Idaho Springs: Where Colorado's Gold Rush Began
Near Idaho Springs, Colorado
You are driving through the town where the state of Colorado essentially began. Idaho Springs sits in a narrow canyon at about seven thousand five hundred feet, where a small stream called Chicago Creek tumbles down to meet the larger Clear Creek. In the dead of winter, early in the year eighteen fifty nine, a prospector named George Andrew Jackson built a campfire on a sandbar right about here.
He scraped away the frozen ground, dipped his tin coffee cup into the gravel, and panned out roughly nine dollars worth of gold. It was the first substantial gold discovery in what would become Colorado, and word of it, along with a lode strike near Black Hawk that spring, helped ignite the Pike's Peak gold rush. Over the next year, something like one hundred thousand people set out for these mountains, though only about forty thousand actually made it.
The camp that grew up around Jackson's diggings went through a whole string of names. Sacramento City. Idahoe.
Idaho City. It finally settled on Idaho Springs, incorporating as a town in November of eighteen eighty five. The placer gold in the creek played out fairly quickly, but miners found rich veins of gold locked in the rock of the canyon walls, and hard rock mining kept the town alive for decades.
What makes Idaho Springs unusual is that it never truly died. The main trail west always ran right through here, first as a wagon road, then a railroad, then Highway Six, and today as Interstate Seventy. That steady traffic, plus the natural hot springs that drew people long before the gold did, carried the town through the boom and bust cycles that turned so many of its neighbors into ghost towns.
Look around and you will see the evidence layered everywhere. The great Argo Mill built into the hillside. A thirty foot wooden water wheel.
Tunnels bored into the mountains. This is not a museum piece. It is a living town of fewer than two thousand people, still perched exactly where a hungry prospector got lucky with a coffee cup more than one hundred sixty years ago.
