This is a well hidden cache with just a log, please bring a pen. This cache is on the grounds of the two room Wild Horse Schoolhouse, originally built in 1912 and was still functioning as a school until the late 1950s. The school now serves as a community building for local farming and ranching families. Cache is on the grounds of the school and not in the building itself, please do not enter the building. Read on for the history of this Colorado ghost town.
Our Heritage, Wild Horse, Colorado
A small detachment of U.S. Cavalry was assigned to protect the surveyors as they laid out the grade stakes for a new railway line. Early one morning in 1869, as the cavalry rounded a bend in the Big Sandy about twelve miles west of Kit Carson, they saw a band of several hundred wild horses around a water hole. The water supply was good so the troops decided to establish an outpost camp and call it the Wild Horse Station. From 1869 until 1906 Wild Horse was just a station.
The boom was on and from 1906 to 1909 other buildings included a two block lumberyard and office, drug store, two restaurants, two livery barns, three saloons (one only lasted a few weeks) a hardware store, pool hall, two cream stations, a barber shop, newspaper building (The Wild Horse Times), a shoe shop, another grocery store and dry goods store, a depot of sorts (two box cars joined together), a warehouse, a butcher shop and the Alfalfa Valley Bank. Local promoters proclaimed Wild Horse to be the "best little town in the world."
The school building which still stands in Wild Horse was built in 1912. Between 1921 and 1923 the Wild Horse School was a branch of Cheyenne County High School and conducted classes for freshmen and sophomores.
Soon after 1909, after automobiles began to displace the horse, one livery barn became a garage. Wild Horse reached a peak about 1910-1911 at which time Charles Collins bought the controlling interest in the bank and moved it to Kit Carson.
Then a series of fires hit the town. The warehouse burned; it was not replaced. A restaurant burned and then the butcher shop. Then came the big fire in 1917 which destroyed almost entirely the east portion of town which was the business section. Someone started a fire in a wood stove in the cream station and some time after midnight, the stove toppled over and flames engulfed the town. Water was in short supply in those days and the bucket brigade was no match for the fire. The destruction was complete; the value of the loss was nearly total.
It was the beginning of the end for Wild Horse. Part of the town was rebuilt but the Depression and the "dirty thirties" followed soon after and like so many other small towns, Wild Horse lost its young folks to greener pastures.