected Freshwater and the town had to find a new name in a hurry, they dropped hers and reached for a Pittsburgh oil man's instead.
Which I wrote about last time. I did not entirely take the measure of it then. They took her name off the place while she was standing in it.
Pittsburgh
Here is a sentence I did not have a month ago. Park County Bulletin, the twenty-first of April, 1905, in the Guffey News Notes column, between an item about a boy who died of scarlet fever and an item about a man who caught his arm in a shaft at the mica mill.
"Mr. and Mrs. McKelvy came home from Pennsylvania last week, but will go back to Pittsburgh in a few days in the interest of mining property near Guffey."
Mr. and Mrs. She went. Not once, either, by the sound of it, and not as a passenger. They were going to Pittsburgh in the interest of Guffey mining property, which means they were going to see people with money, and they were doing it often enough that the local paper reported it the way you report the weather.
Set that beside two other dates. May of 1904, the Irene Mill Site located, with J. M. Guffey's name on it alongside theirs. December of 1904, the Bulletin again: "W. C. McKelvy has struck good ore in the cross-cut at the 100-foot level in his property on Gold Hill."
Good ore in December. A train east in April. That is not a mystery. That is a couple with something to show, going back to the city both their families came out of, to show it to somebody.
The long middle, and then the trains east
Then years pass and the record goes quiet, which is what records do.
In November of 1908 the miners and residents signed an agreement changing the district's name from Freshwater to Guffey, and W. C. McKelvy's signature is on it, twenty-third on a list of twenty-three. In 1907 she bought the Eichelroth interest. After that, mostly silence.
On the seventeenth of September, 1925, William Clark McKelvy died at Cripple Creek. He was seventy-eight and they had been married thirty years.
She sent him home. There is an undertaker's ledger sheet in Pittsburgh, H. Samson's firm, sheet number 357, and it reads Funeral of William C. McKelvy, charge to Mrs. Ida E. McKelvy, Cripple Creek, Colo. The remains reached the city on the twenty-fourth. Moving them in, six dollars. An auto hearse, fourteen. Two automobiles, twenty-four. Delivering a steel case, four. Cemetery, thirty-five. Floral decoration, fifteen. Service and attendance, thirty-five. Telephone and expenses, three sixty-five. Ten death notices, ten dollars. One hundred forty-six dollars and sixty-five cents, paid in full by cash on the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth.
He was buried at three that afternoon at Uniondale, on the old Allegheny City side, the ground he was born on.
Whether she rode the train with him, I do not know. Two automobiles were hired, which sounds like mourners. The bill went to her in Cripple Creek and was settled four days after the service. Both are possible and I am not going to pick one.
In October of 1927 she married Jacob C. Wagner. She was sixty-three.
And a year after that she bought her twenty-two dollars of newspaper.
What she was still doing at seventy-seven
The last recorded acts are the ones that get me.
On the first of September, 1942, eight days short of her seventy-eighth birthday, Ida E. Wagner and the Board of County Commissioners of Park County executed two deeds on the same day, one each way, described as an exchange of property. In March of 1944 the county deeded her another parcel for a dollar. She was seventy-nine.
Forty-nine years after she signed a placer deed in Allegheny City, she was still sorting out title in Park County.
She died at Cripple Creek on Sunday the second of March, 1947, aged eighty-two.
What survived her
Her body went east, fifteen hundred miles, to the Fred S. Bowser funeral home at Parkers Landing, Armstrong County, Pennsylvania. That was the Borland family seat, a river town on the Allegheny, and her sister Ella was still living there. Funeral at half past three on the Sunday, Rev. Paul Leyda of the Parker Methodist church officiating. Buried in the Borland plot in the Parker Presbyterian cemetery.
She had gone to the Methodist church. The family plot outranked the denomination.
Her obituary runs three short paragraphs. It says she was the wife of Jacob C. Wagner. It says she was survived by a sister, Miss Ella Borland of Parkers Landing, and a brother, C. J. Borland of Fullerton, California. It says she belonged to the Parker Methodist church and to the Cripple Creek chapter of the Order of the Eastern Star.
It does not mention William Clark McKelvy, her husband of thirty years. It does not mention Guffey, or Idaville, or the Freshwater district, or a single claim. There is no word about the Hill Top or the Noble Ella or the Franklin, about Block 16 or Block 33, about the Irene Mill Site or the Guffey Tunnel or the trains to Pittsburgh. Nothing about the twenty-two dollars.
And the stone in the Borland plot reads, in full:
IDA E. WAGNER 1947
No birth year. No maiden name. No McKelvy.
She had no children. The 1975 quiet title action in Park County, thirty years after she died, names her four separate ways on the caption, W. C. McKelvey and Ida E. McKelvey and I. E. McKelvey and Ida E. Wagner, and not one descendant, because there were not any. That is why nothing about her lived on in a family, and it is most of the reason a woman who held property in this county for half a century has had exactly one sentence written about her before now.
That is the argument for doing this at all.
Her gravestone gives her a surname and a year. Her obituary gives her two churches and a lodge. The only place any of the rest of it survives is a clerk's book in Fairplay, in a hand nobody has read since it was written, where a woman bought a hill one claim at a time and then, at sixty-four, advertised an oil millionaire out of his share for not paying up.
Next time, the railroad that almost came, the station at the bottom of a canyon that is under a reservoir now, and a stage that met the Coyote Express at twenty-seven minutes past four in the morning.
If you are a Borland, or a McKelvy, or a Wagner, I would very much like to hear from you. The last two things I learned about Ida came from readers.
More soon.