Cherry Creek Confluence
Colorado
The spot where Cherry Creek meets the South Platte River is where Denver began. In the summer of eighteen fifty-eight, a prospecting party led by William Greeneberry Russell, a miner from Georgia, camped under the cottonwood trees near this junction. In July, Russell's party found placer gold in the gravels of Little Dry Creek, a few miles south, the first significant gold discovery in the Rocky Mountain region.
Word spread east fast, and thousands of prospectors set out for the Pike's Peak or Bust rush the following spring. By October of eighteen fifty-eight, Russell had staked a settlement on the west bank of Cherry Creek, naming it Auraria after the gold-rush town in his home state of Georgia. On November twenty-second, eighteen fifty-eight, General William Larimer arrived and claim-jumped the east bank, naming his town Denver City after Kansas Territorial Governor James Denver, hoping to win political favor.
He did not know Denver had already resigned. The two towns competed fiercely. By June of eighteen fifty-nine, Auraria had two hundred fifty buildings to Denver's one hundred fifty, but Denver secured the main stagecoach route, which tipped the balance.
On December third, eighteen fifty-nine, the rival settlements merged under the Denver name. That merger, and this confluence, is where everything started.
