Leadville's Last

In 1875, when silver was discovered in Leadville, the barren ravines leading to California Gulch swarmed with feverish thousands. In the gambling halls and Sallie Purple's fancy parlors, the bonanza kings strutted and roistered. "Haw" Tabor brought in the rich Little Pittsburgh, then the $10 million Matchless. Silver was everywhere a man might throw his pick, and the picks were thrown everywhere. The picks were sold by Charles Boettcher who, in the end, found a slower but surer bonanza.

Methodical Man. A quiet, hardheaded German, Charles Boettcher came to the U.S. in 1869, when he was 17. For eleven years, he sold hardware--pickaxes and hammers, nails and hatchets--to get-rich-quick Leadville. Slowly and painstakingly, he built up his savings. Then he bought a cattle ranch and moved to Denver. He got to thinking it was foolish to send his cattle to Chicago to be butchered, established Denver's first packing plant (the Western Packing Co.). He got to looking at the vast, empty Colorado prairies. After a visit to Germany, he came back with a sack of beet-sugar seed. The beets flourished on the prairies, and he founded the Great Western Sugar Co. He started building beet-processing plants, got to wondering about the German-made cement. He found that Colorado had the right clays, started the Colorado Portland Cement Co. (now the Ideal Cement Co.).

In Leadville, the silver boom slowed and then collapsed. "Haw" Tabor died destitute in a Denver hotel he had built. But Colorado and Boettcher prospered. Boettcher branched out into mines, land, railroads, cattle, banks. He gave generously of his millions, pinched pennies for himself. His son Claude/- took over management of his enterprises, built a new fortune upon the old.

No Room Services. In 1920, after his wife shut herself up as a recluse in their three-story Denver mansion, Charles Boettcher moved to a ninth-floor suite in the famed Brown Palace Hotel, which he owned. Hotel employees watched him every night as he went down in the elevator, walked across the street to a drugstore, bought a container of Coca-Cola, and carried it back to his room. Asked why he did not order from room service, Boettcher demanded indignantly: "And pay the prices we ask here?" Frequently, he would be spotted behind a screen in a dingy tailor shop while his trousers were being pressed. The Brown Palace's valet fees were too high.

Last week, at 96, Charles Boettcher died in the Brown Palace Hotel. He was one of the richest men in the U.S., and one of the least-known. Reporters dug into their files, found a late interview in which the failing old man had crackled: "The young man who wants to go into business should consider hardware. Axes and hammers don't go out of style like so many things."

Խn 1933, Charles's grandson, Charles 2nd, was kidnaped, held for 17 days on a South Dakota ranch, was ransomed for $60,000.

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