Central City is a beating heart of art, history, and culture that’s often overlooked by its gambling attractions and their closest neighbor. But Mike Keeler wants those coming into the Central City Visitor’s Center (CCVC) to know that they’re not in Black Hawk.
“Number one: we’re not Black Hawk. Number two: we keep history alive. These buildings are old buildings and you can not touch the outside of them, and so we preserve that.” Keeler has been in Central City since 1972 and has been a tour guide, a town ambassador, and a gunfighter in live street performances.
“I retired from the high tech industry and I got a call from the City.”
They said, “Mike, would you like to be an ambassador for the Visitor’s Center, tell history and tell stories and greet people?” And I said, “yeah, I’ll do that!” Keeler explains how his love of local history and sharing it with people led him to be at the CCVC for “a long, long time.”
“I used to come up here when the streets still had wooden sidewalks and there was still dirt on the roads. I was all over Main Street, and back then they had entertainment in every saloon.”
The CCVC originally opened on Main Street over two decades ago and is now in a three-story historic building on 103 Eureka Street. The building was formerly a log cabin saloon and then a small restaurant with a little bit of its own history.
“Somebody was jealous and shot that section out with a shotgun; that was the way they settled stuff back then. Of course there are some people that’ll tell you that they never had gunfights or nothing here, well that’s not true,” Keeler notes.
Keeler is no stranger to gunfights, not just from his education in Central City’s history but as a live street performer with the Central City Wild Bunch. The Wild Bunch is a posse of performers and historians who enact gunfights right on the street, simultaneously entertaining and educating. The Wild Bunch perform in Central City every hour from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturdays in June through August.
“This is my fifteenth season. We started traveling around and doing them out of state; we travel to Kansas and do shows. That kind of stuff is what attracts me to the old mining days.”
Keeler is always sure to point visitors to all the local entertainment and art to be found in Central City. He also performs as part of the theater group that presented Call Me Ned, a musical written by Patrice LeBlanc with lyrics by Ed Schoenradt about the infamous “frozen dead guy.”
“I entertain a lot here. I tell stories and people want to listen to them all. And I’ve got hundreds of stories to tell, that’s for sure!” Keeler goes on to explain how he also participates in Central City’s many events, including the Cemetery Crawl (Saturday, August 27, 2022, at 11 a.m.) and Creepy Crawl (October 14, 15, 21, and 22, 2022).
“People like creepy stuff! We have great guides that take people around and they talk about the history on the way to each building.”
Keeler wishes that Central City and its fellow mining towns will begin to embrace historic reenactments and live street theater again. While mining towns now mostly rely on revenue from visitors and tourists, maintaining their history and culture is vital.
“I still think, to this day, if we had a couple of shows it would still attract a lot of people. That’s what Patrice LeBlanc and Ed are trying to bring back. All the shows that we do that they put together are just fantastic. The people of Central City love theater, I can tell you that because they pack it out here!”
The Central City Visitor’s Center is at 103 Eureka Street in Central City and is open 7 days a week from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Check out their website at https:// centralcity.colorado.gov/visitors2.
For more information on the Central City Wild Bunch, go to: https://m. facebook.com/CCWB59/
Sponsored by Gilpin County, with funds from the American Rescue Plan Act.
