The Gold Rush That Built a State

In the first week of July of eighteen fifty-eight, a prospecting party led by William Green Russell found a modest placer deposit of gold near the mouth of Little Dry Creek, where it joins the South Platte River. It was the first significant gold discovery in the Rocky Mountain region, and the news traveled fast. What followed became known as the Pike's Peak Gold Rush, a stampede across the high plains that drew an estimated one hundred thousand fortune seekers.

Their wagons carried the slogan Pike's Peak or Bust. In November of eighteen fifty-eight, General William Larimer and his associates laid out a townsite on the east bank of Cherry Creek, on land already claimed by the St. Charles Town Company, and named it Denver City after James Denver, the governor of Kansas Territory.

Across the creek sat its rival, Auraria. The two towns competed bitterly before merging in eighteen fifty-nine. The rush also gave rise to Golden and Boulder.

This was not an empty land. It was the territory of the Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples, and the flood of newcomers set in motion conflicts that would shape the decades to come. The population grew so quickly that Congress carved out the Colorado Territory in eighteen sixty-one, the first major step toward statehood, which arrived fifteen years later.