The Civil War. The Sand Creek Massacre. Conflicts between homesteaders and ranchers. The Ludlow Massacre. One remote ranch in Gilpin County intersects all these events influencing Colorado’s history. The 4,000 acres of the Green Ranch are now included in Colorado’s most popular state park, Golden Gate Canyon State Park, because of the generosity of the Greens.
All the land in “western Kansas” was little known and unwanted until John Gregory discovered gold in what is now Black Hawk in May 1859 and the great Pikes Peak Gold Rush began. Thousands of prospectors rushed west as fast as possible to find their fortune in gold, but many men saw a living could be made feeding the prospectors. They wanted land to farm. The federal government, through the 1863 Homestead Act, awarded as much as 160 acres to a prospective farmer if he fulfilled three requirements: pay a filing fee ($16), build a home on the land and plant crops within five years, and pay a final fee of $6.
The 4,000 acres of Green Ranch are now included in Golden Gate Canyon.
In 1859 the land that would be combined into the Green Ranch began to be claimed. Soon 18 families moved onto the land. Charles Hicks was one of these original settlers. Hicks came from New York to try mining in Black Hawk in 1861 and when William Gilpin, governor of Colorado Territory, advertised for soldiers to fight the Texans coming up the Rio Grande with the intention of seizing the rich gold fields of Gilpin for the Confederate cause, Hicks volunteered. Three regiments were raised; Hicks was commissioned a sergeant in the First Regiment of Colorado Cavalry. These volunteers decisively defeated the Texas troops at Glorietta Pass in New Mexico in 1862 because of the tactical cunning of Col. John Chivington, who was hailed as a hero.
But Rev. John Chivington was widely condemned in his next military action, and Hicks was destined to be part of it also. When Chivington was asked by Gov. Evans to recruit troops to “discipline” the Southern Cheyenne (read ‘exterminate’) in 1864, Hicks enlisted and was again appointed a sergeant. Fortunately for his future peace of mind, he was assigned to the command of Capt. Silas Soule. When the troops surprised the Indian camp at Sand Creek, Soule withheld his troops because of the white flag flying and the many women and children in the camp. Thus Hicks never fought in the infamous Sand Creek Massacre. In 1873 Hicks started the paperwork for 160 acres that became the northern part of the Green Ranch.
The Green family sold their ranch at a fraction of its value to the state park system in order to preserve its beauty intact. Photos courtesy of Colorado State Parks
An African-American named Samuel Parker homesteaded another part. Parker was born into slavery in Kentucky and came west in 1862 to prospect. He was successful enough by 1880 to pay the costs of homesteading 80 acres in the middle of the Ranch. A Cornishman first settled the northern edge of the Ranch in 1894; other settlers in the Golden Gate region came from England, Canada, Denmark, Germany and Sweden, paralleling the origins of the melting pot of America.
The first Green purchased land in Gilpin County in 1917. George, his wife Edna, and their two sons were ranching with his parents in Las Animas County in southeastern Colorado. They had come to that dry, dusty prairie to raise cattle, not farm, and to take advantage of the vast swaths of open range. The federal government owned the unclaimed land and leased it to stockmen originally, but homesteaders began filing claims and moving in. They fenced the land to keep the cattle out and hard feelings resulted. One day when George Green was riding by a homestead, the owner, with no provocation, shot him. The bullet lodged in his hip. George rode home and was put in a wagon for a rough 40-mile ride to a doctor in Walsenburg. He was bedridden for five months and always walked with a limp after the injury.
That was one warning that it was time to move on. The second was the infamous Ludlow Massacre. Miners working in the Ludlow coalmines struck. The Colorado governor called out the National Guard to force the miners to return to work and the standoff eventually ended in violence. Unfortunately, the Green’s ranch house was adjacent to the land where the miners had erected their tents and dug their underground tunnels. When the shots began on April 14, 1914, George was bed-ridden with typhoid fever. Edna helped him make his way downstairs as the bullets flew. She arranged a pallet on the floor in front of the stone fireplace for protection and lay there with him. The two little boys had been sent with their aunt to the stone pump-house. When the shooting ended, the Greens counted 14 bullet holes in their home and their hired hand was killed as he returned in the afternoon from checking on the cattle.
That was enough for the Greens. They sold their herd and moved to the mountains, staying at the Gilpin Hotel in Black Hawk their first night and renting a team and wagon the next day to inspect their 900-acre ranch. Realizing their auto was not the ideal mode of transportation in the mountains in those times, they sold it and used horses and wagons for years.
Soon the Greens began purchasing neighboring ranches as they came up for sale and eventually the Green Ranch totaled 4,000 acres; another Green holding on Robinson Hill encompassed 1,000 acres. The Green Ranch was sold at a fraction of its value to the state park system in order to preserve its beauty intact. Kenneth Green, one of George’s sons, married a neighboring ranch girl, Lela White, and they were instrumental in donating the large White Ranch to Jefferson County as Open Space. The Greens only child, Alan, was killed with his wife in a DC-10 crash in Chicago and they created a charitable foundation named for him; the Alan Green Foundation aids nonprofits in Gilpin County. The White family also established a charitable foundatio
