DE BEQUE — A century-old cast-iron slot machine, with its “Jak-Pot” window stuck on the triple bars of a payout, is gathering dust on a back table in this town’s modest town hall.

It is a reminder of De Beque’s economic heydays when there were ranches galore, a lumber mill, a shale oil plant, banks and hotels. There were saloons where a fancy slot like this was popular. The slot machine now also heralds a hoped-for big strike for this threadbare town of 501, where storefront businesses are nearly all gone: The last restaurant closed several years ago, and the last rowdy bar lives on only in old police reports.

De Beque, about 30 miles east of Grand Junction, is trying to become Colorado’s fourth gaming town and the first on the Western Slope outside an American Indian reservation.

De Beque is working with two Western Slope legislators to get a referendum on the November ballot that would add De Beque to a 1990 voter-approved constitutional amendment allowing gambling in three towns. If the new referendum gains support from two-thirds of the House and Senate and from a majority of voters, De Beque could sprout casinos like Black Hawk, Cripple Creek and Central City.

“We’ve got to do something to make people take that exit,” said Forest Matis, 27, a lifelong De Beque resident and the chairman of the De Beque Wild Horse Gaming Committee.

Matis is referring to exit 62, which curves off of Interstate 70 and crosses over the Colorado River and under railroad tracks 2 miles from De Beque’s tiny downtown. That exit, just east of the mouth of De Beque Canyon, is currently distinguished only by a Kum & Go and by the strung-out scatterings of oil-patch drilling equipment and buildings.

Boom fizzles out

The latest gas drilling boom in the Piceance Basin east of here has gone flat in the past several years. Ranching in the rugged area is a mere shadow of what it used to be. And the promise of oil shale development has proved over and over again to be as capricious as a big gambling win.

A spin through this town that tilts on the edge of the Roan Plateau illustrates why it is willing to take a stab at joining the big-league gaming industry when so many other municipalities in the state have tried and failed.

Duplexes and apartment buildings built with oil-field workers in mind sit half empty. Modular homes have sagging porches and crumbling paint. Fourteen homes have gone into foreclosure in the past four years, and some sit abandoned. Snow-covered furniture lashed into the backs of some pickup trucks outside trailer homes indicate there could be more.

The main drag of Minter Avenue has three businesses still operating — a headquarters office for the luxury High Lonesome guest ranch north of town, a small grocery store, and The Chop Shop Salon housed in an old gas station.

An “Open” sign in the Chop Shop window is the only lighted fixture on a street with no cars and no pedestrians.

Inside, one customer riffles through a magazine looking for a new hairdo. A bulletin board pinned with cards and fliers advertising pet sitting, mending, cleaning, personal protection products and a home-based tanning bed show how townspeople are scraping to make some money.

“I am definitely for gambling. It will help our economy,” said Chop Shop owner Stephani Rose. “It’s very hard to make ends meet here.”

Rose is one of 16 De Beque residents who formed the nonprofit gaming committee last fall.

“Go for it”

An opinion-gathering town meeting had earlier shown general citizen support for the idea, and the De Beque board of trustees had voted unanimously to support the gaming effort.

The trustees also voted to let citizens vote in April on whether De Beque should allow recreational marijuana enterprises in the town limits. If they approve it, De Beque will be the only place in Mesa County allowing recreational pot sales.

“We’d like that boost. We’d like to have marijuana and gambling here. The overall feel from our residents was ‘go for it.’ So we are,” said De Beque Mayor Wayne Klahn, who also serves as town historian.

The history of De Beque, founded in 1884 by Dr. W.A.E. de Beque, has as many ups and downs as the foothills of the Roan Plateau, including a century of confusion over the spelling of the town’s name — capital letters or not, a space or not?

Ups and downs

Ranching and oil drilling helped De Beque hit its peak in the 1920s, but the wells turned out to be shallow and acidic, and drillers went elsewhere after tying up water that had supported agriculture.

Developers descended on De Beque in the late 1970s for a modern-day boom, but before it could explode into a sizable community, oil shale companies pulled out and financially devastated an area that stretched far beyond De Beque. The devastation dragged out because an East Coast developer bought up a third of the properties in town and then let them sit for four decades.

The town rode out more ups and downs in the latest energy frenzy, but realizing that energy development is always going to be boom and bust, tried to capitalize on the wild horses that roam a sanctuary area west of the town. In 2001, the town trustees designated De Beque as the only Wild Horse Sanctuary City in the West.

But the town’s annual wild horse celebration has faded out in recent years to more of a community picnic rather than an event that draws outsiders.

The last boost the town could celebrate was the opening of the Kum & Go. The town had bragging rights when it was the busiest Kum & Go in the country for a short spell.

And now, gambling.

“We have tried everything else. This is a perfectly legitimate consideration,” said part-time De Beque Administrator Guy Patterson, who drives from the Vail area two days a week to work for De Beque.

Opposition surfaces

State Sen. Steve King, R- Grand Junction, who plans to introduce the De Beque gambling measure in the Senate, said he also sees gambling as a legitimate leg up for a town fighting for survival.

“I think it’s an uphill battle, but I don’t think it’s as insurmountable as some might think,” he said.

A little opposition is already surfacing in De Beque, and beyond.

Two De Beque residents who didn’t want to give their names because, they joked, they would be “beat up,” said they would move away if De Beque became a gambling town.

Paul Harris, the acting administrator of Cripple Creek, said his town would oppose any expansion of gambling.

Patterson said he believes some of that can be overcome, and De Beque can succeed where other towns have failed because De Beque is not proposing to change the way gambling proceeds are distributed or to change any of the current hours or limits or other factors governing gambling. He also said De Beque’s location — more than 200 miles from any of the gold-town casinos and in a part of the state lagging in economic recovery — should make gaming a sellable option.

“I think our odds are better than anyone else who has tried to do this,” Patterson said.

Nancy Lofholm: 970-256-1957, nlofholm@denverpost.com or twitter.com/nlofholm