Welcome to the Wild West - Pt 3: There's gold in them thar hills

It took until 1851 for the first permanent settlement of non-Indian origin to be founded in Colorado, at a place called Conejos in the San Luis Valley in south central Colorado, though it was inhabited by a group of Hispanic families. But by the time Colorado became a territory of the United States in 1861 the population came to 25,371. By the time it became a state of the Union its population had sprung to more than 100,000!

What stimulated this population explosion was the fact that there was gold in them thar hills, and what became of it was the biggest gold rush in American history.


Famous picture of a prospector panning for gold.
Source

 Pikes Peak or Bust:

Approximately a decade after the famous gold rush in California, the rush began in Colorado. Gold was first discovered in Colorado in 1858 but it was a false start, producing nothing significant. It wasn't until 1859 that the first major strike was had by George Jackson in a creek in a canyon of the Rockies Front Range at what is now called Idaho Springs, just outside of present day Denver. Then another, more substantial find was subsequently made in a stream not far north from here in a place that came to be called Central City. The rush was now on.

These new strikes brought renewed belief in the existence of gold riches in these mountains. People that had moved on came back while new prospectors came in thousands and the days of the Wild West legend were now about to make their mark.

The first decade of the boom was largely concentrated in this region and within a year some $18 million in gold was extracted. Pikes Peak, the mountain from the Zebulon Pike discovery became famous as a landmark for gold-seekers which guided them to the area much like the bright star guided the wise men to Jesus. The term "Pikes peak or bust" became the motto of gold seekers.

It is estimated that more than 200,000 wagons rolled across the prairies of Kansas and Nebraska in 1859 and 1860, many of them carrying a sign with the now famous phrase “Pikes Peak or Bust.” [1]

Pike's Peak Miners. Wikipedia.org

The influx of these fortune-seekers provided the first major white population in the region which helped create many early towns as well as the formation of Colorado Territory itelf. More gold brought more boom towns, but these early shanty towns were bawdy, rough places dominated by the hardiest of men. Tent stores, and log saloons sprang up along the muddy streets of raw new towns, as well as gambling parlours, and brothels for entertainment (scenes from the old movie Paint Your Wagon come to mind).

Central City boomed quickly; by 1860, it had a population of 60,000 people and was at the centre of what became known as "The Richest Square Mile on Earth". However placer deposits were quickly exhausted and replaced by corporate underground mining operations, but these operations kept the town prospering for some time and for a while it rivalled Denver, an up-and-coming city, itself.
Many colourful personalities of Colorado lived there, including Horace and Baby Doe Tabor, Doc Holliday (more on these people below), and "Unsinkable" Molly Brown. The Opera House attracted international performers like the Barnum & Bailey Circus, Oscar Wilde, Buffalo Bill, and Harry Houdini. [2]


Miners drinking in a Colorado saloon, 19th Century. Source

Denver grew almost overnight, not from any gold discoveries but from it's strategic location at the juncture of the south Platte River and Cherry Creek, which fashioned it into major supply centre. It all started when a man picked a track on the east side of Cherry Creek, and marked its centre with cottonwood sticks on November 22, 1858; this was how claims were made on a piece of land, indicating the start of a building. It's economy grew by servicing local miners with gambling, saloons, livestock and goods trading. It's where people started and ended their journey into the mountains, and where they came for respite and gamblers, prostitutes and saloonkeepers took up residence here in order to "mine" the miners.

Colorado's lively camp scenes were described by Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune. He travelled the region and wrote of the frenzy he saw in the 1859 goldfields. Of the fledgling "log city" of 150 dwellings at Cherry Creek/Denver he mused that there were "more brawls, more fights, more pistol shots with criminal intent" than any place of comparable size. (Insight guide: Colorado).

Other towns sprang up with gold finds, these included Golden, Gold Hill, Fairplay, Colorado City and Boulder. But of all the mining camps in Colorado, the towns of Creede, Tin Cup, and Leadville were the most wild and unruly.


Creede, late 1800s. Source

Creede: For a brief few years Creede was one of the most notorious of the Colorado mining settlements. Initially built in the narrow confines of East Willow Creek Canyon, a tributary of the Rio Grande river in the south-west of the state, the town eventually spilled out of the gulf into the broad plain west of town when almost overnight, the new town grew to 10,000 residents.

A miner named Nicholas Creede discovered a high-grade silver vein here. He supposedly exclaimed "Holy Moses!" and the Holy Moses mine was created and became one of the most profitable holdings in the region. Hastily constructed shacks were built and silver fever was so high that people worked night and day. A famous poem by Cy Warman in 1892 observed "It's day all day in the day time, And there is no night in Creede." A line from the local paper also lamented that “Creede is unfortunate in getting more of the flotsam of the state than usually falls to the lot of a mining camp,” with the likes of Bob Ford, killer of Jesse James, controlling much of the gambling, and Soapy Smith, running an extortion racket out of his Orleans Club.


Soapy Smith at his saloon in Skagway, Alaska 1898, not long before he was killed.
Source

Tin Cup: In 1816, Jim Taylor found gold in his tin cup as he was taking a drink of water from a stream, but not until 1870 was high grade gold and silver found. The town quickly grew into Virginia City but in 1882, the name was changed to Tin Cup in honour of its discoverer. Gambling was big business, like in all these towns, but the gamblers of Tin Cup controlled the town's 6,000 residents.

They hired their first marshall and told him, "see nothing, hear nothing, do nothing, and the first arrest you make will be your last". (Colorado little pocket guide).

Let's just say they went through a number of sheriffs and the cemetery is testimony to that. Unbelievably, the name has stuck, and you can still find Tin Cup on the map today, though a now just a mere dot.


Leadville, 1879. Source

Leadville: has a great boom and bust rollercoaster history. Nicknamed "Cloud City" at 10,430 feet it is located in the heart of the Rockies at the foot of two of Colorado's highest mountains. It had a fitful start during the early gold rush of 1859 and it wasn't until 1874 that major deposits of gold and silver were discovered. Leadville's population exploded from 1200 to 40,000 almost overnight. It became the second largest town in the state and the silver yield alone was worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

It deflated almost just as quickly when silver prices collapsed in 1893. But during its era of prosperity, violence and fortune seemed to be mutually exclusive. There were a number of mining swindles, and at one point, Leadville had a bordello for every 148 inhabitants. The local newspaper observed at the time: "Leadville never sleeps. The theatres close at three in the morning. The dance houses and liquoring shops are never shut..." 



The Matchless Mine today. Source

Horace Tabor was a famous Leadville resident, and is a symbol of the state Colorado was in at that time. Good luck brought him a fortune and he divorced his wife and took up with a divorcee half his age nicknamed "Baby Doe". He purchased the Matchless Mine in 1879 which brought him further riches before moving to Central City. However he lost everything in the crash of 1893 and by the time of his death six years later his wife and family were living in poverty.

Doc Holliday got around these parts too, shortly after the gun fight at the O.K. Corral he showed up in Leadville and immortalising himself in its history when in 1884 he shot and wounded a man, the last man on record he ever shot.

The Last Hoorah:

The easy-to-reach gold deposits were largely played out by 1863; over 1.25 million troy ounces (39 t) of gold were produced in those years. The ore deposits of Colorado were complex and required smelting processes that weren't available in the early days of the Colorado gold rush. The result was that mining in many districts waned throughout the 1860's and early 1870's, and many disillusioned miners returned to their homes back East.

Cripple Creek: Just when it was thought the great gold rush of Colorado was behind them, in 1891  a significant gold discovery in a basin, ironically, near Pike's Peak, started the last of the great Colorado mining stampedes. By 1894, there were four newspapers and even a stock market to match remote investors with local mining interests. But it was not devoid of proplems: there were two fires within a week of each other in 1896 and was also the site of some of the worst labour conflicts in American history, culminating in the state militia being called in to break a strike in 1903.


Crowds gathered around the National Guard outside the Mining Exchange building during the Miner's Strike, Sept. 1903

Like most mining boom towns, Cripple Creeks mining days were over by World War Two. Gold ore and many other minerals continue to be produced up to the present day in Colorado, although gold has been a minor part of the picture for decades. Since the mid 1990's open pit mining has been swallowing up the numerous historic mines that cover the hills around town and when gambling was legalized in 1991, places like Central City, Blackhawk and Cripple Creek, former shells of themselves, were reborn as tourist centres.