[Illustration: D.K.P., 1960] CARSON SNUGGLES AGAINST THE DIVIDE This section of the town lies on the Pacific slope side of the divide and is in much better condition than the camp on the Atlantic side. _From Creede_ [Illustration] Bachelor’s beginnings followed the silver rush to the Creede area in the autumn of 1890. The town was heralded by an amusing paragraph in the _Creede Candle_ for January 21, 1892, which ran: “The latest townsite excitement is in a park on Bachelor Hill, around the Last Chance boarding house. Two saloons and a female seminary are already in operation and other business houses are expected soon. It is to be called Bachelor.” By April the 10,500-foot-high town had a post office (Teller, because of a conflict with Bachelor, California), a theatre, eight stores, a dozen saloons and several boardinghouses, restaurants and hotels. A number of two-story buildings were being erected. By June the town had been incorporated and was holding an election of officers. By December it had a new opera house which was packed when the Bachelor City Dramatic Club presented the drama _Wild Irishman_, interspersed with several divertissements and followed by a dance, in an effort to raise money for a Catholic church. But the efforts of the better people failed. The character of Bachelor remained tough. At the height of its population of around twelve hundred, two hundred residents were prostitutes. It was a nightly custom for patronage of the soiled doves to include not only the local boys, but miners from Creede, North Creede and Weaver, who tipped the hoistmen of the Last Chance and Commodore to lift them up to the wild, brawling and drunken delights of Bachelor. The crash of silver in 1893 affected the whole Creede area. The population of Bachelor (according to the Colorado Business Directory) was down to eight hundred in 1896 and one hundred and fifty by 1910. [Illustration: Unknown, 1910; D.P.L.] BACHELOR WAS FULL OF BRAWLING “BATCHERS” The mining camp was already declining when this picture was taken. Its population had fallen from twelve hundred to one hundred and fifty. Still Bachelor hung on as a town after that for a number of years. But the winters were so harsh, and transportation over the two-and-a-half mile road that climbed nearly two thousand feet up was so difficult that in the ’teens the last residents gave up. They moved down to Creede.