Personal Recollections of Early Denver
Personal Recollections of Early Denver .J OSEPII EMERSOX S11nTn* Recollections, like everything else, must have a beginning, and my first memory of early Denver has to do with a Fourth of .July Christmas. It has remained vivid, unforgettable, undoubtedly because of th<:' successive shocks to the sensitive ear drums of a small child. Tt was prior to the Chinese riot of 1880 and the large Chinatown of the city, extending from Sixteenth along vVazee and Vlynkoop streets and directly in the rear of the American House for seYeral blocks, was a busy mart, a growth of the steady immi gration of the "Celestials" to Colorado, where thousands had been, and still were, employed in placer mining around Central City, at Fairplay, Tarryall, California Gulch, and other gold camps. Chinatmn1 was their suppl~' source. Here \Yere silk and clothing shops, stores of exotic atmosphere with shelves crowded with im ports, fine tea, spices, drugs, and foods from China, tapestries, fans, laces, and there were many laundries. Underground floors were tunnels leading to burrows and the larger rooms where Nepen- 1heized sleepers lay in bunks, the air sticky and sweet with the fumes of opium. 'l'he steam laundry hadn't come, and the Chinese had a monop oly on laundering. 'l'o homes all over the city trotted the tireless, affable, pig-tailed little yellow men in their blue-black tunics, flap ping trousers and felt white-soled slippers, delivering newspaper wrapped bundles. We " ·ere living at Coffield 's ''family boarding house,'' a spacious two-story verandahed frame residence where the Colorado National Bank now stands at Seventeenth and Champa streets.
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