The Trail of Gold and Silver

by Duane A. Smith

  Meanwhile, busy Byers continued to refute negative stories about the mines and the region. In his November 10 edition, he pointedly called a defamatory Illinois article a “base fabrication of falsehoods.” Earlier that fall, he became so carried away that he refuted a story point by point and called the author a “d—m fool”—strong language for the young newspaper.

  As 1859 wound down to its final weeks, snow finally stayed and winter took hold. It had been an amazing year and not just for mining, which was well on its way to becoming industrialized. Some enthusiastic politicians had created and organized the territory of Jefferson, not only to provide another legal basis for the mines and towns but also, no doubt, to create some paying jobs. Roads had been built, trails improved, towns and camps established, better connections made with the “States,” homes and buildings constructed, and the essentials of Victorian society rooted. Some light industry could be found in Denver, the largest settlement and transportation hub. Thanks to Byers and his Rocky Mountain News, Denver’s future looked bright. With only one paper in the territory for a brief period, all the news filtered through it. His outreach to the states back east praised his town, its prospects, and its investment and settlement possibilities.

  Agriculture, both farms and ranches, was found along the creeks and rivers tumbling out of the mountains. Some fifty-niners, tired of or disgusted with mining, returned to their Midwestern farming roots, with Byers’s encouragement. He loved to print the “amazing results” of their efforts in bushels per acre and size of vegetables. Byers looked to the time when the region would be self-sufficient, although that dream was slow in becoming reality despite his best promotion. His well-taken point, however, was that the Pike’s Peak country would be vulnerable until locals could produce more of their own food and grains. The cost of living remained high, and everyone knew why: the need to ship goods across the plains (and the high freight charges to do so). This fact of life was starkly highlighted as winter storms closed or hampered that exposed, essential lifeline.

  Another threat to that lifeline existed year-round. Plains tribes, as mentioned earlier, had been upset for several decades about white men’s incursions on their land. They understood clearly what was happening to their way of life and their culture. A Plains Indian war could severely hamper and perhaps even damage development prospects for years. The Utes in the mountains faced the same predicament, but so far had caused only scattered problems.

  The region had been thoroughly explored along almost the entire foothills area and well into the mountains. Prospectors and miners had penetrated South Park and crossed the mountains into the Blue River Basin. Isolated camps and mines stood as outposts in rugged land, each convinced it was the future El Dorado.

  These future Coloradans might be isolated by distance and the winter season, but they could not escape what was happening in the country they had left. Sectional tension had increased alarmingly that fall following the attack by radical abolitionist John Brown at Harper’s Ferry, [West] Virginia, and his dramatic trial and execution. A presidential election would be held in 1860, with prospects bright for the young Republican Party to take control of the White House and perhaps Congress. “Black-hearted abolitionists,” Southerners called them, and threatened secession if the once-unthinkable occurred; that is, if Northerners elected an anti-slavery president. Heated talk on both sides included mutterings of war if that happened.

  Some of the fifty-niners had fled the states in a forlorn hope of escaping the mounting tension and name-calling, but found that they could not outrun the failure of American democracy. Moreover, their local newspaper kept them aware of the changing situation, as did letters and newspapers from back home.

  Nevertheless, the fifty-niners accomplished a huge amount in a very short time. That speedy development showed the essence of the fast-moving, urban mining West. Not everyone had been successful, as Byers admitted on July 23. “It is true that many very many are still unfortunate.” Still, others had prospered enough to go home with a “stake” they could not have obtained so quickly in any other way. Many more hoped to do the same the next year. Optimism, confidence, grit—these folks had it.

  One of Byers’s correspondents explained, in an October 27 letter, that he was “confident that there is a fortune for each, lying hid in these mountains, which they mean by labor and perseverance, to obtain, and they are little concerned whether others believe it or not.” For him and his determined contemporaries, the new mining season could not come soon enough. Another wrote in September that “old gold miners” who had worked in California, Australia, and South America “all concur that the Gregory district, for six miles square is richer in gold than any other of the same extent in the known world.”

  The fifty-niners had faith. They were not go-backers, and some even thought this new land was not a bad place to put down roots. Maybe even a few of them could still hear the faint echoes of the Cherry Creek emigrants’ song that had cheered them that past spring: “There’s plenty of gold, in the west we are told in the new Eldorado.” Whatever they might have thought about gold prospects as 1860 opened, a new mining season was nearly upon them.

  3

  1860–1864: “To Everything There Is a Season”

  Last Monday Rob, Sam and I started out to look around and in the afternoon we discovered a lead which we called the Moline and have been at work on it ever since but can not tell whether it is going to turnout to by any account or not but we have good indications so everyone tells us that know any thing about it but if it is not worth anything we intend to “try and try again” for I believe that there is plenty of gold here and if any one will just pitch in with heart and hand they will get some of it.1

  William A. Crawford, writing to his cousin Mina from the Rocky Mountains, captured perfectly the expectations of “Young America,” as the press liked to call the generation that opened the second season of Pike’s Peak mining. William and his crew were living in a tent “on the mountain about one half of a mile back of Gregory Point and we are enjoying ourselves very well. The only fault we have to find is that we can not hear from home oftener”—a “fault” that was the subject of many and frequent complaints. This determined worker criticized the go-backers who, when they found they “cannot pick the gold up by the handful[,] . . . whine around for a few days and then sell out and start for the states,” but also gave some familiar advice: “I think that those that have farms and families and are doing well had better stay there.”

  The rush of 1860 never equaled the one of the year before, but Ovando Hollister declared that “never did spring open on a more hopeful people. The richness and great extent of the new gold fields were considered proven.” By the first of May, “Immigrants were arriv[ing] from the States at the rate of a hundred a day.”

  What made Hollister’s outlook so sanguine? Among other things, the mining experience that had been gained, the mining machinery that had arrived, the laws and regulations that had been established, the roads that had been built and bettered, and the support industries and agriculture that had been developed. Finally, he noted a “great influx of people, many of them women, many of them bringing more or less capital, and coming at least prepared for the emergencies of the season.”2

  Such boosterism could not overcome the fact that the Pike’s Peak mines were not newsworthy back in the states. That story was now “stale”; other headlines grabbed readers’ attention, including those on the increasing sectional hatred, the fading hope of some resolution before a national tragedy ensued, and the presidential nomination conventions, campaign, and election of Republican Abraham Lincoln. All these pushed Pike’s Peak and golden fantasies into the background. Then, South Carolina’s secession destroyed all hopes for peace.

  Some people went west that spring to escape the impending war; others came for the same reasons the fifty-niners had. Much of the Pike’s Peak country had not been prospected, and it was hoped that the known districts had not been completely strip
ped either. As Hollister noted, “In view of the unparalleled richness of the lodes and gulches in the Gregory District, the most sanguine expectations were not unreasonable.” Reality proved different, however.

  William Crawford, for example, did not have the success he had forecasted in 1860. He wrote to Mina on September 2, 1860, from Mountain City, where he had decided to stay for the winter, even though some of his friends were returning home: “I think that I may stand a chance of making something more than wages by staying here for we have several claims that I think will see for something next spring.”

  Next spring, Mina received a letter saying that William was looking for work and planned on going prospecting. Like others, he confided in his March 31, 1861, letter why he had not returned home: “I think that there is no use of making a baby of myself and running home just because I feel like it when I know that I could do better here, or, think so at any rate.” In October of 1861, Crawford said he had planned to go to Gold Hill, but gave up the idea and stayed at “Bobtail City” near the Bobtail Lode below Central City. The optimism he had cherished since the spring of 1860 had vanished.

  Philosophically, he noted the high prices of potatoes ($2.00 to $2.50 per bushel): “that seems to you like an awful price, but it appears cheap to us.” Although he had maintained good health, others had been less fortunate. William commented, “I believe this would be a very healthy country if people would live as they do in the states.”

  William had no luck in 1861 either. In May of 1862, he told Mina that he had not much news to write, “for I am still working by day” on the “No. 6 on the Bobtail” Lode. “There are a great many idle,” he complained, whose unemployment woes were heightened by “high prices of grub [and] of all kinds of provisions.” Being a veteran miner now, he looked with skepticism on the Salmon River (Idaho) excitement: “A great many have star[t]ed there from around here.” Showing that he was not completely isolated from the rest of the world, Crawford noted that he was glad to see “the war going on with so much spirit and energy.”3

  Crawford’s letters tell us much about the times, from health to high prices of goods. Both his optimism and his lack of success were typical; nevertheless, “next spring” always held promise. Although he wanted to become a mine owner, nothing worked out for him and he ended up a working miner, resolved not to go home until he had made his “stake.” Thousands like him would continue their quests in Colorado during the high tide of mining.

  The spring of 1860 was not so wonderful for newcomers, either. “Old-timers,” with all of a year’s experience, did not welcome the immigrants who crowded into Boulder, Clear Creek, and Gilpin Counties. Hollister explained what happened and why:

  They felt that they had earned what they had got, and that there was chance enough for others to do likewise. Surely, they said, all these strangers cannot expect employment here on our ground; let them branch out and find mines for themselves, or if not, go back.4

  The newcomers generally turned to prospecting, “which is a discouraging business except to the prospector by nature, who must have the faith of a martyr,” or they made “continual purchases of claims which they knew not how to work.” Then Mother Nature chipped in with a heavy snowstorm in early May, “well calculated to dampen the spirits of the new men.”

  Finding pickings slim in the established strike areas, the newcomers spread out seeking the new El Dorado that surely lay just over the next mountain or along the next stream. With the Eastern Slope districts already overcrowded and claims staked, the hopefuls ventured onto the Western Slope. The Blue River diggings promised less competition, and what lay beyond them sparked the imagination and drew the adventuresome even further westward.

  Again, however, the mining tide ebbed and flowed. As Hollister noted, miners found “wages were quite low; it seemed there were no more big things to strike; it was hard to get letters from home; and is it wonderful they felt discouraged?” Hollister continued: “By the first of June [many] might be seen facing homeward with a dejected air, as if under conviction for sin. Still, the incoming tide was vastly the strongest.” He estimated that during a two-month period, at least 5,000 per week arrived. “They generally brought grub enough to live on for a few months, they wandered around, joined every stampede—of which there were many—in short, didn’t think of returning to the States till fall.”5

  Prospectors moved across the range throughout the year—Georgia, Humbug, Galena, and French Gulches all had their moments. Gold Hill, Gregory, and Russell Gulches proved that the “old-timers” were not exhausted, particularly after a reliable water supply arrived for Gilpin County thanks to the Consolidated Ditch. Mining in Clear Creek County evolved quickly during the year: “Placer mining had been chiefly abandoned ere the season was half gone, and all the energies of the people bestowed on quartz-vein discoveries and development.”

  Two significant discoveries were made during the mining season of 1860: California Gulch and the San Juans. Each became a storied legend in Colorado mining. At the time, though, the former offered the year’s best hope.

  A prospecting party left Russell Gulch in March 1860 and eventually reached the upper Arkansas River Valley, after struggling through deep snow. They were not the first; others had been there the year before, but left when winter arrived. On or around April 26, 1860, one Abe Lee, while panning, reportedly shouted to his friend, “By god, I’ve got California in this here pan.” Thus the gulch was named California, and on April 27 the newcomers organized a district.

  A “flying rumor [of] $20-$25 each man per day” excited nearby prospecting parties, who rushed to the strike. Perhaps 5,000 had arrived by summer and as many as 10,000 by the end of the year. California Gulch was the big mining event of the year, promising to be the spring of 1859 all over again. Lewis Dow wrote to the Rocky Mountain News (May 30, 1860) that thanks to the “pleasant weather,” the snow, which “had been the principal drawback, is now mostly gone.” He went on describe what had become the typical aspects of a mining rush:

  People are constantly coming in from other diggings as well as from the States. Merchants, blacksmiths, shoemakers and attorneys are sticking up shingles here. At present there is a great scarcity of provisions [and those they had were selling at high prices].

  The mines opening are richer than even the most sanguine hope for. On May 12 Earl, Hopkins & company washed one small rocker from 150 buckets of dirt [that brought] the sum of $147.20 . . . . Such news is apt to cause a stampede. I advise every man doing well in any other place to let well enough alone. All the claims are taken.

  A little mining camp named Oro City soon sprawled along the lower end of California Gulch, and that was where the Tabors again tried their luck. Augusta continued their story, again revealing much about the times:

  We arrived in California Gulch May 8, 1860 and [by] 1861 we had acquired what we considered quite a little fortune about $7,000 in money.

  I was the first woman in California Gulch. We killed our cattle that we drove in and divided it among [the others in the camp]. [They] built me a cabin of green logs and had it finished in two days.

  I never saw a country [1859–60] settled up with such greenhorns as Colorado. They were all young men from 18 to 30. I was there a good many years before we saw a man with grey hair.

  As she had the previous year, she “commenced taking boarders with nothing to feed them except poor beef and dried apples.” Horace mined and the couple eventually opened a store. Meanwhile, Augusta was appointed postmistress. “With my many duties, the days passed quickly.”

  As winter settled in, mining stopped. A conservative production estimate for Oro City places the value at between $2 and $3 million, but no accurate figures are known. Many miners were reluctant to reveal their gold yield, and placer gold could easily be taken out of the district and territory. The production figures also vary according to a subject of constant upset for the miners: low prices for their gold. Whether in California Gulch or elsewhere, the price o
f gold was set based on its presumed purity, not on the price it would bring back east—and the folks in the Colorado placer districts could do little about that.

  Given the disappointments in 1860, hopes mounted for 1861. In April, it seemed to be happening: Iowa Gulch, two miles south of Oro City, grabbed attention, but did not pan out to be another bonanza, despite its “brilliant prospects.” With the snow gone, miners returned to California Gulch, which began “to assume the appearance of olden times,” with diggings there “being worked with success.” By late August, however, a dismal report said that California Gulch “looks a good deal like a graveyard, for several miles along its upper end.” The writer went on: “Most folks are talking about leaving, they don’t know where; but generally speaking, the gulch is ‘dried up,’ and the gold is not flush here any more.”6

  California Gulch’s placer-mining days had ended. A familiar pattern emerged: In Colorado, placer deposits proved rich but shallow. If the territory was to remain a viable mining region, the future rested with hard-rock mining.

  These let-downs were somewhat countered by the revival of another tantalizing story: silver. Ovando Hollister told of silver being found in 1861 in the future Ten Mile District west of Breckenridge, over the mountain from Oro City. The district was out of the way and still undeveloped when he wrote in 1867. On October 10, 1860, the News ran another story about “scores of [silver] lodes” having been discovered in California Gulch and elsewhere. The author’s veracity remains in question, though, as he went on to describe “opal discoveries” too.

  At Buckskin Joe reports of silver seemed to be springing up everywhere. Byers was not convinced. He observed that a “country like this must always have some prevailing excitement, something that for the time being obscures everything else.” Just now, the territory “is in the midst of a silver mine agitation” (News, August 29, 1860).