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Vintage Colorado Poetry Poem of the Week December 15, 2003

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In the summer today, Creede is a busy little mountain town known for great repertory theatre plus colorful art galleries, hoopla aplently between the 4th of July and Labor Day, and its plenty of places to get a cold beer and a burger.  Creede is again Cy Warman's but with tourists for miners.  And if you're a lonely traveller driving through late at night in coldest winter, Warman's Creede is there too.

The Rise and Fall of Creede A thousand burdened burros filled    The narrow, winding, wriggling trail. A hundred settlers came to build,    Each day, new houses in the vale. A hundred gamblers came to feed    On these same settlers -- this was Creede. Slanting Annie, Gambler Joe    And bad Bob Ford, Sapolio, -- Or Soapy Smith, as he was known, --    Ran games peculiarly their own, And everything was open wide,    And men drank absinthe on the side.                       * * * And now the Faro Bank is closed,    And Mr. Faro's gone away To seek new fields, it is supposed, --    More verdant fields.  The gamblers say The man who worked the shell and ball    Has gone back to the Capitol. The winter winds blow bleak and chill,    The quaking, quivering aspen waves About the summit of the hill --    Above the unrecorded graves Where halt abandoned burros feed    And coyotes call -- and  this is Creede. Lone graves whose head-boards bear no name,    Whose silent owners lived like brutes And died as doggedly, -- but game,    And most of them died in their boots. We mind among the unwrit names    The man who murdered Jesse James. We saw him murdered, saw him fall,    And saw his mad assassin gloat Above him.  Heard his moans and all,    And saw the shot holes in his throat, And men moved on and gave no heed    To life or death -- and this is Creede.                            --Cy Warman

Reprinted from Songs of Cy Warman, Boston, 1911.