Joseph Alexander, Gilpin County. Isn’t it that siblings make the best rivals, that something about nearly being the same thing makes for more competition and intensity when the small differences are noticed? With this analogy in mind, your correspondent would say that anybody would be hard pressed to find two towns more like a pair of scrappy mountain brothers than Black Hawk and Central City (legally known as the City of Central and once known as Mountain City but most often referred to Central City). Both towns were put on the modern day map so to speak, when on May 6, 1859, in a gulch between the two towns, a gold vein was found by a gold miner named John H. Gregory, since that day they have been competing.

While in the 1920s through the 1930s “the richest square mile on earth,” or Central City flourished as a prospecting and mining town, “The City of Mills,” or Black Hawk, was home to Colorado’s first ore smelter and became a home to the processing of much of the gold ore and ore from other precious metals from around the area. Due to the success of and industry around mining both of these towns were then home to many brothels, gambling houses (which your correspondent has to assume were operating based on frontier lawlessness and not in the legal matter of those which fill the streets of both of these towns today) and saloons of the type which only wild west movies can do justice to describing. Some famous residents during this time are said to have been Buffalo Bill himself as well as a frontier famous Madam and poker player named Poker Alice.

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Despite the happening nature of these two “it towns” of the early twentieth century, by World War II, gold mining was not as lucrative and the country turned its industrial eye and investments to the processing and building of weapon’s grade metal and weapons respectively.

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From the end of World War II until 1991, with the passing of a legal allowance for casinos to be built in both towns, both of these small mountain towns who had already gone from mining towns to ghost towns were about to go through another massive transition. This would take them into how we know them today in the twenty-first century between the Second World War and the passing of the casino bill. This reporter has had a hard time finding any information as to what went on in either of these towns during those fifty years, other than a brief mention of Central City in Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road in which he and another writer Neil Cassidy travel up to Central City from Denver to party and leave back to Denver in a stolen car later that night.

Since the passing of the 1991 casino bill, the towns have grown into a more recent rivalry, mainly due to the fact that because of its closer position to Highway 119, Black Hawk (which before the casinos was a smaller and less profitable town) has become rather wealthy whereas Central City has had a harder time convincing casino clientele to travel just a mile further up into the hills to gamble at their casinos. This ongoing imbalance in casino attendance prompted Central City to build the Central City Parkway with the hopes of pulling traffic coming from the direction of Idaho Springs towards their open casino doors, to mixed results. Today Central City, while focusing on the casino industry, also seems to put much of its time into the history of the town, promoting the long running and locally famous Central City Opera as well as various other historical attractions and events. Meanwhile Black Hawk, with its larger casinos, focuses more on the casino aspect of the town’s culture but still has time to also rejuvenate various historical landmarks and buildings in the area.

And now in 2020, another change came on election day, one that could pull more people up here to these sibling towns, and that is Amendment 77, which was passed as of the writing of this article. This amendment allows an increase in the maximum single bet allowed for any game beyond the current statewide limit of $100. Additionally, Amendment 77 allows voters to approve games other than those currently allowed by Colorado law. Currently allowed games in Colorado casinos include blackjack, craps, poker, roulette, and slot machines.

All this may lead to an expansion in what can be offered as games in these casinos and thus an expansion of the casinos and their revenues as well. And while we may not know how these changes will play out, based on our lookback through the history of these two rival towns situated just one dusty mile apart from another, we can be sure of two things: firstly that there will be, as there always has been, changes that irrevocably reshape the way these two towns function and exist as we know them today and secondly, that there will continue to be wild west style, one-up antics and friendly rivalries between these two towns for as long as they both shall exist.

To find out more about the goings on in either of these towns please visit their websites; Central City https://centralcity.colorado.gov/ and Black Hawk https://site.cityofblackhawk.org/

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(Originally published in the November 12, 2020, edition of The Mountain-Ear.)