Pikes Peak or Bust: The 1859 Gold Rush

In the summer of eighteen fifty-eight, a small party of prospectors found placer gold in the gravel of Cherry Creek, near the junction of the South Platte River at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. The discovery was modest. The news that reached the eastern states was not. By the spring of eighteen fifty-nine, newspaper accounts of a new Colorado gold rush were drawing people from across the country, and somewhere between fifty thousand and one hundred thousand people were crossing the Great Plains with Pikes Peak or Bust painted on their wagon covers.

Many turned back before reaching the mountains. The early diggings near the creek were thin, and rumors of fraud circulated among discouraged emigrants returning east, earning them the nickname Gobacks. Then, on May sixth, eighteen fifty-nine, a prospector named John Gregory found a rich vein of gold-bearing quartz in a gulch above present-day Black Hawk. The Gregory Lode proved that the Colorado mountains contained genuine mineral wealth. The rush resumed in earnest.

Towns appeared almost overnight. Black Hawk, Central City, and Georgetown rose from mountain canyons. The population of the future Colorado Territory, which had barely existed in organized form, jumped into the tens of thousands within a single year.

Colorado Territory was formally organized in February of eighteen sixty-one. Statehood came fifteen years later. The gold rush that triggered both had lasted barely a decade in its first phase, but it had remade the western landscape in ways that the people already living there had never anticipated and could not have stopped.