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

Summary

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.

The Rush

The story begins not with a lone prospector but with a party. In 1858 William Green Russell, a Georgia gold miner with experience from the southern Appalachian fields, led a group that included his brothers and several Cherokee relations and acquaintances westward to the Rocky Mountain foothills, where there had long been rumors and small Indian and trader reports of gold. In July they found placer gold in the sands near the mouth of Cherry Creek, on the South Platte. The actual yield was meager and most of Russell's party gave up and went home, but a handful stayed, and word of "gold at the foot of the mountains" began to travel east.

The timing made the difference. The United States was still reeling from the Panic of 1857, with thousands of men out of work and looking for a fresh start, and the example of California a decade earlier had taught Americans to believe in gold rushes. Town promoters and merchants in Kansas and Missouri, eager to profit from outfitting and feeding a stampede, talked the find up far beyond its merit; newspapers printed glowing, often invented, accounts; and guidebooks of varying honesty flew off the presses. By the winter of 1858–59 rival settlements — Auraria and Denver City — had been laid out on the plains beside Cherry Creek to receive the crowd everyone was sure would come.

Come it did. In the spring of 1859 perhaps a hundred thousand people set off across the Great Plains toward the Rockies, on foot, on horseback, in wagons, and even pushing handcarts, many with "Pikes Peak or Bust" daubed on their canvas. Pikes Peak itself lay well to the south of the actual diggings, but it was the one landmark a plains traveler could see from far off, and it gave the whole rush its name. They were the Fifty-Niners, and they were about to learn that a slogan is not a fortune.

The Diggings

For many of them, the reckoning came fast and hard. The placer gold around Cherry Creek was real but thin — nowhere near enough to support a hundred thousand hopefuls. Men who had crossed seven hundred miles of prairie on the strength of newspaper hype arrived to find crowded camps, high prices, and creeks that yielded a few cents a day if anything. Through the spring of 1859 the trails reversed: a vast counter-migration of bitter "go-backs" streamed eastward, some having never reached the mountains at all, their wagons now lettered "Busted, by God," cursing the promoters who had lured them. For a few weeks it looked as though Pikes Peak would join the ranks of history's great frauds.

Then the mountains delivered. In early May 1859 John H. Gregory, a Georgia prospector following the creeks up into the foothills northwest of Denver, traced gold to its source and uncovered a rich quartz lode in a steep gulch. His find — the Gregory Lode, on about May 6, 1859 — was the first major hard-rock gold discovery in the region, and within days other prospectors struck nearby. The narrow valley, Gregory Gulch, between the camps that became Central City and Black Hawk, filled almost overnight with thousands of miners. The surrounding district proved so concentrated and productive that boosters later called it "the richest square mile on Earth."

Gregory's strike changed the meaning of the whole rush. It showed that Colorado's true wealth lay in veins of gold-bearing quartz locked in the mountains, which required tunnels, stamp mills, and capital to crush the ore and free the metal — a different game from panning a creek. The discovery drew the doubters back and gave the new towns a reason to exist. Denver and Auraria, the supply settlements on the plains, boomed as the gateway to the mountain mines; Central City, Black Hawk, and other camps rose in the gulches. The newspaperman Horace Greeley, who visited the diggings that summer and reported on Gregory's strike for an eastern audience, helped convince a skeptical country that this time the gold was real.

The Reckoning

John Gregory himself followed the oldest pattern in the gold country. A Georgia prospector who had been bound for the Fraser River fields when he heard at Fort Laramie of Russell's strike and turned south, he proved the lode, sold his claims for a sum that seemed handsome at the moment, and prospected on, never holding the kind of lasting fortune that his discovery generated for others. He is said to have remarked bitterly to a journalist, "I believe that I am the only living being who has not benefited by this discovery." The men who got rich from Gregory Gulch were largely those with the capital to buy claims and build the mills, not the prospector who found the gold — and Gregory faded from the record, by most accounts returning toward the South. His name stayed on the gulch; the wealth flowed elsewhere.

The rush as a whole transformed the region with astonishing speed. The scattered camps and supply towns coalesced into a permanent society, and on February 28, 1861, Congress created Colorado Territory, carving a new political entity out of the goldfields barely two and a half years after Russell's first modest find. Mining grew from frantic placer work into an industrial enterprise of mines, mills, smelters, and railroads, the foundation of Colorado's economy. Denver, born as a speculative townsite on Cherry Creek, became the enduring metropolis of the Rocky Mountain West.

The cost fell on the people whose land it was. The diggings, the trails, and the new cities lay squarely within territory guaranteed to the Cheyenne and Arapaho by the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie, and in the high country on the lands of the Ute. The hundred thousand newcomers and the towns they built shattered those guarantees; a coerced treaty in 1861 stripped the Cheyenne and Arapaho of nearly all the land the rush had taken, confining them to a small reserve they could not live on. The mounting pressure, broken promises, and conflict that followed culminated on November 29, 1864, when Colorado volunteer cavalry under John Chivington attacked a peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho camp on the plains, killing some 150 to 230 people, mostly women, children, and the elderly, in the Sand Creek Massacre. The gold that founded Colorado was wrung from nations who lost their land, their treaties, and, at Sand Creek, their lives.

What Became of Them

The Pikes Peak rush left a permanent mark far out of proportion to its hesitant beginnings. Denver, founded as a muddy speculation on Cherry Creek to serve gold-seekers who might never come, grew into the great city of the Rocky Mountain West and the capital of the state that the rush brought into being. Central City and Black Hawk, born in Gregory Gulch, became substantial mining towns, and the district's mines produced gold for decades; the region's hard-rock and later silver booms made Colorado a mining power for the rest of the century.

The individual fates ran true to type. William Green Russell, who started it all, kept prospecting and eventually returned south; John Gregory, whose strike rescued the rush, sold out and faded from history, his name preserved on the gulch but the fortune kept by others. The pattern of the discoverer enriching everyone but himself, so familiar from California, repeated itself faithfully in Colorado.

The deepest legacy is the one the boosters never advertised. The rush was an invasion of lands belonging to the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Ute, and it converted the Treaty of Fort Laramie's promises into worthless paper within a few short years. The Cheyenne and Arapaho were pressured onto a barren reserve, then attacked at Sand Creek in 1864 in one of the worst atrocities of the era — a massacre that flowed directly from the land hunger the gold had unleashed. Colorado remembers "Pikes Peak or Bust" as a slogan of pioneer grit; an honest reckoning remembers, too, the peoples for whom the rush meant not fortune but the loss of everything.

Lessons

References

• Pike's Peak Gold Rush Wikipedia
• Colorado Gold Rush History Colorado
• John H. Gregory and the Gregory Lode Wikipedia
• Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site National Park Service