they had discovered gold, and in a dozen other places trying to find the source and were as yet unsuccessful. However, the cry had gone out, and settlements and later towns began growing in the places they had searched. Soon the towns of Auraria and Denver came into being. But the gold the Russells had found was depleted and no one had yet struck it rich. Regardless, the stories of great wealth continued. A haphazard sprint for the newly discovered goldfields ensued.
“Though they carried home or sent home large stories of the auriferous character of the country they ‘prospected,’ [and] took with them precious little gold,” Greeley reported. “But their reports aroused a spirit of gold-seeking adventure in others, so that the ensuing (last) fall witnessed a rush of three or four hundred, mainly men of broken fortunes from the dead mushroom ‘cities’ of Nebraska and Kansas, to the region watered by the South Platte and the more northerly sources of the Arkansas [River].”
As it turns out, the country was also in a severe depression, starting with the Panic of 1857. Homes, businesses, jobs were all lost in the economic crises, a nasty situation primarily aggravated by the loss of the gold-laden SS Central America in a hurricane. The disappearance of the valuable cargo dealt a near-crippling blow to the American economy.
The ship sank near the Carolinas, taking with it more than four hundred passengers and twenty-one tons of gold to the bottom of the sea. Fortunately, many women and children were evacuated before the ship went down, and another fifty were later rescued from the ocean. A handful of men survived a desperate week in a lifeboat before being discovered.
Incidentally, the gold was later recovered in 1988 by treasure hunter Tommy G. Thompson, who was arrested in 2015 after a two-year manhunt for failing to appear before a judge in a case where investors were excluded from the gold profits removed from the wreck.
In the wake of the tragic incident with the ship, and compounding economic troubles, merchants across the Midwest who were desperate for any source of additional income were all too eager to help perpetuate the talk of gold and what could have easily become a myth.
“I doubt that three thousand dollars’ worth of gold in every shape had been taken out by the five or six hundred seekers who came to this region in hot pursuit of it,” Greeley wrote.
However, the gold was there: they only needed to look a little higher.
A Golden Ring
In the late days of 1858, Jackson was hunting with his friends Tom Golden and Black Hawk. His diary has brief descriptions of the terrible weather and his varied successes aiming down the length of his rifle.
Dec. 27
“Still snowing. Tom hunting Oxen. Black Hawk and I for elk. I killed a fine fat doe. Still snowing.”
Dec. 28
“Snowing fast, accompanied by high wind. In camp all day.”
Dec. 29
“I got into camp late at night; saw about 600 elks; killed five cows and one bull.”
Dec. 31
“Jerked Elk meat until noon with intention of going down mountain … packed meat and blankets and started down over fallen timber and through snow four feet deep. Had a hell of a time before I reached the creek. Went into camp at dark. Dogs and I almost tired out. Made big fire after supper and dried my clothes and blankets. Turned in about 12 o’clock, and slept good until daylight.”
Then on the first day of the new year, Jackson decided to head out on his own to follow the stream into the mountains. He told Tom Golden that he’d be back at their camp above Table Mountain in a week. With two pounds of bread, one pound of coffee, and dried elk for both himself and his dogs, Jackson set off.
Traveling about eight miles farther upstream, he killed a mountain lion he came across, and as some accounts of Jackson’s adventures report, he saw what he initially interpreted as a cloud of smoke from a camp of Native Americans. Being cautious, he worked his way through the deep snow and saw that it was actually steam from a hot spring. The snow around it was melted away, and the sheep he came across were eating the thawed vegetation.
“Killed fat sheep and camped under three cottonwood trees. About 1,000 mountain sheep in sight tonight; no scarcity of meat in future for myself and dogs. Good,” Jackson reported. He was up before daylight, shot at and wounded another mountain lion, and drank the last of his coffee. He then started inspecting the gravel of the streams. “Good gravel here; looks like it would carry gold,” Jackson wrote. “Wind has blown snow off the rim, but gravel is hard frozen. Panned out two cups; nothing but fine colors.”
The next day he built a giant fire on the rocks to thaw the gravel. He kept the fire going all day and didn’t notice at first that a “carcajou,” also known as a wolverine, had come into his camp. What followed was a savage fight between the dogs, Jackson, and the wolverine.
“Dogs killed him after I had broken his back with belt ax. Hell of a fight.”
On January 7 Jackson removed the embers from the fire he had set the day before to thaw the frozen gravel by the stream. Using his cup, he panned out the gold from the rock and was quite pleased with what he found. On his ninth cupful, he found a large nugget of gold. He would later have it turned into a ring for his wife.
“Feel good tonight,” he wrote in his journal, then added as an afterthought, “Carcajou no good for dog.” He worked at the stream all the next day with the inadequate tools that he’d brought along. He made the best of what he had, even wearing out his belt knife.
“Well, Tom old boy, I’ve got the diggins at last,” Jackson wrote. “But can’t be back in a week. Dogs can’t travel. Damn carcajou.”
After recovering about an ounce of gold, he decided to head back to camp and join up with his hunting partners—that is once his dogs were ready to travel again. In preparation for a return trip, he carefully hid evidence of his work and marked a tree with a knife and his belt ax.
“Snowing like hell. High wind and cold. In camp all day. Drum can hardly walk around today.” It did finally stop snowing, but Jackson spent the day in his camp doctoring his dog’s leg, which he said had swollen to the size of his upper arm.
“Damn a carcajou.”
On January 12 the three of them began the slow trip back down the mountains. That evening Jackson put a balsam on Drum’s wound. They started late the next day but made better progress; he noted that “Drum is doing much better.”
On January 14 with his moccasins so worn that he was nearly barefoot, Jackson made his way back to camp and found his friend Tom more than a little uneasy about his delay in returning.
“After supper, I told him what I had found and showed him the gold, and we talked, smoked and ate, the balance of the night. I could hardly realize I had been gone nineteen days.” Once out of the mountains he and Tom came across a man they knew who was using two sluice boxes to get gold from the stream. Compared with what Jackson had pulled from the river in his coffee cup just days prior, he was not remotely impressed.
“No good; too fine to save without quicksilver, and not enough to pay with it.”
Many miners used quicksilver, or mercury, to remove the gold from rock or to help remove it from sand. The mercury turns the gold into an amalgam, which can later be burned off and returned to its pure form. Not environmentally friendly or safe,
