a time when a fortune could be dug from the ground and anyone, regardless of their economic status, could change it all in the blink of an eye. They also serve as memorials to crushed dreams, lives, and an environmental legacy that will chain us to the sites for all of time.
What I found more compelling were those that still hunted for their fortune in the shade cast by the gold rush more than 150 years ago. Prospectors, miners, and treasure hunters who ignored popular sentiment that the gold was gone, that it had disappeared or was too hard to remove. A small community engages in dangerous, backbreaking work even today to pry wealth from the dirt and rock of the Colorado mountains.
Fascinated with both the history of the gold rush and those who still toiled in its legacy, I spent a year meeting with them, hearing their stories, and trying to understand why it is they continue to do what they do—often in the face of extreme hardship. Many times by word of mouth, I went and met with one after the other and discovered the dubious inheritance of the gold rush included far more than just miners and prospectors.
But for the moment those thoughts were far away. I’d found gold in a chilly Colorado stream, and that is, after all, how it all began.
WOLVERINES AND SUNKEN TREASURE
Despite the bitter cold, George Jackson continued wading through waist-deep snow, going ever farther west into what would become the Colorado Rockies. Originally from Missouri, the hunter, trapper, and experienced prospector had no clear destination; Jackson just wanted to see what was beyond the next bend in the river. In retrospect this was maybe not the best idea as he had nearly drowned some weeks before and was saved by one of his traveling companions. But now Jackson was alone, save for his two dogs, and often risked injury or death. Even so, he continued west. It was the winter of 1859.
On January 2, Jackson woke to hear his two dogs growling in the frigid blue hue of early morning. Eyes open, he scanned his campsite. The nearby herd of bighorn sheep he had spotted the day before were now gone. Kit and Drum continued their low, intense warning, which created plumes in the biting air. Then he spotted it. The mountain lion was only twenty feet away. The difference between life and death on the frontier was sometimes as simple as attacking first.
“[I] pulled my gun from under the blankets. Shot too quick; broke his shoulder,” Jackson wrote in his diary. He fired again, the second gunshot report deafening in the mountain canyon. The lion dropped dead to the snow.
“Clear high wind and very cold,” Jackson later remarked of the day, adding he spent this time in camp building with tree branches a small shelter from the freezing temperatures. The next day he spotted another mountain lion creeping up on him, which he also shot dead.
On January 4, Jackson and his dogs followed the river, which would later be named Clear Creek, for five miles, then followed the north fork of the river for five more miles through the rugged, ankle-splintering country. This was a land that had been seen briefly by the Spanish some two hundred years before, but was known to Native American tribes such as the Utes and Cheyenne. Exhausted, Jackson returned to his camp after dark and discovered yet another surprise.
“Mountain lion stole all of my meat in camp; no supper tonight—damn him.”
Jackson didn’t know it, but he would soon make a discovery at the confluence of two creeks that would send many thousands of settlers into this far-flung western portion of what was then the Kansas Territory. The call to fame and fortune would dwarf the size of the California gold rush, bringing in miners, merchants, entrepreneurs, criminals—and lead to the formation of a state, which today has some 5.5 million residents. In just one more day George Jackson would make a discovery so large, it would light the fuse that set off the Colorado gold rush.
Bottom of the Ocean
In a near-abandoned high school parking lot, just south of the historic city of Idaho Springs, sits a monument dedicated to George Jackson. A giant and unimaginative potato-shaped boulder rests on a pedestal, hidden to one side by a grove of small trees. A plaque fixed to its front reads:
“On this spot was made the first discovery of gold in the Rocky Mountains by George A. Jackson January 7th, 1859 placed 1909.”
Jackson’s discovery wasn’t the first in Colorado or even the largest—but it was the first time a substantial amount of gold was found in the Rockies. Before the high school in Idaho Springs was built, and later abandoned for a larger one; before neighboring Interstate 70 snaked its way up the canyon along Clear Creek, connecting the plains to the mountains; before even the town, the mills, and the mines that preceded them all, Jackson, with his two dogs, fought their way deeper into a largely unexplored canyon.
George Jackson. (Courtesy of the Historical Society of Idaho Springs)
There is some disagreement about Jackson’s original intentions in the Rockies. While he was certainly a seasoned veteran of the California gold rush ten years before, his trip into the Rockies lacked any prospecting supplies and seemed to indicate he had come to Colorado mainly for hunting and trapping. A small amount of gold was discovered in Colorado only the year before, and rumors and legends of the precious metal had persisted since at least 1765 when Spanish explorer Don Juan María Antonio de Rivera returned from Colorado.
The Spaniard had brought samples of gold with him to Santa Fe, which were later dismissed by his government. Subsequent travelers, explorers, mountain men, and even madmen related tales of gold that were likewise disregarded. The California gold rush of 1849 saw those who were seeking to strike it rich cross through the Rockies and pan the streams along the way.
In 1850 Lewis Ralston, on his way to California, stopped for a time in Colorado to pan a small amount of gold from a drifting finger of Clear Creek. The gold was quickly removed from the area and he decided to move on, continuing his journey west. Again gold was discovered but in such small quantities that it didn’t warrant additional time or energy.
“For some ten years past, vague stories affirming or implying the existence of gold in our country’s principal chain of mountains, have from time to time reached the public ear; but they seemed to rest on very slight or insecure foundations, and attracted but limited and transient attention,” wrote the New York Tribune’s Horace Greeley in his account from 1859. “An Indian’s, or trapper’s, or trader’s bare assertion that, in traversing the narrow ravines and precipitous heights of our American Switzerland he had picked up a piece of quartz lustrous with gold, or even a small nugget of the pure metal, was calculated to attract little attention, while California was unfolding her marvelous treasures.…”
William Green Russell had participated in the gold rush in his home state of Georgia in the 1830s, and in California’s a decade later. With his eye on the Rockies, Russell organized a party to prospect Colorado with the guidance of Cherokee Indians related to him through marriage. The Cherokee told him they had discovered gold in the streams that tumbled down from those breathtaking mountains. In July of 1858, Russell, his two brothers, and their small party finally succeeded in finding gold in Dry Creek. While they were able to pan out only a limited quantity of gold, it had been found, and word of its discovery began working its way back east.
In time, its battle cry would become the plucky and courageous, however geographically erroneous, “Pikes Peak or Bust.”
Indeed,
