The Trail of Gold and Silver Read online

  Change came slowly to New Mexico, but come it did. Far to the east, the newly victorious “Americans” began to move westward, searching for, among other things, the gold and silver that had helped motivate the establishment of the first English settlement at Jamestown, Virginia, back in 1607. Neither determination nor luck had brought success, but the hope of instant wealth would not die.

  By the early 1800s, these foreigners had reached New Mexico, much to the dismay of Spanish officials. Particularly after hearing of the sale of the Louisiana Territory to the United States in 1803, the Spanish worried what the future might hold: That purchase placed the aggressive outsiders right next door. New Mexico could expect little military assistance, or any other help, from its mother country, which had become merely a pawn in the English-French struggle to dominate Europe.

  The New Mexicans had every right to be concerned, because Americans, drinking deep from the cup of manifest destiny, had visions of controlling North America—and everything else they could lay their hands on. Was it not, after all, their God-given right to bring democracy and their advanced political and social institutions to more backward peoples? They could see little reason to doubt the righteousness of their endeavors.

  Before long, the threat became reality. Wanting to know what he had purchased, President Thomas Jefferson sent out two expeditions, one led by Lewis and Clark that went up the Missouri River, and one led by Zebulon Pike that went across to the Rocky Mountains. Pike’s 1806 mission was to go into the Southwest and find the source of the elusive Red River, the southern purchase boundary.

  Pike reached the Rocky Mountains, tried to climb the peak now named after him, and eventually journeyed across the Sangre de Cristo Mountains into the freezing, winter-locked San Luis Valley. There he finally built a stockade on what he thought was the Red River. All his party’s movements were known to the Spaniards in New Mexico, who had earlier tried but failed to intercept the expedition on the Great Plains. They logically waited until spring to have a patrol take the Americans into custody and escort them to Santa Fe. Pike’s claim that the Rio Grande was in fact the Red River did not sway New Mexican officials in the least, and the group was taken, under guard, to Chihuahua, before finally being dumped back into American territory in June 1807.

  During his sojourns, Pike found no gold, but he met someone who had: James Purcell, a trapper who had also wandered into Spanish territory and found himself forced to remain there. The former Kentuckian “assured me that he had found gold on the head of the La Platte [sic], and had carried some of the virgin mineral in his shot-pouch for months.” Purcell steadfastly refused to tell Pike exactly where he had found the gold, because he believed the site to be in American territory.

  This tidbit was included in Pike’s report of 1810, but it did not stir much interest. Troubles with England were about to erupt into another war, and New Mexico was still a long way from the advancing western frontier.

  Even less well known was the report of St. Louis resident Regis Loisel, who had been sent out by the French governor, back in April 1803, to examine the western territory. Upon his return, he found that the United States now owned the region; Loisel nonetheless filed an 1804 report that, among other things, claimed he had found gold.

  Though the scattered, fragmentary evidence was mounting, no one had yet put all the pieces together. Nor had there been a gold strike in the last century in what was now the United States to whet the appetite of the adventuresome. However, the pace of westward expansion was quickening. With the war over, Americans moved beyond the Mississippi Valley. The profits of the fur trade beckoned them into every Rocky Mountain nook and cranny. That the Spanish government (or anyone else) continued to be hostile did not bother the aggressive Americans much.

  Meanwhile, the Mexican people threw off Spain’s yoke, and declared their independence. Their government then made a move it would later regret bitterly: it opened Texas, California, and New Mexico to Americans, hoping to build up settlement, increase trade, and provide better defense against marauding Plains Indians and other tribes. Over the Santa Fe Trail the invitees came, ready to trade, and moved into the mountains looking for beaver. Before long, gold rumors began to filter back East from the Rocky Mountains, though few of the tale-tellers brought any actual gold or silver with them. Trapper James Cockrell thought he found a silver mine in 1823, for instance. Four years later, an expedition found “ore” and laboriously packed it back to St. Louis by horse—only to have an assay crush their hopes.

  Reality seldom puts rumors to rest, though, and America’s first real gold rush, in western Georgia, gave them all new life. In 1828–1830, and the following years, the eager and excited hastened to the mining communities of Auraria and Dahlonega, to find their fortunes “without working.” They camped and prospected, they panned, they dug, they burrowed, they sweated in the heat and humidity; they even watched slaves work claims for their masters. Most came away disappointed, having discovered only astonishingly hard work and meager returns. As one old miner moaned, “I’ve never worked so hard in my life to get rich without working.” Georgia’s was less than a huge stampede by later standards, and only encompassed a fairly small area, but it was the first American gold rush . . . and it revived the dreams and hopes that other golden troves awaited the fortunate adventurer.

  During the decade of the 1830s, both Indians and Mexicans brought gold to Fort Vasquez and Bent’s Fort, located beyond the foothills on the South Platte and Arkansas Rivers. William Bent claimed that the Indians had long known of the presence of gold in the country. It was, however, in the natives’ best interests to keep quiet; a gold rush could potentially destroy their way of life forever.

  A party of trappers and traders headed out of New Mexico to the Vas-quez Fork of the South Platte on a prospecting tour, first in 1833, then during the winter of 1834–1835. According to them, they made a “paying strike,” but did little about it. Another trapper, lost in the Rockies in 1835, found some gold specimens, finally regained his bearings, and returned to New Mexico. He excitedly organized a prospecting party, but never could relocate the strike site.

  By the late 1830s, trappers along the Missouri River were showing gold “flakes” to curious locals. Possibly truth-based claims were often accompanied by very tall tales: One that persisted for many years held that the Arapahos used “gold” bullets in a desperate fight with a rival tribe. In the 1840s, along with increasingly frequent oral reports, the reading public began to encounter comments such as one in Josiah Gregg’s classic Commerce of the Prairies. He observed that there existed an “extensive gold region about the sources of the South Platte; yet, although recent search has been made, it has not been discovered.” Gregg included a chapter on New Mexico mining, which unambiguously indicated mineralization in the region. Likewise, Rufus Sage mentioned gold several times in his Scenes in the Rocky Mountains. He also reported that “Mexicans mined gold in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains,” and repeated other stories about trappers or hunters finding gold. His comment that “doubtless very rich mines” existed may have piqued some interest, but few were stirred to hasten west seeking gold.

  William Gilpin, later a famous figure in Colorado’s saga, went west on several expeditions in the 1840s. He, or one of his party, found gold. Excited about what he had seen and what he believed the future held, Gilpin gave speech after speech in the 1850s about precious metals locked in the central Rocky Mountains. For him, no question remained: “The facts then and since collected by me, are so numerous and so positive, that I entertain an absolute conviction, derived from them, that gold in mass and in position and infinite in quantity, will, within the coming years reveal itself to the energy of our pioneers.”

  Dreams, rumors, hopes, untraceable gold deposits, and tall tales—they all became reality on the brisk morning of January 24, 1848, in California, when John Marshall found yellow “specks” in the millrace he was building for entrepreneur John Sutter on the South Fork of the American River.
That moment changed the destiny of the United States and shaped the future of the American West.

  “Boys, I believe I have found a gold mine,” Marshall told his fellow workers, in one of the most understated pronouncements ever heard. By mid-March, despite Sutter’s attempts to keep the discovery under wraps, the news had leaked out; nothing travels faster than the announcement of a gold strike. “Gold has been discovered in the northern Sacramento District about forty miles above Sutter’s Fort,” San Francisco’s California Star (March 18) calmly reported. Readers were far less placid: some immediately hurried to the discovery site. By mid-May, the Star editor intimated that “El Dorado” had been discovered: “Parties who have penetrated and traversed the region in which originally gold was found give encouraging reports of its increase in quan-tity—undiminished in purity” (May 27). As another paper more emotionally put it, California “resounds with the sordid cry of ‘gold, gold, GOLD!’” Within months, the forty-eighters were scattered throughout the Sierra Nevadas, over what became known as the motherlode country, looking for free (placer) gold in the streams and rivers. They found abundant gold almost everywhere they prospected. Jerry-built mining camps sprouted up almost overnight, and near the diggings, eager opportunists arrived to “mine the miners.”

  The news quickly traveled to all points of the globe, and a worldwide rush ensued. The 100,000 or so forty-niners who arrived the next year by ship, wagon, and horse took up digging, panning, and sluicing, not only enriching themselves but also nearly upsetting the world’s economic system. Never before had so much gold been pumped into it in such a short time. Although the forty-niners had to work much harder than their predecessors of only a year ago to get their “poke,” the 1849 rush dashed on into the 1850s. Among those journeying west in 1850 was a group of Cherokees from Indian Territory, who cut across the eastern foothills of the Rockies to intercept the well-traveled Oregon Trail. They did a bit of panning along the way, but found nothing interesting enough to make them pause on their way to El Dorado.

  During the California rush, William Gilpin kept telling listeners about the great future for potential wealth in the Rocky Mountain region. Anyone interested could also read numerous accounts of gold being found there. Several forty-niners told of panning for gold on their way west, including one who claimed to have purchased $2,000 worth of gold dust from an Arapaho Indian who had dug it around Ash Hollow, Nebraska!

  The city of St. Louis, along with its newspapers, fancied itself the gateway to and speaker for the great West beyond, and the news editors were not shy about publishing stories of gold. The Evening News (July 9, 1853), for instance, gushed that the South Platte and South Park areas “possess[ed] extensive gold fields.” Other papers heralded golden news as well. A letter from California, printed in the Little Rock True Democrat in December 1857, spoke of “gold prospects on the upper waters of the Arkansas and Platte” that were “better” than any in California.

  Not that the Evening News was taken in by every story. It reported on May 14, 1855, that the “existence of rich gold diggings on the head water of the Arkansas river, still continues, though slightly modified by adverse” reports. Its rival, the St. Louis Intelligencer, on July 16, told its readers solemnly that another letter writer “is convinced that it is all a hoax.”

  An interesting aspect of many such reports is that they placed the discoveries in some of the very spots where gold and silver were later actually found. True or not, stories, tales, and rumors of discoveries only heightened the interest. The California strikes kicked off a generation, and then a second generation, of mining frenzies that eventually carried prospectors and miners throughout the Rocky Mountains and southwestern deserts, on into Canada, and north to Alaska. Before the rushes ended, an epic saga had been written across the western North American continent.

  All of this excitement did not go unnoticed by the Plains and mountain Indians. Although they found relatively few gold seekers trespassing on their lands, they saw throngs of folks in rambling wagon trains going over the Santa Fe, Mormon, and Oregon Trails to Utah, California, New Mexico, and Oregon. No one could outrun cholera, or the other diseases, that came west as well; such white man’s diseases nearly eradicated some of the individual Indian bands. Further, the buffalo, that lifeblood of the native peoples, was decreasing in numbers. While not solely the fault of the traveling pioneers and hunters, the tribes knew who to blame.

  Of course, these westward-forging pioneers did not think of themselves as interlopers, but rather as fulfilling their own and their country’s manifest destiny. That they disrupted and threatened the existing inhabitants’ way of life probably did not enter the minds of most of them. Nor were these travelers and would-be settlers at all happy about the fact that the native peoples stood in their way. All told, an emotionally charged tinderbox waited to explode along the trails, trapping newcomer and older resident alike. A predictable result ensued: a recurrence of the war that had started back in 1607 between two peoples who each desired to call this land home.

  The European and American interlopers had climbed the Appalachian Mountains, surged across the Midwest, and now crisscrossed the trails west. Then came the California gold strikes—never before had anything like it drawn such multitudes westward.

  Washington responded haphazardly, first putting troops in the field in the 1820s along the Santa Fe Trail, and then, in the 1830s, building a string of forts to guard it and other trails. The rushes to Oregon and California only heightened the tensions, and in 1857 another effort was made to resolve the ongoing conflict. The army sent troops into the field that summer, and along with them went a Delaware scout, Fall Leaf. Somewhere along the campaign trail, he acquired some gold. The details of just where and how remain hazy, but the important thing was that he carried the gold back to Lawrence, Kansas, where it fired many imaginations in that depressed farming community. The crash of 1857 was in full swing, and an anxious population was more than ready for hints of possible salvation.

  As the fall of 1857 settled over the plains and mountains, the Ute, Arapaho, and Cheyenne tribes enjoyed one last season of quiet before the dawn of a new era. Shakespeare warned, “All that glitters is not gold,” but 300 years of Rocky Mountain rumors, legends, expeditions, and mining attempts convinced many that there was indeed gold out there in the foothills and mountains, despite the vanishingly small amount of hard proof available. In 1857, three factors came together for the first time that motivated people to turn rumor into reality.

  First was the lure. California abundantly proved that gold was out there, awaiting the fortunate or determined discoverer. The fact of gold in the Sierra Nevadas made it seem only logical that it would be found everywhere, or, at the least, that there would be a couple of new Californias. Furthermore, some forty-niners had returned home with unslaked gold fever and the skills and experience needed to open and develop a new gold district.

  Second, thanks to Uncle Sam, the way west had become better marked and safer than ever before. Through generous government policies and pioneers’ determination, settlement had crawled to within thirty days’ travel time of the central Rockies.

  Third, there was a mighty push from economic conditions. By 1857, the United States had sunk into a deep, desperate depression that hit urbanites and rural folk alike. Americans had never seen anything like it; it was the worst of times in national memory. Owners lost their homes and farms; economic disaster faced many other Americans (particularly Midwesterners and Northerners) as businesses failed, jobs disappeared, and banks collapsed, taking their uninsured depositors’ money with them. Farm prices plummeted, railroads declared bankruptcy, and disheartened, discouraged folk sought work of any kind—and there seemed none to be had. Mother Nature had no mercy, either: recurrent, seasonal fevers and agues swept the Midwest. All in all, Americans could point to little in 1857 that cheered them. The American dream of a better tomorrow appeared to be slipping away as the older agrarian America faded before advancing industria
lization.

  To add to their woes, perspicacious citizens could see an oncoming clash between industrial Northerners and slave-owning Southerners over a variety of issues, including states’ rights, sectional economies, political power and political parties, and the ever-emotional slavery question. Agricultural Southerners enjoyed gloating that they were weathering the depression better. In Washington, the halls of Congress echoed with recriminations, threats, and outright hatred. It seemed that the country and its leaders had lost their direction and that the future of America teetered in the balance. Some radicals went so far as to assert that separation offered the only answer.

  Americans looked for something, almost anything, to pull them out of this mess. What that might be they did not know, but prayed to find out, as the winter of 1857–1858 settled over the land.

  The Gold is there, ’most anywhere.

  You can take it out rich, with an iron crowbar,

  And where it is thick, with a shovel and pick,

  You can pick it out in lumps as big as a brick.

  (Chorus)

  Then ho boys ho, to Cherry Creek we’ll go.

  There’s plenty of gold,

  In the West we are told,

  In the new Eldorado.

  —ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS, JUNE 18, 1859

  1

  Pike’s Peak or Bust

  A gloomy winter slipped past, but gave way to a spring of 1858 that was not much brighter economically. The fowers bloomed, but too briefy to take most people’s minds off the trials of daily life. Still, for two groups of people, spring finally brought the chance to follow their cherished dreams of gold beyond the western horizon. Gold, they had every right to believe, was waiting out there. One group, in Indian Territory, prepared to travel the relatively short distance to the foothills of the central Rockies, where some of them had found gold back in the California excitement of 1850. The other group, in Lawrence, Kansas, also knew that gold existed to the west, because the army scout Fall Leaf had brought some back from the military campaign there the year before. Unfortunately, he did not know its source, so they had to decide where to start searching.