The Wet Mountain Valley briefly seemed headed for mining glory after silver strikes at Rosita in 1872, Querida in 1877, and Silver Cliff in 1878 drew waves of prospectors, but the mines declined by the 1890s and livestock became the valley's main asset. Cattle ranching had begun in the late 1860s, and by 1880 more than 13,000 head ranged across the basin, more than half on the Beckwith Ranch, where Elton and Edwin Beckwith, Maine natives who settled in 1869, built one of Colorado's largest herds and created a ranchstead styled like an English country estate; after Edwin died in 1898 and Elton in 1907, the land was sold in pieces, though the ranch house was preserved as a tribute to the valley's ranching heritage. Early settlement also included the Colfax Colony, founded in March 1870 by German immigrants about ten miles south, where roughly three hundred colonists struggled with inexperience, mismanagement, and internal friction before the colony dissolved within about a year, though many families remained and the Hope Lutheran Church founded in 1872 continued. English settlement left its mark as well: Ula, established in 1870, became known as the Briton's paradise, and in the late 1880s Reginald Cusack's nearby guest ranch drew additional British migrants, including remittance men, some of whom stayed and brought elements of English social life to the frontier. Westcliffe, platted in 1880 by the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad, outgrew neighboring communities because it had the valley's only rail connection, overcame flooding-related rail closures in 1889 with a reopened line in 1901, and by the time the railroad ended service in 1937 had become a stable ranching town. Silver Cliff rose quickly after the 1878 discovery of horn silver, reaching nearly 2,500 residents by year's end and becoming Colorado's third-largest city by 1880, but it lost momentum after Westcliffe gained the railroad and its lodes disappointed, though it saw renewed growth in the 1990s.