Gold!. Ian Neligh

      A man pans for gold near where it was first discovered on Clear Creek. (Photo by L. McLean, courtesy of the Historical Society of Idaho Springs)

      It was not even a full year later when the area had its first lynching when a man named Pensyl Tuck attempted to shoot Mountain City Sheriff Jack H. Kehler. The lawman was apparently quicker on that draw and shot and wounded Tuck.

      “[Tuck had] gone to a miner’s court, and he had threatened everyone involved with it,” Forsyth said. “The trial adjourned, and Tuck tried to shoot the sheriff, who returned fire and hit Tuck. He was taken to his cabin, the doctor dressed his wounds.” In what probably wasn’t the cleverest move, Tuck told his physician that he planned on doing some killing in the name of revenge as soon as he was up and out of bed. Understandably concerned, the doctor decided to warn those men.

      “Over the next few days he repeatedly threatened to kill basically everyone in Mountain City,” Forsyth said. “Two hundred men approached his cabin, dragged him from his bed, and they hanged him from the limb of a nearby yellow pine. That was the first lynching in Gilpin County. People objected to it, not because he didn’t deserve to be hanged, but because they thought he should have had a trial first.”

      The territory’s first “legal” execution also occurred in Central City in 1863 after William Van Horn killed a man out of jealousy when the girl he was with dumped him.

      “They were very serious about these rules and regulations,” Forsyth said. “Because they wanted these outside investors to come in and they realized that the easy lode gold was gone, and they were going to have to start doing hard rock mining. And you can’t do that without money. Investors don’t want to go to a place where there are shootouts in the street three times a day. They want stability.”

      Before long the miners brought their wives and children, the towns were built, and schools sprang up.

       A Thousand Years of Gold

      Bayard Taylor, a travel writer and poet, came into Central City in 1866 and found what had grown from the seeds Gregory had inadvertently planted.

      [It] is by no means picturesque. The timber has been wholly cut away, except upon some of the more distant steeps, where its dark green is streaked with ghastly marks of fire. The great, awkwardly rounded mountains are cut up and down by the lines of paying ‘lodes,’ and pitted all over by the holes and heaps of rocks made either by prospectors or to secure claims. Nature seems to be suffering from an attack of confluent small-pox. My experience in California taught me that gold mining utterly ruins the appearance of a country, and therefore I am not surprised at what I see here. On the contrary, this hideous slashing, tearing, and turning upside down is the surest indication of mineral wealth.

      Taylor detailed the houses, shops, mills, and saloons in both Central City and neighboring Black Hawk. Not a happy camper by any stretch of the imagination, Taylor complained in his narrative about the high altitude, a bleeding nose, and needing to catch his breath every twenty feet. However, he does come away from the experience impressed with some of the area’s early residents.

      “In this population of from six to eight thousand souls, one finds representatives of all parts of the United States and Europe. Men of culture and education are plenty, yet not always to be distinguished by their dress or appearance,” Taylor wrote. “Society is still agreeably free and unconventional. People are so crowded together, live in so primitive a fashion for the most part, and are, perhaps (many of them), so glad to escape from restraint, that they are more natural, and hence more interesting than in the older States.”

      Taylor said going on a descent into a mine was one of the necessary things a traveler to the area must endure—and as such agreed to subject himself to the experience.

      “It is a moist, unpleasant business,” Taylor recounted of his journey into one of the area’s larger mines. “As we were returning to the lower drift, there was a sudden smothered bellowing under our feet, the granite heart of the mountain trembled, and our candles were extinguished in an instant. It was not an agreeable sensation, especially when … [I was informed] that another blast would follow the first. However, the darkness and uncertainty soon came to an end. We returned to the foot of the ladder, and, after a climb which, in that thin air, was a constant collapse to the lungs, we reached the daylight in a dripping, muddy, and tallow-spotted condition.”

      When Taylor’s tour of the area was over, he embraced the opportunity but reflected on Colorado’s gold mining future.

      One thing is certain: the mines of Colorado are among the richest in the world. I doubt whether either California or Nevada contains a greater amount of the precious metals than this section of the Rocky Mountains. These peaks, packed as they are with deep, rich veins seamed and striped with the outcropping of their hidden and reluctantly granted wealth are not yet half explored. They are part of a grand deposit of treasure … and if properly worked, will yield a hundred millions a year for a thousand years. Colorado, alone, ought to furnish the amount of the national debt within the next century.