While Green Russell and his men had waited in Kansas, promoter John Beck had managed to assemble more than forty Cherokees and nearly a dozen whites, including mountaineer George McDougal and a Missouri lead miner named Philander Simmons. Two of the men - Kelly and Kirk - brought their wives along. The company was organized under the leadership of George Hicks, a lawyer and former war chief, who was credited with once having saved the life of Andrew Jackson. Beck, whose efforts had originally brought everyone together, had to content himself with serving as second in command.
The Cherokees started west on 12 May 1858. Their route was to be the Santa Fe Trail west across Kansas Territory and then the Cherokee Trail north up the Front Range of the Rockies. Beck and his recruits were already past the big bend of the Arkansas River when the Frenchman Henri brought word that Green Russell and his party were hurrying to overtake them. On their arrival, Russell’s re-enforcement’s swelled the caravan to seventy gold seekers, fourteen wagons, thirty-three yoke of oxen, two horse teams and some twenty saddle horses. For the more timid among the Cherokees, these numbers gave assurance of added protection from hostile Indians.
Several days further back on the trail were more than two dozen other gold seekers from Ray and Bates counties in Missouri. These Missourians had first learned of the proposed expedition through the published letters of John Beck. They had come together under the command of a certain Captain Doke. Though enroute to the mountains by mid-May, they would not catch up with the combined Russell-Cherokee Parties until nearly in sight of their common destination on Ralston Creek.
Still further back on the trail was a party of gold seekers from the little Kansas town of Lawrence. This Lawrence Party had been organized quite independently of John Beck. Their inspiration had come from an Indian named Fall Leaf who lived on the Delaware Reservation on the other side of the Kansas River.
When Fall Leaf was released from duty with the First Cavalry in the fall of 1857, he returned to his reservation near Lawrence, Kansas Territory. He carried with him a small horde of gold nuggets, which he had found not far from Pikes Peak. The forty-six year old Fall Leaf was then in the prime of his manhood, an imposing Indian specimen just under six foot tall and weighing in the neighborhood of 180-90 lbs. He had been born on the banks of the Delaware River, had served with Fremont after coming west, and had built up a long-standing reputation for honesty and bravery.
Fall Leaf had long been in the habit of selling his reservation cattle to a butcher named John Easter in the town of Lawrence. One day in the late fall of 1857, the Delaware entered Easter’s butcher shop carrying the gold nuggets he had brought back from the mountains.
“Fall Leaf, where did you get these?”
Fall Leaf responded that “he got them on the Sumner expedition; said he came to a little stream of water that was running out of the side of the mountain and got off his horse to get a drink. He saw the nuggets lying on the rocks as the water ran over them and he picked them up, of course.”
Once having seen the nuggets, John Easter began planning his own gold seeking expedition for the spring of 1858. Fall Leaf agreed to accompany the expedition as guide, provided his family was given six months worth of provisions.
By mid May of 1858, some thirty-five young men had signed up for the trip. Numbered among them were an attorney, two merchants, a typesetter and a telegrapher. Most were unmarried. A few were well educated. One - William Hartley, Jr. - was a civil engineer, who was determined to carry his surveying instruments along with him.
The men had originally intended to outfit themselves with pack mules, but were dissuaded by Fall Leaf, who argued that only by using wagons could they hope to bring back all the gold they might find. Fall Leaf, who “bore certificates of honesty,’ claimed that the Pike’s Peak country was a veritable open-pit mine, “not the sands only, but the rocks and earth for miles around were studded - nay filled - with particles, nuggets, even boulders of purest gold.”
Accordingly, the would-be prospectors loaded eleven wagons with a half-year’s supply of provisions, and armed themselves with revolvers, Bowie knives and Sharp’s rifles. To captain their train they settled on an experienced miner from California named John Tierney; to oversee the night guard they appointed George Smith, Jr.
Various explanations were put forward to account for Fall Leaf’s failure to appear. Charles Nichols said that the Delaware feared the Indians of the plains, and considered the Lawrence Party too small to ensure his safety. Jason Younker claimed that Fall Leaf had been on a drinking binge the day before their scheduled departure; when found by Easter and Hutchins, he was still drunk and getting drunker. William Parsons agreed, adding that Fall Leaf had suffered several broken ribs in a brawl. John Easter remembered only that “when it came to a showdown Mr. Fall Leaf refused to accompany us.”
Unable to persuade the Indian to act as guide, Easter and Hutchins hitched up their span of mules and set out after the Lawrence Party, catching up with the slower-moving ox teams at Council Grove on the Santa Fe Trail. There they found that several other interested individuals had already joined the wagon train. These included Augustus Voorhees, who had abandoned the Coal Bank near Burlingame and raced thirty-five miles on foot to overtake the wagons, as well as a couple named Middleton, with their three-month-old baby and two hired men. “A very little talk in the shape of ‘Indian stories,’ wrote William Parsons, “easily induced them to abandon their idea of going to California, and ‘take their chances’ with us. This acquisition was of some advantage to us, because they had four cows and we thus secured milk for the trip.”
James brought quite a reputation with him. He bore the nickname “the Little Hornet,” because of his exploits as an abolitionist. An early member of the notorious Free State Raiders, he had eventually joined the John Brown faction, with whom he had fought at Osawatomie. His wife, Julia, was the daughter of an abolitionist father and a feminist mother, whose Kansas home had long been a station on the Underground Railroad.
Julia was an avid feminist in her own right. For the trip she had worn the bloomer costume, in her case “a calico dress, reaching a little below the knees, pants of the same, Indian moccasins on my feet, and on my head a hat.” That first night on Cottonwood Creek, as Julia cooked dinner on her large black stove, the Lawrence men crowded around to gaze in wonder at her singular outfit. Soon there was talk in camp of “weak-minded men and strong-minded women.” Matters were not helped when Julia approached George Smith, requesting that she be allowed to stand guard duty alongside her husband. Smith, an old-fashioned gentleman from Virginia, was aghast. To his way of thinking, it would have been a disgrace for the men of the company to allow a woman to stand on guard.
At length, Mrs. Middleton felt compelled to give Julia some matronly advice: “If you have a long dress with you, do put it on for the rest of the trip, the men talk so much about you.” Julia was indignant. “I could not positively enjoy a moment’s happiness with long skirts to confine me to the wagon,” she later wrote.
The matter came to a head several days later, when the Santa Fe mail passed, and one of the drivers cautioned the Lawrence men that the plains Indians would fight them for their women. Julia was subsequently confined to her wagon whenever the train approached wandering bands of Indians. At a large Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment on Pawnee Fork, however, Julia’s presence was discovered when she inadvertently opened her wagon cover for ventilation. James immediately received several flattering offers for his young and beautiful wife. One lovestruck brave presented his two squaws in trade; several others approached the wagon, making signs for Julia to jump behind them on their ponies. She declined with a decided shake of her head. Later, Julia regretted allowing herself to be seen “on account of the feeling existing in the train.”
Julia enjoyed a vindication of sorts two weeks later, when the train reached Bent’s New Fort on the mountain branch of the Santa Fe Trail. The fort was set high on the bluffs overlooking the river. It was built of stone, with walls sixteen-foot high and a breastwork around the top.
While the majority of the Lawrence Party explored the fort’s thirteen rooms or lounged around the interior courtyard, a few of the boys inquired after whiskey. A Mr. Russell of Kentucky, who was overseeing the post in William Bent’s absence, obligingly brought forth several gallons of Taos Lightning. “After tarrying an hour or so,” Julia Holmes later wrote, “the merry men continued their journey, but went only three miles further that day. Up to this time our company had been remarkably healthy. This afternoon, however, several were taken very ill. Among the sufferers some of the quasi moralists who so opposed my mode of dress and woman’s freedom.”
Two days later, the Lawrence Party reached the crumbling ruins of Bent’s Old Fort. Here, like Zebulon Pike before them, they first glimpsed the distant blue cloud, which marked Pike’s Peak, their ultimate destination.
At Bent's Old Fort the Lawrence Party abandoned the southwestward-bending Santa Fe Trail to follow directly westward along what had become known as the Cherokee Trail. The route of the Cherokees took them up the north bank of the Arkansas River to the mouth of Chico Creek.
Immediately upon leaving Bent's Old Fort, the men began “to look anxiously for a glimpse of Pike’s Peak.” Like Pike before them, they first caught sight of the mountain just past the ruins of Bent’s Old Fort. Everyone stopped their wagons and took a good, long look. “We stood upon the plain and gazed upon our mountain,” wrote William Parsons in later years. “It was to us everything. It stood for the whole country, from Mexico to our northern line. It represented gold, and plenty of it; it spoke of influence, power, and position in our middle age, and ease and comfort in our decline.”
At the mouth of Chico Creek the Lawrence Party cut cross-country to a cottonwood grove on Fountain Creek (then known as the Fontaine qui Bouille), just fifteen miles above the old Pueblo. This cottonwood grove, which they promptly named Independence Camp, had long been a favorite campsite along the old Taos-Fort Laramie Road. Here the tired men decided to rest and celebrate Independence Day.
“The next day being the 4th of July,” Jason Younker remembered, “our party determined to remain in camp and celebrate. Accordingly after breakfast ‘Bill’ Prentis, who assumed to be our military commander, formed the boys in line and drilled us in the manual of arms, some using their guns, some whip-stocks and sticks as weapons. After drilling us a short time our commander made a patriotic harangue to us, saying we might be attacked by Indians before night and he wanted us to discharge our duties faithfully. He then went to his wagon and brought a pint cup and his demijohn of ‘snake-bite antidote’ and passing along the line gave each one a supply of ‘ammunition’ as he expressed it, repeating the supply after each drilling bout. Later in the day, as Prentis got more patriotic himself he issued the edict that any man who didn’t get gloriously drunk that day would be court-martialed! Suffice to say there was no whisper next day of any court-martial proceeding.”
The recuperating revelers had barely started out on the morning of 5 July 1858 before they were astonished to see two covered wagons lurching down the trail towards them. Though aware of the companies in advance of them for nearly three weeks, this was to be their first encounter with any of their fellow argonauts. The two wagons were filled with homeward-bound Cherokees, who reported “that they were angry with Captain Beck because they could not make twenty dollars per day, as (they alleged) he had told them; that they thought he would be killed; that they ‘had worked hard prospecting the Platte and Cherry creek FIVE WHOLE DAYS;’ that they could not make more than ‘two bits’ per day; that they ‘had farms and niggers at home, and home they were going.’”
Two days later, the forty-eight men, two women and a baby who made up the Lawrence Party left the northbound Cherokee Trail to follow an old Indian path along the Fontaine qui Bouille to the base of Pike’s Peak. They encamped in a garden valley a mile or so northeast of the mineral springs. A small stream they promptly named Camp Creek meandered past their parked wagons, and overhead towered what they called the Red Rocks - massive upright slabs of red sandstone later known as the Garden of the Gods.
No sooner had the Lawrence Party gone into their month-long camp at the foot of Pike’s Peak, then three men - John Miller, Augustus Voorhees, and John Miller - decided to make an assault on the summit. Miller immediately busied himself cooking up three days worth of provisions. Early on the morning of 9 July he and his two friends shouldered their packs and climbed all day. The first night they slept between two large rocks. The following day they reached timberline, but soon after were forced to spend nearly three hours crouching under an overhanging rock to escape a driving hailstorm. They got to the top at three o’clock in the afternoon. It was so cloudy they could see nothing of the country beyond.
When the returned to camp, the trio of mountain climbers discovered that their fellow gold seekers were packing up to leave. For four days the miners in the group had made a determined search of the Pike’s Peak region. They had found “fine grass, good water and rocks in plenty,” but no ore-bearing quartz, no indications of gold about the soil. The resulting consensus was that they should all head north to join the other groups of gold seekers still prospecting near the South Platte.
Early on the morning of 12 July 1858, the fourteen wagons of the Lawrence Party rolled out once again for the Cherokee Trail. They nooned alongside the trail at Jimmy Camp, some fifteen miles due east of Camp Creek. Here they found green grass, shade, and the cold water of Jimmy Springs. Here also they met with twelve wagons and fifty-six gold seekers - among them Captain Doke - returning discouraged from the South Platte. The men from Lawrence listened intently as these go-backs told the tale of their unsuccessful gold hunt.
The Georgia and Cherokee parties, it seems, had initially found traces of gold some forty miles above Jimmy Camp, at what was then called the Head of Cherry Creek. Soon abandoning this meager find, they had continued on to the South Platte crossing, where they awaited the arrival of the Missouri Company. After effecting a crossing of the rain-swollen South Platte on 24 June, the combined parties of 104 men, one woman and two children marched northwestward to a point about one mile above the junction of Ralston and Clear Creeks and a quarter mile west of the Cherokee Trail. Here they determined themselves to be in “the immediate vicinity of the gold mines.”
For nearly a week the men prospected Ralston Creek. “We thought if we could make some sluice boxes we could make it pay,” remembered T.C. Dickson. “We took the bottom boards of some of our wagons and made two of these. We then built a dam across the creek, took out a ditch and commenced to sluice the gold-bearing dirt.” The result of all this labor was only about one cent worth of dust to a shovelful of gravel.
Disillusioned, two wagonloads of would-be prospectors left for home. The others split into several groups in order to make a search of the surrounding country. Twelve men went north. Green Russell and five others attempted to follow Clear Creek to the foot of the mountains. But no gold prospects were found. On the evening of 3 July, the returning parties assembled for a final consultation. “For a long time all were silent, each meditating on the gloomy prospect, considering whether to return home without further search, or remain and risk further disappointment.” The following day, the entire Cherokee and Missouri contingents hitched up and took the trail for home.
The thirty remaining gold seekers moved back to the South Platte crossing, where a final split up was proposed. Green Russell, shocked to see his grand scheme about to dissolve, stepped forward and said: “Gentlemen, you can all go, but I will stay if two men will stay with me.” A dozen men - the brothers Russell, the Pierce cousins, Solomon Roe, Samuel Bates, William McFadden, Luke Tierney, J.T. Masterson, Theodore Herring, and Valorious Young -agreed to stay with him. And, the storytellers concluded, supposedly all of them were still prospecting on the South Platte.
After listening intently to the go-backs' long recitation of woe, the members of the Lawrence Party discussed the matter over among themselves, and decided to offer the fifty-six discouraged gold seekers another chance at finding gold. “We camped together at noon,” wrote William Parsons, “and then it was agreed that we should join our forces and send a party over the mountains into the South Park.” That afternoon both parties left Jimmy Camp and recrossed the hills to Camp Creek, where they parked their wagons once again in the shadow of the Red Rocks.
As luck would have it, a Mexican named Nicholas Archuleta happened by soon after. Archuleta had been packing flour and whiskey over the old Ute Trail, when he noticed the white-topped wagons and stopped by to see what the men were doing. On learning that they were searching for gold, he claimed that he could lead them to mountains of the yellow stuff, enough to fill many wagons. Accordingly, Archuleta was hired as guide. Captain Doke, Jason Younker and ten others followed him west up the Ute Trail into South Park.
The expedition was a disaster from the start. Archuleta lost the trail. His improvised route led over steep mountains and through narrow ravines. Jason Younker would long remember the trip: “Suffice to say we followed the Mexican for eight days when he finally brought us out of the mountains at South Platte canon, and insisted that we were then on the western slope! We had suspected for several days that our guide was lost; now we knew it. We made our way along the foothills across the Divide back to camp in the Garden of the Gods.”
On their return to camp, Archuleta informed all assembled that he had gotten lost only because he had started out on the wrong trail; had he gone further to the south before entering the mountains, he could have found the promised gold with no problem. After some discussion, the gold seekers decided to give the Mexican another chance. Three of their number - John Easter, Roswell Hutchins and J.H. Tierney - were chosen to accompany him on a second expedition. They left camp well armed, mounted on horses, and leading pack mules - thoroughly prepared to make an extended search of the headwaters of the Arkansas River.
With this second expedition off to the mountains, the gold seekers at Red Rocks settled down into what Julia Holmes called “the disgusting inactivity and monotony of camp life.” The days were spent, she said, “Eating, sleeping, smoking tobacco, manufacturing pipes out of soft white magnesia limestone rock, found near camp, which they also made into finger rings.”
An eccentric known only as “Coon Skin” was one of those who spent his time carving pipes. Others among the men were into playing cards, especially euchre and cribbage. On occasion, the stakes would involve the loser spending an extra four hours of night guard duty. Sometimes the card games would be interrupted by alarms of Indians trying to scatter the oxen.
To the hunters of the party game was plentiful during that fateful summer of 1858. Jason Younker remembered “good sport shooting mountain sheep and black-tail deer. Julia Holmes saw this sport in a somewhat different light. “On these hunting expeditions,” she said, “they always started in fine spirits, but returned generally quite serious, without game, reporting having seen thousands of deer and antelope, but the timid animals would not permit them to approach near enough to kill them.
Others of the party sought out Augustus Voorhees, Frank Cobb, and John Miller to hear of their earlier climbing experiences on Pikes Peak, and to ask about the best route up the mountain. One of the most interested listeners was twenty-year-old Julia Holmes, the avid feminist, who had more than once shocked her traveling companions by wearing the recently-introduced bloomer costume and by insisting on standing guard duty with the men.
After much discussion, Julia was finally able to persuade John Miller to retrace his steps up Pike’s Peak. On the first day of August 1858, Julia - with her husband James, their guide John Miller, and a prospector named George Peck - began the ascent. The lady wore a pair of tight black pants, a hickory shirt and a pair of moccasins. With her she carried some writing materials and a copy of Emerson’s essays.
Julia’s later description of her historic climb was pure poetry. She wrote of “huge boulders” and “terrible canyons,” of “music from the foaming stream” and of “straight, slender tapering pines that stand around so beautiful in their death.” She also described a little rocky nook near timberline which she christened “Snowdell,” and where she and her companions spent two days resting for their ultimate climb to the summit.
That climb came on 5 August 1858. The day was cold and cloudy, with frequent squalls of snow. Once on top, Julia finished a letter to her mother: “I have accomplished the task which I marked out for myself, and now I feel amply repaid for all my toil and fatigue...In all probability I am the first white woman who has ever stood upon the summit of this mountain and gazed upon this wondrous scene, which my eyes now behold.” Though numbed by the terrible cold, Julia hurriedly commenced letters to some of her friends, then took a few minutes to engrave her name on a large boulder. Before starting the descent, she read aloud a few lines from Emerson:
By the final week of July, the monotony of camp life and the repeated failures to locate gold anywhere in the vicinity of the Red Rocks combined to dampen the enthusiasm of the Cherokee and Ray county go-backs, who had joined the Lawrence Party only two weeks previous. William Parsons noticed that “as they sat around the campfires telling the stories and singing the songs of home, it soon became evident that their days of gold-hunting were nearly over.” Sure enough, Parsons’ hunch proved correct; on the morning of 25 July, ten of the twelve wagons composing the go-back train pulled out for the States.
The members of the Lawrence Party, however, continued to remain at their campsite near the Red Rocks. They had not yet given up hope that Easter, Hutchins and Tierney would return from the mountains with pack loads of the promised gold. The trio returned, said Jason Younker, “at the expiration of sixteen days, half starved and wholly disgusted. They brought back a handful of yellow iron pyrites as a sample of the Mexican’s gold. We paid the greaser off and turned him loose.”
By now it had become evident to all the members of the Lawrence Party that there was no gold to be had anywhere in the Pike’s Peak region. Not a nugget had been found, not a flake, not even a flash of color in the pan. Moreover, another passing Mexican had reported that gold seekers were hard at work in Grayback Gulch on the Sangre de Cristo Pass, and were daily digging at least ten dollars in gold to the man.
A general meeting was called on Camp Creek to decide what course of action to take. Six of the gold seekers elected to call it quits and take the Santa Fe Trail back to the settlements. Two more decided to journey east by way of the Republican River. A few others opted to head north and join up with what was left of the Russell Party on the South Platte. The majority, however, voted to once again follow a Mexican rumor - this time south towards the Sangre de Cristo range - in hopes of finally locating some gold.
Accordingly, on 10 August 1858, the tents near the Red Rocks were struck one final time. The campfires were extinguished. The wagons were loaded. And the Lawrence Party retraced their tracks along the Fontaine qui Bouille to catch the Taos-Fort Laramie Trail once again at the mouth of Jimmy Camp Creek. They followed this trail south - past the ruins of the abandoned Pueblo, along the Greenhorn River to the Huerfano, then up and over the Sangre de Cristo Pass.
Excited as they were at seeing the first flash of color since their arrival in the mountains, the gold seekers soon realized that the area had long since been panned out. Ten-dollar-a-day gold was a dream of the distant past.
It was at this point that Julia Holmes, her husband and her brother, decided to abandon the gold chase and head their wagon towards Taos, where Julia soon after accepted the position of schoolteacher. “When we last saw the gold seekers,” wrote Julia, “most of them were engaged in fishing for trout in the creek of Sangro de Christi.” T.C. Dickson, a former member of the Russell Party who had joined up with the Lawrence men at the Red Rocks, was one of these fishermen: “A Mr. Churchill and myself went fishing and having but one hook and line between us we took turns catching grasshoppers for bait and caught seventy trout in two hours.”
The next day, a mounted courier from Utah - Captain Deus by name - who was carrying dispatches to Fort Garland, stopped at Grayback Gulch with news of the Russell Party. Captain Deus had chanced upon the thirteen men at Dry Creek, some several miles upstream from the South Platte crossing. They told him that on the very day the last of the go-backs departed, they had started up the river and in three or four miles found a bed of alluvial gravel. James Pierce got out a pan, pick and shovel and had a scoopful of gravel about two-thirds panned, when Green Russell came up and finished washing it. Lying in the bottom of the pan was about six or seven cents worth of nice scale gold. “Our fortune is made!” exclaimed Russell. “Run and stop the wagons and tell them to come back here.” The other eleven returned and camped for several days. They fashioned a hand rocker out of a cottonwood log, and washed out a little over $200 in thin scale gold before the deposit was played out.
In the meantime, Green Russell and Sam Bates found a small deposit of placer gold on the bank of Dry Creek, about two miles east of the South Platte. The pair panned out three-fourths of an ounce of gold that first day. When the others arrived, they sank a hole some four feet into the sand in order to get water with which to rock the dirt, and in one day retrieved a small pile of coarse golden flakes. By the time Captain Deus passed through in early August, the thirteen prospectors had accumulated $400 worth of Rocky Mountain gold.
News of the Russell Party’s success on Dry Creek determined the Lawrence men to abandon the old diggings on the Sange de Cristo Pass. Though by now somewhat conditioned to view rumors of gold finds with more than a little distrust, they decided that Captain Deus seemed honest enough. Besides, he gave such particulars that all present were finally convinced his story was true.
Before returning north, the gold seekers followed Grayback Gulch down some twelve miles to the newly established fort on Ute Creek. This was Fort Garland, construction of which had begun the previous June as a replacement for abandoned Fort Massachusetts, which lay some six miles up the creek. Although the post buildings were still in the process of erection, the red adobe trading store - with its sod roof and whitewashed interior - was already open for business. Inside, sutler J.M. Francisco was pleased to replenish their supplies of sugar and coffee. The post doctor noticed that some of the men were showing signs of scurvy, so he advised them to eat more fruits and vegetables. Accordingly, on the return trip north, each mess gathered as much as a bushel of chokecherries to eat along the way. The scurvy soon disappeared.
The Lawrence Party reached the South Platte crossing on 6 September 1858. They had made the 225-mile trip from Fort Garland in just eight days. On arrival, they found the thirteen-member Russell Party off on a prospecting tour that included the Platte Canon, the head of Cherry Creek and the Medicine Bow Mountains. In their place were several newly arrived mountaineers, among them John S. Smith and William McGaa. These mountaineers, along with their Indian families, were scattered up and down the streams and dry creeks, panning and rocking out from $1-$3 a day, wherever they could find a rich spot. The newcomers from Lawrence joined them. “Between the mouth of Cherry Creek and Big Dry Creek on the bars and banks of the Platte on the east side,” remembered Jason Younker, “we found colors almost any place, and after a little experience could find spots near bedrock where we could obtain 10 cents to 25 cents to the pan.”
The necessity of providing for winter quarters was soon on the mind of nearly every gold seeker prospecting on the South Platte. Most of the Lawrence men decided to move some distance upriver from the diggings of the others. On the right bank of the Platte, five and a half miles from the mouth of Cherry Creek, they pitched a permanent camp. The camp was on a projecting point of land, surrounded on three sides by towering cottonwoods and opening on the southeast to the boundless prairie. Within days, a town company was organized. Josiah Hinman was elected president, William J. Boyer secretary. William Hartley, Jr., a surveyor who had his instruments with him, was prevailed upon to survey and stake off blocks, lots, streets, and alleys. The townsite was called Montana.
The beginnings of Montana in late September of 1858 signaled the final breakup of the Lawrence Party. Several of the gold seekers were dissatisfied with the location selected. It was off the main track, some five and a half miles distant from the Cherokee Trail crossing of the South Platte. A group of seven - Adnah Smith, John Churchill, Frank Cobb, Charles Nichols, T.C. Dickson, William Smith, and William Hartley, Jr. - decided to organize their own town company and move to the mouth of Cherry Creek. There on the hilly east bank, William Hartley, Jr. surveyed and laid out the town of St. Charles. Squawmen William McGaa and John Smith were invited to join the company, as they were experienced mountaineers and might prove useful in holding the land for town purposes. At a meeting of the town company on 28 September, Adnah French was elected president, William McGaa vice-president, T.C. Dickson secretary, Frank Cobb recorder, and John S. Smith treasurer.
Not long after, William McGaa invited several Lawrence men down from where they had settled on Henderson Island to put up a house on the new townsite of St. Charles. James Cochran, “Dad” Clark, Jack Palmer and Andrew C. Wright came down to look over the site, but decided to build on the bottom land across Cherry Creek instead. There they cut their cottonwood logs and began construction of a double cabin. Two days later, they were joined by John Easter and Roswell Hutchins as well as by some members of the Russell Party. The resulting settlement would later be surveyed and named Auraria, after the hometown of Green Russell in Georgia.
By early October of 1858 thoughts of home began to intrude upon the gold chase. The days were growing shorter. Winter was coming on. Flour and sugar were in short supply. A dozen or more men from Lawrence decided to head home for the winter, planning to outfit again and return in the spring of 1859. Before they had traveled 200 miles down the South Platte, they began to meet with fresh parties of gold seekers making their way to Cherry Creek. Word of the gold finds had reached the Missouri River towns, and goldseeking parties had been hastily organized. As many as 2,000 men were said to be preparing for the trip west.
The first large party of newcomers met by the returning Lawrence Party was the Plattsmouth Company of fifteen wagons and forty-five men. Listed in the company were diarist Anselm Barker and his friend, bootmaker Fred Kocherhans. Five days after their arrival at the diggings the two men helped to organize the Auraria Town Company. They hired William Foster to survey the land near Wright's cabin on the west bank of Cherry Creek. No sooner were the first stakes driven than Barker had his logs chopped and on the ground, ready to begin construction of his own cabin.
Arriving a few days behind the Plattsmouth Company were a dozen men from Crescent City, Iowa, including I.L. Avery and the merchandizing firm of Blake and Williams. The Iowans had been on the trail since 23 September 1858, slowed by fourteen yoke of plodding oxen and four wagons loaded with goods for sale to the diggers and mountaineers.
Blake and Williams immediately opened a store on Cherry Creek. Three months later they began construction of the Denver House, the first large hotel in the area. Later visitors described the structure as the Astor House of the gold region. It had walls of logs, a floor of earth, windows of cotton sheeting, and a slanting roof covered with canvas. Every guest found as good a bed as his blankets could provide. Behind the hotel was the Elephant Corral, a quarter city block used as a travelers' rendezvous and as a depot for the loading and unloading of freight.
Other early gold seekers came the southern route, by way of the Santa Fe Trail. In mid-October a mechanic named Palmer set out from St, Louis in company with several others. The young men called themselves the Grey Eagle Company. all were skilled craftsmewn - tinners, blacksmiths, painers - and all took along the tools of their trade.
Two weeks ahead of them on the Santa Fe Trail was the well-equiped Larimer Party of gold seekers, who had been organized at Leavenworth in September of 1858. The thirty-two men had left for the gold fields on the first day of October with eight wagons, six months' supply of provisions, and signed commissions from Governor Denver empowering them to lay out a town and establish a local government. At the head of the party was General William Larimer, a former banker and real estate promoter. With him from Leavenworth was Marshall M. Jewett, and from Lawrence the fiery William O'Donnell. Also along were the governor's appointees: Sheriff Ed Wynkoop, Judge H.P. Smith, Clerk Hickory Rogers, and District Attornet J.H. St. Matthew.
Like the Lawrence Party before them, the men of the Larimer Party were townbuilders. Upon arrival in Auraria on 16 November 1858, they formed the Denver City Town Company. They jumped the townsite of St. Charles, enlarged and re-surveyed it, then re-named it in honor of James W. Denver. General Larimer christened the new town by commencing a cabin of round logs, daubed with mud and covered with earth. Within a month forty more cabins were lining the newly named Blake and Larimer Streets.
Even as the general busied himself developing his new town on Cherry creek, William O'Donnal and several companions made a trip south to the Pikes Peak region. There they formed the El Paso Town Company, selecting a townsite on the east bank of Monument Creek (in present downtown Colorado Springs). The would-be townbuilders envisioned their embryo city as a second Sacramento, a gateway to the gold fields. Boards or hewn logs were to be used in all the buildings, with no houses less than twenty feet square or one and a half stories high. Arrangements were made with newspaperman S.S. Prouty to have his presses transported from Kansas territory to the new town. A. Cutler was to precede him with a large party of settlers via the Smoky Hill route.
In the meantime - even though the survey was left uncompleted and only one log cabin built - a map and description of El Paso was circulated among interested parties in Lawrence, K.T. Over $2,000 worth of lots were sold. And efforts to have the paper town declared the county seat of the newly-formed El Paso County were successfully pushed through the Territorial Legislature.
Even as the fateful year of 1858 drew to a close, everything seemed in place for the stampede that was sure to come the following spring. Gold had been discovered at several locations. Towns had been laid out. The Santa Fe, Platte River and Cherokee Trails had been mapped and described by guidebook writers Billy Parsons and Wlliam Hartley.
News of the gold strikes had been carried back to the Missouri River Valley, where the frontier newspapers had picked up the story, embellished and exaggerated and printed it, until the meager finds had taken on the nature of a true bonanza. These reports of gold to the west had been spread eastward by word of mouth and by reprints in the big city newspapers.
Would-be gold seekers by the thousands were eagerly awaiting the latest word from Cherry Creek. Plans were being laid. Decisions were being made about departure dates, routes, and the necessary supplies. The great Pikes Peak Gold Rush of 1859 was about to begin.
2- William B. Parsons, "Pike's Peak Fourteen Years Ago," Kansas Magazine, January-June, 1872.
3- Jason T. Younker, "My First Buffalo Chase," The Trail, Vol.II.
4- Jason T. Younker, "The Early Pioneer," The Trail, Vol.II.
5- Julia Holmes, "Letter." Written at Fort Union, 25 January 1859. Published in The Sibyl. Reprinted in The Whig Press, 16 and 23 March 1859.
6- Frank M. Cobb, "The Lawrence Party Of Gold Seekers," The Colorado Magazine, Vol.X.
7- W.J. Boyer, "Letter of 18 June 1858," published in the Lawrence Republican, 15 July 1858.
8- Augustus Voorhees, "Diary," ed. by LeRoy R. Hafen. Pike's Peak Gold Rush Guidebooks of 1859 (The Arthur H. Clark Co. Glendale, Calif, 1941).
9- Luke Tierney, "History of the Gold Discoveries on the South Platte River," ed. by LeRoy R. Hafen. Pike's Peak Gold Rush Guidebooks of 1859 (The Arthur H. Clark Co. Glendale, Calif, 1941).
10- J.D. Miller, "Early Day Reminiscences of Col. T.C. Dickson," The Trail, Vol.III.
11- James H. Pierce, "The First Prospecting in Colorado," The Trail, Vol.VII.
12- James H. Pierce, "With the Green Russell Party," The Trail, Vol.XIII.
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By the third week of May 1858, nearly all was in readiness. Only the Delaware guide was missing. Leaving John Easter and Roswell Hutchins to locate Fall Leaf, the other members of the Lawrence Party struck southwest for the Santa Fe Trail, intending to follow it due west to the mountains. Already ahead of them on the trail were the three other parties of gold seekers, all of whom had gotten an earlier start.
At the trail crossing of Cottonwood Creek, the men from Lawrence were joined by yet another, not so welcome couple. This was James and Julia Holmes. With them was Julia’s eighteen-year-old brother, Albert Archibald. James and Julia had left their farm on the Neosho River, “animated more by a desire to cross the plains and behold the great mountain chain of North America, than by any expectation of realizing the floating gold stories.” 
The apparent lack of success experienced by these Cherokees on the South Platte served only to make the Lawrence Party more determined than ever to try their luck in the streams around Pike’s Peak, where Fall Leaf claimed to have found his gold. “We passed them not much discouraged,” wrote William Parsons, “notwithstanding their VERY THOROUGH prospecting of the country.”
Certain that they were the first to have ever stood on the summit, the trio made what Cobb later called “a thorough search to ascertain whether anyone had ever done so before but could find no indication that anyone had.” This determined them to leave behind a permanent record of their own achievement, so the men built up a pyramid of rocks, in the middle of which they placed an upright stick engraved with their names and the date.
The magnificent red and white rocks seemed to hold a special attraction for the young men of the party. Not only did they explore the rock formations and enter the many caves and hollows, but several of the men - Frank Cobb, Josiah Hinman, William Hartley, Howard Hunt, Andrew Wright - took the time to carve their names into the soft sandstone. Diary-keeper Augustus Voorhees left his name inside the great cavern of North Gateway Rock.
There, some six miles northeast of old Fort Massachusetts, they gave the lie to yet another Mexican rumor. No miners were there at work. No gold was being taken out. The men did, however, find a broken pick and shovel and some old prospect holes, which they took as evidence of mining having been done there at some remote period. “Some of our boys got busy at once with their picks, shovels and pans,” Jason Younker later wrote, “and sure enough, in a little while, came into camp with very perceptible colors of gold and some larger flakes, in their pans.” 
The Russell Party was surprised to find so many new faces when they returned from their prospecting tour the third week of September. On their tour they had unearthed some gold, “from one to ten cents worth in a panful of gravel,” according to Luke Tierney, but had been unsuccessful in finding the source of all this drifted gold. An early August snowstorm had caught them unprepared while encamped on Medicine Bow River in present day Wyoming. “That night it clouded up and about five inches of snow fell,” wrote James Pierce. “This was the fifth day of September. We were one thousand miles from our base of supplies, our stock of grub was getting low and the snow coming at that time made us think we better be looking out for winter quarters.”
Copyright © 1999-2007 Richard Gehling. All Rights Reserved.
E-mail me at GehlingR@aol.com
1- Eugene Parsons, "John Easter and the Lawrence Party," The Trail, Vol.III.
Map of the Cherokee Trail Through Colorado Related Links
Further Reading on the Pikes Peak Gold Rush - The John H. Gregory Legend
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