With its rich farmland, natural hot springs, and proximity to busy mining districts, Poncha Springs seemed poised for prosperity. By 1880 the town of 3,000 was receiving eight daily stagecoach arrivals, the Denver & Rio Grande Western tracks were pushing toward town, and the Jackson Hotel was lodging the famous, like Susan B. Anthony and Ulysses S. Grant, and the infamous, like the outlaw Jesse James. But the next decade brought three calamitous fires, and when the railroad installed a junction a few miles downriver in Salida, Poncha Springs settled on a more modest future. Traces of its glory days remain: some families are in their fourth or fifth generation of local residence, and the Jackson Hotel and school house, built in the 1880's, still stand today. In 1880, the stagecoach trip from Cañon City to Leadville took 26 hours, a speed record for the Arkansas River road, which by then was centuries old. The Utes had traveled it seasonally, pursuing the buffalo between South Park and the San Luis Valley, and Juan Bautista de Anza followed it in 1779, making the first recorded crossing of Poncha Pass in the process. With the mineral strikes of the 1870s, the bend of the Arkansas at Salida came to resemble Grand Central Station, funneling traffic north to Aspen and Leadville, west toward Telluride and Silverton, and south to the San Luis Valley and into New Mexico. Today it only takes a few hours to drive from Cañon City to Leadville, but the route was generations in the making.