Lake City, founded in 1874, soon became the center of one of Colorado's richest lead and silver mining areas, and during the 1870s it grew as a genteel community known for class, refined tastes, high culture, and distinctive Victorian-era architecture, drawing people from across Western Colorado to attend cultural events and shop in local stores. Creede was a wild boom town in the 1890s, made famous by silver and infamous for saloons, gunfights, fancy women, and gamblers; after Nicholas Creede discovered rich veins of ore there in 1889, millions of dollars of silver ore had been taken from the ground by 1892, and notorious figures including Bat Masterson, Soapy Smith, Bob Ford, and Poker Alice passed through or lived there. South Fork, named for its location at the junction of the Rio Grande and its South Fork, began as a stage stop for the Barlow & Sanderson's Stagecoach and thrived as a lumber town after the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad arrived in 1882, with timber, ranching, agriculture, and the railroad long sustaining its economy. South Fork, Creede, and Lake City were shaped by the mining booms and busts of the San Juan Mountains; nearly 30,000 people lived in these towns during the boom years, while today all three communities together have fewer than 3,000 year-round residents.