the gulch, and slides were being constructed—in short, the very picture of a busy, promising mining camp was before me.”
Villard met with Gregory and interviewed him about his background. Gregory describes his group’s early days being hindered by ice and snow.
“But for a week the weather has been warm enough. A great many, as you see, have tracked us to the gulch and taken up claims on other veins and are working them,” Villard reported Gregory as saying. Villard then spent about a week with Gregory and the other miners looking for gold and enjoying their “hospitality.”
“I visited every ‘lead’ and ‘claim’ then opened, witnessed the digging, hauling, and washing of ‘pay-dirt,’ washed out many a pan myself, saw the gold in the riffles of the sluices, and was daily present when the workers caught the quicksilver used to gather the fine gold from the sluices and heated it in retorts into gold-charged cakes,” Villard wrote. “Thoroughly convinced by all this ocular evidence that the new [El] Dorado had really been discovered, I returned to Denver, and felt justified in spreading this great news with all the faith and emphasis of conviction.”
Again ready to make history, William Green Russell showed up in the area on June 1, 1859, with more than one hundred followers ready to find gold. He found Gregory’s area already filled to the brim with people also hoping to strike it rich. He continued on an additional two miles from the mine, also called “Gregory Gulch,” and struck gold in what would later become “Russell Gulch.”
The miners began sanctioning the area off into claims and mining districts. Then the towns began appearing: Central City, Black Hawk, Mountain City, Nevadaville, Gregory Point. Today only the first two still exist; history turned the others into ghost towns.
Gregory himself earned $972 in six days on his claim. But like Jackson, he wasn’t destined to stay for long in the area he had discovered. Gregory sold his claim for $20,000 and in time disappeared, largely without a trace, from the pages of history.
Hung from a Yellow Pine
“[Gregory] was an experienced miner from Georgia, had been in the gold rush there and like a lot of people kind of heard what was going on in the West and thought he understood it,” said David Forsyth, executive director and curator of the Gilpin Historical Society. “They had the placer gold discoveries … which kind of got people to looking. And so what he did is he followed it up Clear Creek.”
I met with Forsyth in his office on the top floor of a giant 146-year-old schoolhouse converted into a museum. All around him and all the way to the ceiling were stacks of books and other yellowed reference materials. As we talked about Gregory, the whistling of the ancient boiler occasionally interrupted us.
“And within about six weeks of his discovery there were thirty thousand people up here,” Forsyth said. “Because placer gold is nice—but you got to work a lot of placers to get enough gold to make it worth your while. That discovery was huge and with the people coming up here, staking their claims … it was chaotic at first.”
Chaotic indeed. Russell reported in the first few months from his area that several men had already been shot, five froze to death, more drowned trying to ford a river, and eighteen died in various forest fires. A Capt. Wm. M. Slaughter recalled an incident where he and two friends were prospecting twenty miles northwest of Gregory when they came across a small party of Utes. Apparently, the men shared dinner and after the meal, the groups went their different ways—his friends to prospecting the streams and the Utes to hunting. When Slaughter later returned to the group, he was shocked at seeing the Indians busy scalping his friends. He hid among the rocks and made his way back to Gregory’s diggings to share his dramatic tale. Crime and claims jumping had to be curtailed early on because they soon discovered that more money and investors were needed as the gold was chased into the hard rock.
“So very quickly they realized this wasn’t going to work, so each mining district started making their own rules—and it was ‘This is how we’re going to handle claims, this is how we’re going to handle claim jumpers, and this is how we’re going to handle crime,” Forsyth said. “If it was a certain crime, they might shave half your head and send you out of town. They might tar and feather you. Claim jumping you could be killed for. They were not shy about it.”
A man pans for gold near where it was first discovered on Clear Creek. (Photo by L. McLean, courtesy of the Historical Society of Idaho Springs)
It was not even a full year later when the area had its first lynching when a man named Pensyl Tuck attempted to shoot Mountain City Sheriff Jack H. Kehler. The lawman was apparently quicker on that draw and shot and wounded Tuck.
“[Tuck had] gone to a miner’s court, and he had threatened everyone involved with it,” Forsyth said. “The trial adjourned, and Tuck tried to shoot the sheriff, who returned fire and hit Tuck. He was taken to his cabin, the doctor dressed his wounds.” In what probably wasn’t the cleverest move, Tuck told his physician that he planned on doing some killing in the name of revenge as soon as he was up and out of bed. Understandably concerned, the doctor decided to warn those men.
“Over the next few days he repeatedly threatened to kill basically everyone in Mountain City,” Forsyth said. “Two hundred men approached his cabin, dragged him from his bed, and they hanged him from the limb of a nearby yellow pine. That was the first lynching in Gilpin County. People objected to it, not because he didn’t deserve to be hanged, but because they thought he should have had a trial first.”
The territory’s first “legal” execution also occurred in Central City in 1863 after William Van Horn killed a man out of jealousy when the girl he was with dumped him.
“They were very serious about these rules and regulations,” Forsyth said. “Because they wanted these outside investors to come in and they realized that the easy lode gold was gone, and they were going to have to start doing hard rock mining. And you can’t do that without money. Investors don’t want to go to a place where there are shootouts in the street three times a day. They want stability.”
Before long the miners brought their wives and children, the towns were built, and schools sprang up.
A Thousand Years of Gold
Bayard Taylor, a travel writer and poet, came into Central City in 1866 and found what had grown from the seeds Gregory had inadvertently planted.
[It] is by no means picturesque. The timber has been wholly cut away, except upon some of the more distant steeps, where its dark green is streaked with ghastly marks of fire. The great, awkwardly rounded mountains are cut up and down by the lines of paying ‘lodes,’ and pitted all over by the holes and heaps of rocks made either by prospectors or to secure claims. Nature seems to be suffering from an attack of confluent small-pox. My experience in California taught me that gold mining utterly ruins the appearance of a country, and therefore I am not surprised at what I see here. On the contrary, this hideous slashing, tearing, and turning upside down is the surest indication of mineral wealth.
Taylor detailed the houses, shops, mills, and saloons in both Central City and neighboring Black Hawk. Not a happy camper by any stretch of the imagination, Taylor complained in his narrative about the high altitude, a bleeding nose, and needing to catch his breath every twenty feet. However, he does come away from the experience impressed with some of the area’s early residents.
“In this population of from six to eight thousand souls, one finds representatives of all parts of the United States and Europe. Men
