Gold!. Ian Neligh
the creek banks to the bedrock below to find where gravity had carried the gold over time.
The hunt for gold naturally evolved to see where it came from and how it got in the streams. Soon miners were chasing the gold lodes or veins into the surrounding mountainsides, and with the bang of black powder, the era of hard rock mining began. Men drilled by hand blasting rock apart and used candlelight to work by.
Necessity is the mother of invention and pneumatic drills were created and black powder gave way to dynamite. By 1902 the Idaho Springs area had more than three hundred mines, which were estimated to have a combined one hundred miles of tunnels.
A FORTUNE LOST AND FOUND
He tried looking again and still couldn’t find it. Everything was covered in thick snow, and the source of what could have been a fortune in gold was now gone. It was April 1859, several months after George Jackson made the historic find at the confluence of Chicago Creek and Clear Creek. Jackson would soon head up again to remove the gold with his team—and John Gregory found himself in something of an unfortunate predicament.
Often characterized as ornery, cantankerous, and something of an antisocial curmudgeon, Gregory was a prospector in the truest sense. He was described as bearded, red shaggy-haired, wiry, wrinkled, and dressed as a beggar. One can also be fairly certain he didn’t smell of flowers but much else about him is a mystery. Unlike Jackson, who happened accidentally upon his find, Gregory was specifically hunting the streams for gold. But gold dust or a simple handful of nuggets wasn’t at all what he had in mind. Gregory had his eye on a larger prize. He wanted to find where the gold had come from.
John Gregory had left his home of Gordon County, Georgia, in August the year before with the intention of looking for gold in British Columbia. He was detained in his travels and forced to spend the winter in Fort Laramie. The breathless news of the discovery of gold in Colorado reached him, and a classic opportunist, he decided immediately to change his plans. Gregory followed the gold flakes like bread crumbs in the mountain rivers and up the north fork of Clear Creek. A seasoned prospector, he knew exactly what he was looking for and soon found it.
John Gregory. (Courtesy of the Gilpin Historical Society)
A vein or lode of gold ore often streaks through the area where the precious metal has filled in a fissure in the rock. In time a small amount of gold washes away where it is exposed to the surface and runs into the streams. But Gregory knew that if he could indeed discover the source of the gold found in the streams, he’d find a fortune.
In what is essentially an overflow casino parking lot today, Gregory came across a ledge that had the state’s most famous lode of gold ore. A sudden spring blizzard forced him to use his gold pan to dig a shelter and build around him a brush hut. He was stuck there for days, with his supply of food rapidly dwindling. When the storm finished, and he climbed out into the blinding winter landscape, he saw his discovery was gone. In the deep snow, he couldn’t for the life of him find it again. One can imagine his frustration echoing in colorful verse off the surrounding valley walls.
With no supplies, no money, and no options, Gregory was forced to leave the state’s first gold vein discovery and head back down the mountain to the town that would later be called Golden, after George Jackson’s good friend.
Penniless, Gregory got to the town and it’s said he took a little time to recover from his adventure through the restorative powers of the local saloon. Before long he found people who believed his discovery was real and would help him outfit a small party to journey into the mountains to rediscover his gold. On May 6, with a fresh group of treasure hunters from Indiana, Gregory marched forth once again to locate the spot that had eluded him. With luck, and a seasoned eye, he found the lost vein once again.
By then word of the rich gold discoveries of Colorado had already caught fire and were roaring east, back across the Great Plains. Journalist Henry Villard recalled that an exodus took place when word reached those living in the young towns of Denver and Auraria.
“Whoever could secure provisions enough for a stay in the mountains started off without delay,” Villard wrote in his memoir. “Traders locked their stores, barkeepers set out with their stock of whiskey, the few mechanics [carpenters] that were engaged in building houses dropped their work. The county judge and sheriff, lawyers and doctors, and even the editor of the Rocky Mountain News, joined in the rush. Naturally, I did not stay behind, but started out on a fine mule.…”
When Villard reached the area where Gregory had found gold, he was exhausted from the long trip. He asked to be pointed in the direction of the prospector, found him, introduced himself, and “begged a place to lie down for the night. He complied at once, and assigned me a corner of his tent,” Villard wrote. “My animal required no care, as he had had plenty of grass and water on the way, and, after picketing him, I spread my blankets and was asleep in a moment.”
When Villard woke in the morning, he took a moment to get his bearings of the area he called the “Gregory Mine.”
“Although but two weeks had elapsed since Gregory had washed out the first ‘pay dirt’ in his pan, there were already many scores of men busily engaged in ripping open the mountain sides with pick and shovel,” Villard wrote. “Dozens of huts of pine branches had been erected, and tents pitched. Sluices, ‘long toms,’ and ‘rockers’ were in full operation, ditches crossed the gulch, and slides were being constructed—in short, the very picture of a busy, promising mining camp was before me.”
Villard met with Gregory and interviewed him about his background. Gregory describes his group’s early days being hindered by ice and snow.
“But for a week the weather has been warm enough. A great many, as you see, have tracked us to the gulch and taken up claims on other veins and are working them,” Villard reported Gregory as saying. Villard then spent about a week with Gregory and the other miners looking for gold and enjoying their “hospitality.”
“I visited every ‘lead’ and ‘claim’ then opened, witnessed the digging, hauling, and washing of ‘pay-dirt,’ washed out many a pan myself, saw the gold in the riffles of the sluices, and was daily present when the workers caught the quicksilver used to gather the fine gold from the sluices and heated it in retorts into gold-charged cakes,” Villard wrote. “Thoroughly convinced by all this ocular evidence that the new [El] Dorado had really been discovered, I returned to Denver, and felt justified in spreading this great news with all the faith and emphasis of conviction.”
Again ready to make history, William Green Russell showed up in the area on June 1, 1859, with more than one hundred followers ready to find gold. He found Gregory’s area already filled to the brim with people also hoping to strike it rich. He continued on an additional two miles from the mine, also called “Gregory Gulch,” and struck gold in what would later become “Russell Gulch.”
The miners began sanctioning the area off into claims and mining districts. Then the towns began appearing: Central City, Black Hawk, Mountain City, Nevadaville, Gregory Point. Today only the first two still exist; history turned the others into ghost towns.
Gregory himself earned $972 in six days on his claim. But like Jackson, he wasn’t destined to stay for long in the area he had discovered. Gregory sold his claim for $20,000 and in time disappeared, largely without a trace, from the pages of history.
Hung from a Yellow Pine
“[Gregory] was an experienced miner from Georgia, had been in the gold rush there and like a lot of people kind of heard what was going on in the West and thought he understood it,” said David Forsyth, executive director and curator of the Gilpin Historical Society. “They had the placer gold discoveries … which kind of got people to looking. And