The REAL gold rush

"Pike's Peak or bust!"

In the late summer and fall of 1858, with the nation on the brink of financial ruin - torn apart by internal strife - these four words, painted on the sides of a thousand westbound wagons, came to symbolize the hope of a generation.

Gold was struck along Cherry Creek to the north, and, riding a wave of desperate optimism, as many as 100,000 people crossed the "Great American Desert," scanning the endless horizon for the distant outline of the peak they believed held their salvation.

Colorado had no name, and it was known by its most famous and eastern-most mountain.

The would-be miners would learn that all that glitters is not gold, and by 1861 most had gone back home, headed farther west or joined the armies gathering for the Civil War.

But some stayed and formed the outposts on the edge of civilization that would blossom into cities: Aurora, Denver, Golden, Boulder, Breckenridge and many others trace their beginnings to the gold rush.

The story of the Pikes Peak or Bust gold rush (the apostrophe was later dropped from the name of the peak) has a particular irony for the Pikes Peak region. No gold was found here; three decades passed before gold struck at Cripple Creek caused another boom.
The town built in 1859 - Colorado City, now the west-side neighborhood Old Colorado City - grew to 300 buildings and was briefly the territorial capital, but it quickly faded into obscurity. When Gen. William Palmer arrived in 1871 to found Colorado Springs, just 80 people lived in Colorado City.

On the 150th anniversary of the gold rush - the fall of 1858 was when gold fever hit the nation - local museums and historians are making a new effort to commemorate this often-forgotten era of local history. Planned exhibits and markers will tell about the time Pikes Peak captivated a nation of miners, and the boom town born with their dreams that withered when the dreams died.

Invitations to an expedition

Anthony Bott was broke.

A native of France, his thirst for Western adventure had taken him to Kalamazoo, Mich.; Chicago; St. Louis; Santa Fe; and finally to a hotel in Kansas City. That's where he learned, in August 1858, that gold had been struck at Pikes Peak. Bott, in his early 20s, was invited to join an expedition.

"As I had little money, I agreed to join them. I had little idea where Pike's Peak was. I knew it was to the west somewhere, but how far, I did not know," he wrote in his memoirs years later.

It was a tough time for a lot of Americans.

The Panic of 1857 had begun with the sinking of a gold shipment off North Carolina, which led to bank collapses and a loss of confidence in the government's ability to pay debts and back currency. More than 5,000 businesses failed in the next year. Cities and towns of the East and Midwest were filled with shiftless young men, cast adrift by skyrocketing unemployment.

In early 1858, two expeditions, fueled by reports of gold in the rivers to the west, set out to find it, and had some success in Cherry Creek and other waterways near present-day Denver. One group stopped here long enough to lay out a town, El Paso, though nobody stayed to live here.

When one member returned to Lawrence, Kan., with a quill filled with gold dust, it caused a stir.

Word reached Bott, and he joined a third expedition to Pikes Peak. They reached the foot of Pikes Peak in the fall of 1858, and Bott, having had no luck mining on the east side of the peak, decided to found a town. He put up a cabin, the first structure of El Dorado, along Fountain Creek, today's location of Old Colorado City.

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"Here, therefore, is a field ripe with the harvest and ready for the gathering. Who shall number all its treasures? How shall we take an inventory of all its wealth?" wrote the St. Louis Democrat newspaper Nov. 30, 1858.

Claimed the Nebraska City News that fall: "It is difficult to find a shovel-full of dirt that does not contain more or less of the precious metal."

So spread accounts of the gold at Pikes Peak.

By the fall of 1858, dozens of guidebooks were in print, offering the best routes to the gold fields, equipment lists and techniques for making an easy fortune. The guides were full of supposed firsthand accounts.

"Gold is found everywhere you stick your shovel, paying from five to 10 cents the pan while prospecting, and there is no doubt but that it will pay from 10 to 20 dollars per day to the man," wrote H. Murat.

Of course, they needed gear, at least $150 worth a person, and the guides were full of advertisements for where to find the essentials.

Land speculators, railroads and merchants all had a powerful interest in sending the miners west, as did border town businesses and the proponents of Manifest Destiny, who wanted to see America spread westward.

"There could not be imagined a healthier, richer or more beautiful region of the country, nor can I see why it should not become, at no very distant day, a grand central station for that noble enterprise, which is to link with iron bands the two great oceans," wrote supposed miner John Buell in one guide.

Exactly when the phrase "Pike's Peak or Bust" began to appear on wagons is unclear, and few photographs have survived. By the spring of 1859, it could be seen painted on the sides of the many wagons heading west.

Later, when they were heading back east, the phrase "humbugged" or "busted" replaced "Pike's Peak or Bust" on many wagons.

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For the "Pike's Peakers" - also known as the '59ers" for the year the gold rush began in earnest - optimism quickly turned to disillusionment.

There were three main routes, all involving weeks of walking or riding through 700 miles of arid plains. Travelers stopped wherever there was water and green grass, and lived in constant fear of Indian attacks. While the early explorers came along the Arkansas River, the South Platte route became more popular.

Even those in the first wave found they had been grossly misinformed about gold. The best claims were already taken, the mining camps were squalid and disease-ridden, and the climate was not the gentle paradise that was promised. Historians estimate that half the would-be miners turned back before seeing Pikes Peak. And half who made it left soon after arriving. And few who remained got rich from gold.

For Bott, El Dorado didn't work out, so he wandered to Denver and got in the business of supplying miners.

In the summer of 1859, he met some entrepreneurs interested in his town site. These were not miners, but businessmen who had traveled the plains in the wake of the first rush and sensed how the real money would be made from the great population wave. A town at the foot of Ute Pass, the best route to the mining sites in Tarryall and South Park, would surely prosper, they figured.

They formed the Colorado City Town Co., and on Aug. 12, 1859, Melancthon Beach and Rufus Cable rode from Denver and founded Colorado City. They also stopped at some high rock pinnacles, which Beach said would make a good place for a beer garden.
"Beer garden! Why, it is a fit place for the gods to assemble, and we will call it ‘Garden of the Gods,'" Cable said. The name stuck.

There was no state or territorial government, so the businessmen formed the El Paso Claim Club to enforce claims and hang horse thieves. Bott, the new city's first builder and businessman, and others dreamed of a day when Colorado City would be the capital of the new territory and state.

The town funded improvements to Ute Pass, then a narrow shelf road. People hunted, grew crops and raised cattle, and watched the tide of miners continue to roll up the road.

"Most of these adventurers were men of no mining experience," Beach recalled. "So that in about another month most of these floating prospectors returned and a number settled in our new city for the winter, with the intention of trying their mining luck another season.

"The larger number, however, became discouraged and homesick and returned to their homes."

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Colorado City's glory days were brief. In the fall of 1860, Denver punched a road through the mountains along the South Platte canyon, to Tarryall and South Park, and suddenly the Ute Pass route looked unnecessarily long and twisting for miners.

With the outbreak of the Civil War, the Arkansas River route became dangerous because of Confederate guerillas, and the flow of miners through Colorado City came to a halt.

Colorado became a territory in 1861, and Colorado City was the capital. But when the Legislature met here in July 1862, so cramped were the accommodations - at the Lucy Maggard Hotel they had to fetch their own firewood and clear out at mealtimes - they agreed on little except that they would not meet in Colorado City again. Golden became the capital a month later.

"If it had not been for the border troubles, the war that followed, which permanently turned the traffic from the Arkansas route, our hopes would probably have been realized," Bott wrote.

Colorado City became the unruly neighbor, sin city to the posh resort town Palmer envisioned for Colorado Springs. Colorado City ceased being its own town in 1913, and was later annexed by Colorado Springs.

Bott died in 1916, praised by the Gazette Telegraph as "pioneer, builder, neighbor, father of Colorado Springs."

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Nobody found gold on Pikes Peak until it was struck in Cripple Creek 30 years later.

"It was very simply the best-known geographic feature in the state of Colorado. It was the first thing you saw coming across the plains," said Matt Mayberry, director of the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum. "It was known for that, even though the gold was 60 miles north of here."

David Hughes, a board member of the Old Colorado City History Center, has spent 30 years researching the boomtown days. He also nurses a healthy grudge against Palmer for refusing to extend the railroad to Colorado City.

While Palmer got a statue in the middle of Platte and Nevada avenues, little marks the men and women who arrived here 13 years earlier to build a town in the wilderness. It's a pattern of denial of the importance of Colorado City he says goes back 137 years.

"I don't know of any display, until right now, with the gold rush, about Colorado City," he said, referring to an exhibit planned at the Pioneers Museum for the 150th anniversary.

"There has been a prejudice against Colorado City from the first day Palmer walked into that cabin and it's still going on."

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CONTACT THE WRITER: 476-1605 or srappold@gazette.com

GOING FOR THE GOLD: PIKES PEAK OR BUST

The Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum will open an exhibit on the Pikes Peak or Bust gold rush, which currently gets passing mention in a small display about mining.

It will open with a public lecture by museum director Matt Mayberry at 2 p.m. Saturday at the museum, 215 S. Tejon St.

Historian Elliott West will give a public lecture at 7 p.m. Dec. 4 in the Gates Common Room in Palmer Hall at Colorado College.

All events are free; call 385-5990 for details.

SOURCES

• Manuscripts of memoirs on file at the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum, including those of the Rev. William Howbert, Anthony Bott, Andrew Templeton, M.S. Beach, David McShane and David Spielman
• Several contemporary guides to the Pikes Peak region published during the Gold Rush
• Contemporary news accounts from The Gazette and other publications
• "Here They Dug the Gold," 1931, by George F. Willison
• "A Bloomer Girl On Pike's Peak 1858," by Julia Archibald Holmes
• "Memories of a Lifetime in the Pike's Peak Region," 1925, by Irving Howbert
• "Letters of the Pike's Peak Gold Rush," 1959, by Libeus Barney
• "The Great Pikes Peak Gold Rush," 2001, by Robert L. Brown

OLD COLORADO CITY PLAQUE

The Old Colorado City History Center hopes to mark the 150th anniversary of the gold rush with an eight-panel display in Bancroft Park, to be dedicated in August 2009. The organization also plans a picnic, re-enactment and other events to coincide with the anniversary of the founding of Colorado City. Check http://history.oldcolo.com for details.