Whisper of the Past: Things Lost

Steven Wade Veatch

On a lazy late fall Sunday in 1991, I walked down to Cripple Creek’s business district with my wife Shelly, my friend Mitch, and his wife Jane. Colorado’s legislature had recently legalized gambling in this historic gold mining town. Several entrepreneurs were converting some of the old brick buildings in the historic downtown into casinos. The excitement of the prospect of limited-stakes gambling was spreading along the Front Range of Colorado. It was thought that people from Colorado Springs, Pueblo, and Denver would be crowding gaming houses when they opened, so investors bought up historic buildings and began the process of modernizing them.

The only sounds that Sunday morning were a few cars going down Bennett Avenue. The lingering scent of the chilled mountain air invigorated us, reminding us of the majestic beauty that surrounded us. 

As we were walking along, we noticed several buildings on the corner of Bennett Avenue and Second Street were being torn down for a new casino to be built there. This was once the site of the town’s old movie theater. The Star Theater showed “moving pictures” as early as 1915. We walked down there for a better look. 

Figure 1. The Star Theater at 218 East Bennett Avenue, Cripple Creek.
The sign by the entrance declares this theater part of the Sullivan and Considine
Circuit that provided Vaudeville entertainment. Photo courtesy of the
Cripple Creek District Museum. CCDM 2001 156.

The owners had started to demolish the old historic building. “Let’s go down in there and look around,” I said to Mitch. Shelly and Jane were reluctant to go, but they followed us down to the site’s ground floor.

We knelt in the dirt, looked through the rubble, and found lots of old broken peanut shells dropped by theatergoers 70 years earlier. The shells had fallen through the cracks in the theater’s floor. We found more. Lots of them. Then Jane found clippings of motion picture films, probably created from splicing or repairing the films when they were being shown in the gold camp theater. 

As the sunlight broke through the clouds, Jane caught sight of a shining object in the debris. I carefully pulled it from the dark earth with my fingers. It was an Indian head nickel, money from the gold rush days. Next, Mitch yelled that he had found a dime, one with the head of the Roman God Mercury on it. This coin was minted in 1918. Shelly found a Standing Liberty quarter—the denominations kept going up. 

Figure 2. The obverse of the Standing Liberty quarter dollar.
A number of these quarters were found at the old Star Theater. Photo is public domain.

The process of finding these numismatic artifacts was slow. I turned to Mitch and said, “This process is taking forever; but we need to go through the entire site here. We’re about to hit a jackpot.”

“I have an idea,” Mitch said. He stood up, climbed out of the spot we were working on, and walked up to his house a few blocks away. He returned carrying four green, plastic strawberry baskets, one for each of us. We used the baskets to sift the dirt and could go through a lot of material with them. We found lots of silver coins. The more we looked, the more we found.

Jane yelled out, “OH MY GOD! Look what I found!” She held up a woman’s ring. It was solid gold with one small, simple ruby, something a miner’s wife would own and wear. We looked at her discovery with awe and wondered how someone could have lost it, and how sad the owner must have been after losing it a lifetime ago in the Star Theater. 

Figure 3.  The author’s recollection of the ring found in the ground-floor sediments of the old Star Theater. AI generated image.

We had dirt and dust all over us from digging, turning our clothes and faces completely black. While working through the dirt, we couldn’t help but notice the curious gazes from passersby. Soon a small group of tourists gathered around the site to watch us. By then we had recovered 29 silver coins and a gold ring, all artifacts lost to time, but now found. We decided it was time to quit.

We hauled away our discoveries in the strawberry baskets and went back to Mitch’s house. All of us tidied up and then sat around Mitch’s kitchen table and looked at the coins and gold ring we found. With a tremor in his voice, Mitch leaned in closer as he embarked on a deep conversation about the weight of loss and the desperate search for a glimmer of hope on the uncertain road that stretched before us. We wondered what precious pieces of ourselves would slip through our fingers as we embarked on this uncertain journey.