The Pikes Peak Rush & ‘Pikes Peak or Bust’ — 1859, Colorado

In the summer of 1858 a party of Georgians and Cherokee led by William Green Russell found a modest amount of placer gold where Cherry Creek meets the South Platte River, at the foot of the Colorado Rockies. The find was small, but the news — magnified by promoters, newspapers, and a country hungry for good fortune after the financial panic of 1857 — exploded into one of the great stampedes of the era. They called it the Pikes Peak Gold Rush, after the towering landmark visible across the plains, and they painted their slogan on the canvas of their wagons: “Pikes Peak or Bust.”

Perhaps a hundred thousand people set out across the prairie in 1859. Many of them found almost nothing. The easy diggings could not begin to support the flood of “Fifty-Niners,” and through that spring the trails filled with disillusioned men trudging home, their wagons now reading “Busted, by God.” The rush teetered on the edge of being remembered as a colossal humbug.

What saved it was hard rock. In May 1859 a Georgia prospector named John H. Gregory found a rich gold-bearing lode in a gulch in the mountains above the plains — the Gregory Lode, in what became Gregory Gulch between the new camps of Central City and Black Hawk. Other strikes followed within days. Gregory’s discovery proved the region’s real wealth lay in veins buried in the mountains, not flakes in the creeks, and it turned the bust back into a boom. The supply camps at the mouth of the canyons grew into Denver, the mining camps grew into towns, and within two years Congress created Colorado Territory.

All of this unfolded on the lands of the Cheyenne and Arapaho, and, in the mountains, the Ute — peoples whose territory had been recognized in the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie and was now overrun by a hundred thousand newcomers who built cities on it without consent. The same rush that founded Denver set in motion the pressure, broken promises, and violence that led, only five years later, to the massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho people at Sand Creek. Colorado’s gold built a state; it was taken from nations who paid for it dearly.