Advertisements for Himself: Walter Davis and Colorado Springs
Walter Clyde Davis showed up in Colorado Springs in 1905. He was twenty-four. He carried business cards calling himself a lawyer from Greensburg, Indiana. He also had two letters of recommendation from judges. But those letters recommended him as a stenographer. Not a lawyer.
He was actually a court reporter. Before that, a barber in his dad’s shop.
So right from the start, this guy was faking it.
The marriage announcements that tell you everything
Two months after arriving, his marriage to Lula Gilham made the papers. The Colorado Springs Gazette played up the romance. The Denver Post ran a headline: “Pleading at Bar Wins Heiress for Colorado Lawyer.” According to these stories, Lula was from a wealthy, influential Indiana family. Davis was a practicing attorney.
Here’s the thing. Lula was orphaned at ten. Her parents were a stonecutter and a dressmaker. Tuberculosis wiped out her family over two years. She worked repairing fur coats.
Alice Echols, who is Davis’s granddaughter, can’t prove he wrote those announcements himself. But she found a handwritten draft on his old Indiana office stationery. The guy literally planted his own press coverage to reinvent himself as upper class. Two months into a new town.
Colorado Springs: the town that gold built
To understand Davis, you have to understand Colorado Springs. The town was founded by General William Palmer, a railroad executive and Civil War veteran. Palmer wanted a refined paradise at the base of Pikes Peak. No saloons. No brothels. No gambling. A town for people of “good character and strict temperance habits.”
He even named it Colorado Springs despite the nearest spring being six miles away. The town’s very name was marketing.
For decades, it was a sleepy resort town. Rich people with “neurasthenia” came for the mountain air. British tourists loved it so much they called it “Little London.” Sanitariums treated tuberculosis patients. The fancy Antlers Hotel offered Turkish baths.
Then gold happened.
In 1891, prospector Robert Womack found gold-bearing quartz at Cripple Creek, just twenty miles away. Production exploded from $2 million in 1893 to $120 million by 1902. Bank deposits went up ninefold. The population tripled. Mine owners settled along “Millionaires’ Row” on Wood Avenue. The town bragged it had the most millionaires per capita in the entire country.
All that gold money reshaped what Colorado Springs was about. General Palmer dreamed of a refined retreat from commerce. But after Cripple Creek, the town embraced speculation. The Mining Exchange handled 230 million shares by 1899. The old dream of slow, steady accumulation got replaced by the dream of instant wealth.
Labor wars and the KKK
But here’s the problem. All that gold required actual miners working underground. And those miners got fed up.
The labor wars of 1903-1904 were brutal. When millworkers formed a union, mine owners responded with Pinkerton detectives and strikebreakers. The governor called in the National Guard. Mine owner Spencer Penrose and his business partner got appointed as aides-de-camp to the military. 263 union men were loaded onto trains and deported to the Kansas or New Mexico state lines. Told never to come back.
After the strike was crushed, voting Republican became basically mandatory in the mining district. The mine owners took control of both local newspapers. They fired a newsboy they suspected of being a “labor agitator.”
By the mid-1920s, the white working class, stripped of unions, channeled their resentment into the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK got so powerful in Colorado that a New York Times journalist reported it wielded more power there than in any state except maybe Indiana and Kansas.
This was the Colorado Springs that Walter Davis moved into. A town where the elite felt entitled to run everything. Where the gap between the rich and everyone else was massive and fiercely defended.
A man stuck in the middle
Davis wanted to be one of those rich men at the El Paso Club and the Cheyenne Mountain Country Club. But he was a stenographer whose dad ran a three-seat barbershop. His father had tuberculosis. His mother would later work as a school matron and run a boardinghouse. His brother Ray became a barber. His youngest brother Willard pumped gas.
And then his father cut him out of the will entirely.
Davis challenged the will in court. He lost. He pulled away from his family. His brother Roy, six years younger, was the one who actually succeeded first. Roy opened a typewriter shop, got elected to the Colorado state legislature, became Speaker of the House at thirty-three. He was folksy and civic-minded. A joiner who belonged to every club and lodge in town.
Walter was the opposite. He modeled himself on Wall Street “money kings” who kept their mouths shut. He kept a scrapbook full of his brother’s failures. Roy kept one full of Walter’s.
Echols paints the picture of a man who came to a town of millionaires with nothing but ambition and a willingness to lie about his background. His wife worked beside him in a cramped office. Their baby daughter slept in a dresser drawer at work because they couldn’t afford for Lula to stay home.
His mother later said it simply: “We really were nobodies come from nowhere.”
The stage was set for what Davis would do next. And it would wreck a lot of lives.
Book: Shortfall: Family Secrets, Financial Collapse, and a Hidden History of American Banking by Alice Echols (ISBN: 978-1-62097-304-2)
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