Virginia Dale, Colorado and the Infamous Jack Slade

Virginia Dale Post Office. Colorado, 2013

You’ll pass this place at the high point in the road between Ft. Collins, Colorado and Laramie, Wyoming on U.S. Highway 287, just four miles or so south of the Wyoming line. Not much there these days. The post office and cafe is shuttered. There is a ranchette next door with pigs, chickens and a llama or two. Traffic rarely stops, with the exception of the occasional photographer or tourist interested in memory-steeped structures from the past…such as this building you see above, closed in the 1990s, the school house built in 1874, and the original stage stop structure from the 1860s which is still standing.

From 1962 until 1867, Virginia Dale was the location of a “home station” stage stop on the Overland Trail stage route–a place where travelers could step off the bone-rattling, steel-spring coach, get a home-cooked meal (almost certainly steaks carved from the local cattle), and even spend the night if that was their druthers. Once the Union Pacific railroad came through, the stage stop fell into disuse but the place has survived as a small (very small!) unincorporated town until today.

There is an interesting Wild West anecdote about the founder of the Virginia Dale stage station worth passing on. It was originally established by a colorful, tough, and very alcoholic character named Jack Slade, who likely named the place after his wife, Virginia. Slade didn’t really kill 26 men as per Mark Twain’s writings, but Slade probably was guilty of robbing his own stage line of some $60,000 that was never found–a titillating sum in those days. To give you an idea of the nature of Jack Slade’s personality, read this excerpt from the Wikipedia entry:

“The Virginia Dale stage station was established in 1862 by Jack Slade, former station manager at Julesburg, Colorado where he famously got into a dispute with Jules Beni. Beni had previously shot Slade five times but Slade survived and exacted his revenge by ambushing Beni, tying him to a fencepost and shooting off his fingers before delivering a coup de grace to the head. Slade kept Benis’ ears as trophies. While station master in Julesburg, Slade met and breakfasted with Samuel Clemens, “Mark Twain” and made quite an impression upon Twain. Twain wrote about his encounter with Slade in his 1894 publication “Roughing It”.

Jack Slade met his end at the hands of a very angry lynch mob (vigilante committee, to put it in a more refined way) only two years after establishing the Virginia Dale stage stop. Seems the townsfolk were tired of his violent, unpredictable, drunken sprees.