Alexander Barclay, a British-born corset-maker, came to the region in 1836 seeking fortune and spent the next nineteen years trying to find it through fur trading, bison ranching, and whiskey smuggling, the last of these based from 1844 at Hardscrabble on the nearby creek of the same name in what was then Mexican territory. There he met and married Teresita Sandoval, but after he built Fort Barclay in New Mexico in 1848, she left him for a man with better prospects. His trading post failed, and he died in December 1855 without the fortune he had pursued. Hardscrabble later became the name of a mining district southwest of Wetmore, where prospectors arrived as early as 1863 but no major strike came for more than a decade. Its richest veins, the Possirontas-Humbokit and the Dessick, eventually yielded several million dollars in silver and gold and fueled sharp population booms in nearby Rosita and Querrera during the 1870s. Yet low-grade ores, high transportation costs, labor unrest, and mineral claim disputes weakened profits, and while the Possirontas shut down in the late 1870s and the Dessick peaked in 1884 before declining, the district helped draw prospectors toward richer discoveries that gave rise to Westcliffe and Silver Cliff.