The mountaineers were involved in the great Pike’s Peak Gold Rush almost from its inception. John S. Smith, the acknowledged dean of the high country traders, appeared on the South Platte in August of 1858, shortly after the Russell Party made their first strike of gold. With Smith were his squaw Wapola, their fifteen-year-old son Jack, and several of their friends and relatives among the Cheyennes. “Here we found an old mountaineer by the name of Smith,” remembered William McKimens, “ who had not seen any white man for about six weeks. We greeted him with exceeding great joy.”
When first encountered by the Russell Party, John Simpson Smith had been in the mountains for nearly thirty years. He was already an old man by mountaineer standards. Born in Frankfort, Kentucky, in 1810, he had been apprenticed to a tailor in St. Louis, and while still a teenager had run off to the mountains with a party of beaver trappers. Smith abandoned his life as a trapper in the 1840’s to become an Indian trader, working out of Bent’s Old Fort on the Arkansas. On occasion, he also served as the official interpreter of the Cheyennes, among whom he was called “White Blanket.”
John S. Smith may already have been known - at least by reputation - to some of the Russell Party. In the fall of 1846 a seventeen-year-old western traveler named Lewis Garrard had spent several weeks with Smith, as the trader made his rounds of the Cheyenne villages. Four years later, Garrard published his experiences in book form : Wah-To-Yah and the Taos Trail. “Smith was strange in some respects,” wrote Garrard, “an unaccountable composition of goodness and evil, cleverness and meanness, caution and recklessness! I used to look at him with astonishment and wonder if he was not the devil incog. He and I often sang hymns, and a more sactimonious, meek, at-peace-with-mankind look, could nowhere be found, then in his countenance; at other times, he sacre-ed in French, caraho-ed in Spanish-American, interpolated with thunder-strike you in Cheyenne, or, at others, he genuinely and emphatically damned in American.”
The Russell Party remained with “Uncle” John Smith only a couple of weeks before departing on their planned prospecting tour - time enough for the old mountaineer to regale the thirteen men with tales of his own gold panning experiences on the South Platte. Just the summer before, it seems, Smith and a band of Mexicans had worked what became known as the Mexican Diggings three miles above the mouth of Cherry Creek. The purpose of his present visit, however, was not to renew his search for gold, but to prepare for the fall Indian trade. He had recently purchased a stock of trade goods from Gerry and Bordeaux at a cost of $1,416.88. Included in the cost were:
“10 ˝ pairs of Indigo Blue Blankets $84.00 12 yards of Scarlet Cloth 13.20 49 ˝ yards of Brown Muslin 7.27 88 yards Blue Drill 11.00 200 bundles seed beads 33.33 16 pounds brass wire 6.40 2 dozen mirrors 1.00 2 gross finger rings 1.80”
After the departure of the Russell Party and before Smith could even begin to dispose of his trade goods, he was joined on the South Platte by fellow mountaineers Dad Clark, Jim Sanders, Bill Roland, Jim Baker and William McGaa. These mountaineers immediately scattered along the streams and dry creeks emptying into the South Platte to prospect for gold. Smith’s own half-breed son, Jack, soon became so proficient with his pick and shovel that he could grub out nearly $14 worth of gold a week, despite having to carry his paydirt nearly eighty yards to water.
John Smith himself was more interested in buying and selling real estate than in grubbing for gold. He happened to stop by William McGaa’s lodge at the Mexican Diggings on 24 September 1858, the very day seven of the Lawrence boys invited the moutaineers to join with them in founding the St. Charles Town Company. Like McGaa, Smith also became a charter member of both the Auraria Town Company and the Denver City Town Company. He helped in the construction of a double cabin in Auraria, his half being built first to acommodate the needs of his Indian wife Wapola. Residents of the rival town of Montana came to resent Smith’s efforts on behalf of the Cherry Creek settlements. “Some of the boys charged as the reason Auraria began to outstrip our town before spring,” wrote Jason Younker, “was the fact that ‘Lying’ John Smith, an old trapper and Indian trader, came to Auraria with a barrel of whiskey which he kept on tap to induce new-comers to stop there.”
The barrel of whiskey had obviously come from Smith’s stock of Indian trade goods, most of which he returned to Elbridge Gerry on 26 December 1858. A short time later, Smith’s sojourn on Cherry Creek came to an abrupt and unpleasant end. According to William McGaa, it happened on the Sabbath, a day set aside for preaching, horse racing, gambling and dancing: “after the dance our beloved and most respected friend, the original John S. Smith broke his squaw’s back with a creepy, a three-legged stool, for daring without his permission to trip the light fantastic toe. The original John S. Smith has just been served notice to leave this town in four days, his conduct has been such of late that the mining community will stand it no longer. His squaw is still suffering severely from the effects of said creepy. The original John S. goes into exile, alone, among the Arapahoes, there to recruit his almost shattered fortunes.”
The ostracized mountaineer made his way down to the Arkansas River, where a large band of Arapahoes were waiting out the winter in the environs of Fountain City. Housed in the town itself were a small but rambunctious group of moutaineers led by a former Californian named George McDougal. McDougal was reported to have killed two men during the California Gold Rush, and to have subsequently been driven from the state by the Vigilance Committee. Here on the Arkansas,however, McDougal was known familiarly as “Mac,” and was considered - by some at least - as “polite, chivalric, generous: a man of courtly manners and fine personal appearance. When he mounted his horse, wearing his broad-brimmed sombrero, jingling spurs and fringed suit of buckskin and rode to the door of his house, leaping from his horse to embrace his woman, which he always did before he galloped away, he was a fine picture of a borderer - the handsomest man in the mountains.”
McDougal was also something of a compulsive gambler. One winter night, he and Hamp Boone (a great grandson of Daniel’s brother George) played at cards for more than eighteen hours. Finally, Boone tired of the game. “Now, Mac,” he said, “your owe me $80,000, you can’t pay so what’s the use of playing longer?” “You can’t jump the game, sir!” snapped McDougal. But after some reflection He said, “I owe you $80,000; go and take my band of ponies, and this house, my rifle, my spurs and my woman are all yours.”
Boone replied, “Now, Mac, I don’t want your rifle, nor your house, nor your woman. I’ll go and pick out the pony I want and we will call it square.”
McDougal’s sense of relief was appreciated by all who heard of the incident. As his friend and admirer, David Kellogg, pointed out, “McDougal’s rifle was a Hawkins, a rifle that had a value on the plains above many ponies and many squaws; it was the chief article of value among all which he had enumerated. He could get more ponies, he could get another woman, but where could he get another Hawkins?”
John S. Smith drew his own measure of trouble when he showed up at as Fountain City cabin spoiling for a fight. Inside the cabin were a gold seeker nicknamed “Iowa” and Jim Alexander, a little, blue-eyed fellow from Pennsylvania. Smith began by challenging “Iowa” to as wrestling match, then to a fight. When both challenges were refused, the mountaineer yelled, “Damn you, then you’ll have to shoot.” But before either man could draw his gun, Alexander stepped between them and forced Smith from the cabin. Smith returned later that same night with George McDougal and two other mountaineers. Leveling their guns at “Iowa” and Alexander, they demanded an apology. “Iowa’ said, “You’ve got the drop on me, I apologize.” Not so Alexander. “You’ve got the drop on me too,” he drawled, “but if you’ll take down your weapons until I can draw mine I’ll give you an apology you don’t want.” According to diarist David Kellogg, Alexander’s “cool nerve won the hearts of the mountaineers and the next day they were all drinking together the best of friends.”
Life on the Arkansas during the winter of 1858-59 offered more in the way of excitement than simple drinking, gambling and fighting. Bands of mountain Utes were drawn to the river by the presence of the eighty lodges of Arapahoes. To warn of their coming, a sentry was stationed high on a hill overlooking Fountain City. Despite this precaution, one of the Arapahoes was shot from ambush. When the body of the slain brave was brought into camp it was found that his scalp had been taken off down to the ears. For more than a week afterwards, the squaws raised the death chant, making the night air ring with the sounds of their wailing.
Some time later, a band of about fifty Utes were sighted riding down the Arkansas in the direction Autobees’ farm. The Arapahoes quickly raised a war party. They were joined by a number of mountaineers and gold seekers. While the Utes rode down one side of the river, their pursuers followed down the other, occasionally firing off a volley of long range shots and a chorus of Arapahoe yells whenever their quarry came into sight. Finally, the Utes abanoned their planned attack and turned back to the mountains.
Autobees’ farm lay some twenty miles downriver from Fountain City. It had been one of only two permanent settlements along the Colorado front range when the argonauts first arrived in the summer of 1858. But because it lay across the Arkansas and two miles up the Huerfano River, it went largely unnoticed by most of the gold seekers who followed the Cherokee Trail. The farm itself consisted of 120 acres of irrigated bottomland, sown mostly to corn, with patches of beets, potatoes and rutabagas. The owner, Charles Autobees, was a stocky, middle-aged frontiersman who had left St. Louis as a teenager to join a fur brigade. He had eventually settled in the Taos area, where he met and married Serafina Avila and, for eleven years, worked at Simeon Turley’s flour mill and distillery.
Following the destruction of Turley’s mill during the Taos Uprising, Charley was induced to join in building a settlement on the Vigil and St. Vrain land grant at the mouth of the Huerfano River. He laid out his farm in the fall of 1853, but chose to live for a time at the Huerfano Village with an Indian trader named Joseph B. Doyle and an erstwhile stockraiser known as Richens Lacy Wootton. The Huerfano Village was laid out directly across the Arkansas River from a large grove of cottonwoods, the site of a favorite campground on the Cherokee Trail. The nucleus of the village consisted of the three adobe quadrangles, or placitas, of Doyle, Wootton and Autobees. South of the placitas were a row of cabins where the Mexican laborers lived. Down by the river were a few dugouts, one of which was temporarily occupied by John S. Smith and his Cheyenne squaw Wapola.
Life at the Huerfano Village came to an end after the Pueblo Massacre of 1854. Joe Doyle took his family back to Fort Barclay in New Mexico. Charley Autobees moved to his farm two miles up the Huerfano River, where he built himself another adobe placita. The main gate of this second placita opened to the east. Along the west wall were the log cabins occupied by Serafina and her two sons. Nearby was the lodge of Charley’s longtime Arapahoe squaw Sycamore. A few of the Huerfano villagers joined the new settlement as, in time, did other dispossessed Indians and New Mexicans. By the spring of 1859, farmer Charley could count as many as several dozen farmhands working his rich soil along the river bottom, raising “fine corn and pumpkins and very fine garden vegetables.”
Dick Wootton lingered at the Huerfano Village a little longer than the others. His wife, the beautiful Delores, was with child. Her delivery was a difficult one. She died shortly after giving birth to her fourth child. Wootton took the surviving children to their Le Fevre grandparents in Taos. He himself went to Fort Barclay to join Joe Doyle in the freighting business. But the mountaineer’s heart was no longer in the west. After a particularly difficult trip to Salt Lake City in 1857-58, Wootton decided to quit the mountains forever. First, he returned to the Arkansas to wed Mary Ann Manning, an emigrant widow from Pike county, Missouri. Then, after depositing his new wife at Fort Barclay, he planned one last trading trip to the Arapahoe villages on the South Platte, after which he would take his family “back to the States.”
On his way north, Wootton learned that the Arapahoe villages had been replaced by the Cherry Creek settlements. Even though he would have preferred the Indian trade with its consequent take of peltry, the opportunistic mountaineer continued on, arriving in Auraria on 24 December 1858 with several wagonloads of merchandise and whiskey by the barrelfull. By dispensing free Christmas cheer - served up in pans and tin cups - Wootton soon brought out crowds of prospective customers. After receiving as inducement 160 acres of free land, he opened a general store in one of the unoccupied cabins, setting out his wares atop the partially-emptied whiskey barrels. He also commenced the erection of a 20’ x 30’ storehouse on Ferry Street. When completed, the storehouse was one and a half stories high, built of hewn logs and roofed with shakes. The upper floor was laid with boards that had been sawed by hand, “the first plank floor in the country.”
Wootton’s trransformation from Indian trader to town merchant was severely hampered by his own generosity, a character trait that helped earn him the title “Uncle Dick.” In addition to his general store and Western Saloon, “Uncle Dick” built a hotel. “That hotel enterprise failed financially,” he later confided, “for the reason that neither the manager nor myself could understand that only men who had money had a right to eat. Whenever a man came to me and said he was hungry and had no money I used to send him around to the hotel for a meal, and the manager made it a point never to turn away a man who made the same sort of appeal. Our house was well patronized, but in view of the fact that most of our patrons were free boarders I suppose it is not surprising that we did not make a sucess of the hotel business.”
One of Wootton’s steady customers at the Western Saloon was fellow townsman William McGaa, a man known to enjoy the taste of raw whiskey. McGaa had remained on the South Platte when his mentor John S. Smith went into exile on the Arkansas. Despite his early ties to the Indian trade, the thirty-year-old mountaineer became a town promoter like few others. His name topped the list of stockholders in the Auraria Town Company. His services to rival Denver City resulted in a street being named in his honor. When Sheriff Wynkoop resigned his office to return east, McGaa was there to take over his duties as peace officer of Arapahoe county. When the need arose for a vice-president of the Denver City Town Company, McGaa willingly accepted the office, an office he later used to obtain stock certificates for some of his friends.
McGaa chose to build his home in Auraria. His was a palisade-type cabin of two rooms, with the logs set upright in the ground and chinked with mud. The cabin was close enough to the South Platte that whenever necessary “my little squaw and myself take a pick, spade and pan, and down we go to the bank of the river, not more than five hundred yards from my house, we pitch right in any place along the bank, returning in half an hour, at farthrest, with specimens of one, two, and sometimes three dollars.”
McGaa’s squaw was a comely half-breed, the daughter of a white trader and a Sioux mother. She was pregnant at the time the cabin was built. When a son was born on 8 March 1859, McGaa celebrated by naming him William Denver McGaa - a fitting title, he thought, for the first child born in the Cherry Creek settlements.
The coming of the gold seekers had opened up such a bonanza for McGaa that he could not help bragging to a friend in Missouri named Dr. Phip: “I have a big lay out, the best in the Platte Valley, and with your assistance we can make a pile. Enclosed I send your certificate of stock in Denver City. You many need it. It is legal, and signed by the vice-president, which is myself, the president being absent...It is the best property in this country, and lots are now selling at $25 and $30...I rather think you will find a ready sale for some of it; it will be worth $100 a lot next summer. John W. Jones.”
“John W. Jones” and “Jack Jones” were aliases McGaa often used in his business dealings. These aliases made him something of an enigma to his fellow townsmen, many of whom considered him a Scottish nobleman’s son, who had run away from home to become a sailor and who had later drifted across from the Pacific Ocean to the Rocky Mountains. Others claimed that he had been born in Missouri and had spent some time among the Crow Indians before joining John S. Smith on the South Platte. Whatever the truth of his origins, McGaa’s tireless efforts at townbuilding, his promotional work on behalf of the gold diggings and his unfailing hospitality secured for him “an army of friends” and a lasting place in the annals of the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush.
Unlike McGaa, most of the other mountaineers shunned the town life being developed on the South Platte. A dozen or more congregated some forty-five miles below Denver City at the mouth of the Big Thompson River. Here they set up their lodges and constructed a few log cabins. Forming the nucleus of these temporary winter quarters were George Jackson, Antoine Lebeau, Charles Gardner, William Scofield and the two Janis brothers, all of whom had come down from Fort Laramie in early September of 1858 in company with twenty Sioux Indians.
Fort Laramie had at the time been rife with rumors of the new gold strikes on Cherry Creek. This old trading post, which had become an army post in 1849, served almost as a staging area for the mines. When John Huston of Kansas City stopped by in late summer of 1858, he reported that the majority of the mountain traders had already gone south. “Picks and shovels were worth almost their weight in gold. So great was the excitement that the quartermaster at Laramie was compelled to withold the pay due the hands in the government employ in order to retain them.”
George Jackson had spent the early summer of 1858 prospecting Laramie Creek with Antoine Lebeau, but had not raised even a color. Although only twenty-two years of age, Jackson was already considered a seasoned miner, having spent nearly four years in the California gold fields. On his way down to the South Platte with his mountaineer friends, he prospected every stream between Fort Laramie and Clear Creek. The only gold found was on the south bank of St. Vrain’s fork. Later, specimens of shot gold were discovered a mile and a half up the Cache la Poudre. When M.D. Downs passed through the area in November of 1858, he wrote of meeting twenty or thiry mountaineers. “They came to my wagon with a buckskin bag of dust, and scales for weighing the same, and offered to purchase my load at my own price. I gave them a pound of soda and twenty onions, for which they gave me $5.50 in gold dust.”
Jackson soon tired of the monotonous life at the mouth of the Big Thompson. On New Year’s Day 1859, accompanied only by his dogs Drum and Kit, he set out on a prospecting trip to the soda springs at present Idaho Springs. On nearby West Chicago Creek he found gold. He told of the find in his diary:
“Jan.5. Up before day. Killed a fat sheep and wounded a Mtn. lion before sunrise. Eat ribs for breakfast, drank last of my coffee. After breakfast moved up half mile to next creek on south side; made new camp under big tree. Good gravel here, looks like it carries gold. Wind has blown snow off the rim but gravel is hard frozen. Panned out two cups; no gold in either. “Jan. 6. Pleasant day. Built big fire on rim rock to thaw the gravel; kept it up all day.... “Jan. 7. Clear day. Removed fire embers and dug into rim of bed rock; panned out eight treaty cups of dirt, and found nothing but fine colors; ninth cup I got one nugget of coarse gold. Feel good tonight.... “Jan. 8. Pleasant day...Dug and panned today until my belt knife was worn out, so I will have to quit or use my skinning knife. I have about a half ounce of gold; so will quit and get back in the spring.”
The gold was placer gold - not the mother lode Jackson had hoped for, but still in quantities seemingly much greater than anything yet found on the South Platte. The prospector shared the secret of his find with Thomas Golden, “whose mouth is tight as a No-4 beaver trap.” The pair talked the matter over and decided to wait until spring before opening up the new diggings. In the meantime, they needed to find a few well-provisioned partners. The Chicago Company of goldseekers seemed to fit the bill. “They have the best supply of grub and mining tools of any company in the country,” Jackson wrote in his diary.
In late January of 1859, Jackson returned to the mountaineers’ camp on the Big Thompson to retrieve his mule. Accompanying him were “Ned” Wynkoop and Jim Sanders. Sanders immediately became the talk of the camp for his success in establishing a mail service to the post office at Fort Laramie. Already in his pocket were the proceeds from two trips north, and he was making plans for a third. The old mountaineer had originally picked up on the idea from an entrepreneur named William Smith, who had established a similar express from Auraria to Leavenworth. Smith’s charge had been one dollar per letter. He had left the South Platte on 20 November 1858 with a bundle of letters and a wagonload of passengers, eight of whom had paid $125 each for the 800-mile ride back to the States.
Sanders’ Express was to be much cheaper. For only fifty cents a letter (twenty-five cents for more than one per customer), he agreed to carry the mail all 200 miles up the old trappers’ trail to Fort Laramie, returning within the month with any letters or newspapers left at the fort. In late November - just three days after the departure of Smith’s Express - Sanders and his squaw headed north with a little wagon drawn by four Indian ponies. In the wagon were not only the letters to be forwarded, but also a list of gold seekers expecting mail from the States and willing to pay the fifty cents carrying fee. Sanders’ return in early January of 1859 was one of the most eagerly-awaited events of the new year. Besides the letters, he brought back six editions of the Missouri Republican and eight of the Daily Journal of Commerce. These papers quickly sold for $1.25 each; it was said that 150 more could have been sold at the same price. The success of the venture more than justified the confidence expressed by Samuel S. Curtis, himself a future postmaster, who had written back to the Council Bluffs Nonpareil: “All letters to this vicinity should be directed to Fort Laramie, in care of Sanders and Company’s Express to Cherry creek. The express will run every month, and Sanders is the man to put it through.”
Sanders’ brief stop at the mountaineers’ camp in late January inspired the emulation of Charles Gardner, one of the Indian traders who had originally come down from Fort Laramie with George Jackson. Gardner was known around camp as “Mountain Phil” or simply “Big Phil.” He was an imposing figure of gigantic proportions and repulsive demeanor, who was reported to have a preference for raw meat, often eating enough “at one meal to do him three or four days.” Perhaps for that reason, he was known as “Big Mouth” among the Arapahoes.
Gardner was said to have originally come to the mountains from Philadelphia, where he had been jailed for his part in the riots of 1844. His subsequent escapades along the Platte River earned for him the title, “Big Phil the Cannibal.” “All kinds of stories were told about this being,” Ed Wynkoop later wrote, “one of which was that having been sent by General Harney to Fort Laramie with dispatches, with a single Indian for his companion and orders to return immediately, the time of his return having passed to a considerable extent, it was supposed to them that he and his comrade had perished in consequence of there having been a fearful snowstorm after the time he was expected to have left Fort Laramie, but one day he was seen approaching the camp with something on his shoulder. When he made his appearance the question was asked, ‘Where is the Indian that accompanied you?’ ‘That is all that is left of him,’ he replied throwing down the human leg which he carried.”
“Big Phil” freely admitted to all who asked that he had in emergency turned cannibal, consuming on different occasions the remains of at least two Indians and one Frenchman. The meat, he said, tasted much like pork, although he preferred the head, hands and feet because the other body parts were “too gristly and tough.”
George Jackson was one of the few who refused to believe the reports of Gardner’s cannibalism. In fact, he decided to help the big man in his attempt to cash in on the Fort Laramie mail delivery. Leaving Phil’s two squaws and their numerous children at a nearby Arapahoe camp, the pair journeyed to Auraria to obtain a list of prospective customers. At Auraria, John Ming and Jack Henderson promised “they would give $1.00 a letter and 50 cts a paper for all papers directed to any man in camp, also 25 cts each for all papers not over a month old that I would get at Fort Laramie and bring over.”
On reaching Fort Laramie the morning of 31 January, Jackson probably heard the latest round of gossip about “Big Phil” from Messrs. Little and Hanks, the mail carriers between Salt Lake City and the Missouri River. Just the winter before, it seems, Little and Hanks had come upon Phil Gardner and John Snead stumbling up the North Platte. The pair appeared emaciated and sunken-eyed, suffering from exposure and near starvation. Snead especially was nearing exhaustion. For several days, he said, he had been afraid to sleep or even walk ahead of Gardner for fear of being killed and eaten.
Jackson himself had no such fears. Rather, he became extremely angry with the old mountaineer for getting half drunk at the fort. Impatient to depart, Jackson sought out the offending whiskey bottle and smashed it to pieces, causing Phil to ride down the trail “cross as a bear all day.” The fast-moving mailmen arrived back in Auraria on 7 February 1859. They delivered to Ming and Henderson all the letters they had raised on their list as well as nearly a hundred newspapers. The proceeds netted them $132. Jackson gave fifty dollars to his companion, noting in his diary: “He owes Al Garwitch $100 but won’t give him a dollar; wants to save his money and buy whiskey - the old brute.” As it turned out, Jackson was only half right in his accessment of Phil’s intentions. Unwilling to suffer a repeat of his Fort Laramie hangover, the big mountaineer turned to gambling and promptly lost his fifty dollars at Twenty-One.
On their return from Fort Laramie, Jackson and “Big Phil” had spent the night with fellow mountaineers Antoine and Nicholas Janis. The brothers had set up camp at the Cache la Poudre crossing, where they hoped to establish a ferry boat business and a permanent settlement.
The Janis brothers were descendants of a long line of westering adventurers. In the late 1700’s, their great grandfather Antoine had moved with his family from the French settlement of Kaskaskia near the Ohio River to St. Charles on the banks of the Missouri, a few miles northwest of St. Louis. Their grandfather Antoine continued to reside at St. Charles, but began a family tradition by trading on a small scale with the Osage Indians. Their father, also named Antoine, went to the Rocky Mountains with Ashley’s fur brigade in 1824; the following year, while enroute to Brown’s Hole with more of Ashley’s men, he helped named the Cache la Poudre River by digging a cache near the river in which to hide surplus powder and lead. Antoine went on to spend nearly fifteen years in the mountains. Occasionally, he returned to St. Charles, where he married Marguerite Thibault and fathered five children, among them Joseph Antoine, born 26 March 1824, and Nicholas, born 12 October 1827.
The young Janis brothers themselves went to the mountains after the death of their father at the hands of the Blackfeet. Antoine (who had long since dropped his given name of Joseph) went out in 1841. He settled at Fort Laramie, where he became an Indian trader with the Oglalla Sioux. Nicholas joined him there in 1845. Both married into the Red Cloud family and received Indian names. Antoine’s name meant “Yellow-Hair-All-Messed-Up;” Nicholas’ name was translated as “Long-White-Man.” Antoine was serving as Sioux interpreter for the Indian Agent at Fort Laramie when the news first broke of the gold strike on Cherry Creek. Together with his brother-in-law Swift Bird and twenty Sioux, Antoine and his brother joined George Jackson and the other mountaineers on a prospecting tour down the front range.
At the trail crossing of the Cache la Poudre the party met up with several hundred Indians under the Arapahoe chief Ni-wot and the Cheyenne chief Big Mouth. At a tribal council the Janis brothers and their trade goods supplier, Elbridge Gerry, were given title to the valley of the Cache la Poudre all the way from the mountains to the mouth of Box Elder Creek. Antoine mouth of Box Elder Creek. Antoine had been interested in the property since 1844, when he had first pounded a stake into the river bank, “intending the location selected for my home, should the country ever be settled.”
The brothers Janis did not develop their new property immediately. Instead, they continued on with the others to the mouth of the Big Thompson to set up winter quarters. There they were seen by Sheriff Wynkoop while on his way back to Omaha. In a letter of 8 January, Wynkoop wrote; “Antoine Jeniss, of wide clebrity for many years, is now encamped at the mouth of Thompson’s creek, with a large outfit and stock of provisions. Toil and privation have not damped the ardor of this Prince of Mountaineers.” Near the mountaineers’ camp was a large quarry of plaster of paris. The quarry seems to have held some interest for the brothers, but not nearly so much as the disposition of their Indian trade goods. Nick had picked up an outfit from Elbridge Gerry on 26 December that included sixteen blankets, three lbs. vermillion, seventy-seven bunches of seed beads and 252 yards of cloth.
Also on the minds of the Janis brothers was the impending arrival of the Fifty-Niners and the profits to be derived from guiding the greenhorn prospectors into the mountains. Contacting D.C. Oakes before his return to Iowa, they arranged for an advertisement to be placed in the Tierney guidebook. The advertisement read: “Antoine and Nicholas Janes, mountain guides, St. Vrain’s Fort, Colonia Territory. Having eighteen years experience in the mountains, and prepared to give information relative to any portion of the country in the vicinity of the mines, or to accompany prospecting parties. Terms reasonable.”
To prepare for the expected spring migration, Antoine and Nick moved their outfits in mid-January of 1859 to the north side of the Cache la Poudre River. There - next to the established trail crossing - they built log cabins to house their Indian families whom they had recently brought down from Fort Laramie. By the time the Patterson Party of gold seekers passed through in early June, the settlement was already being called Colona. Among the residents met with by Patterson were: “Indians, squaws and children; blooded and half-breeds, neat and slovenly; of all grades and conditions....”
Patterson and his companions had first tried to cross the Cache la Poudre on a hastily-constructed raft, but were prevented by the swift current. Fortunately, the stranded gold seekers received word that the mountaineers at Colona had already completed a ferry boat and were prepared to transport them across the river. The boat was constructed of whipsawed lumber. It was originally intended to be pulled back and forth by a rope arrangement, but the rope failed and oars had to be used. The Patterson crossing was effected safely and at the cost of only a half dollar per man. Also waiting to cross were several teams bound for California via the Cherokee Trail. They too were transported across, although the small size of the boat necessitated two trips for each wagon.
Before leaving Colona, Patterson stopped in to see the man he called “Nick Jness (pronounced John-nees), an old mountaineer, - his brother Antoine, being absent in the mountains with a small prospecting party.” Antoine himself was met three days later on the Cache la Poudre-Lodgepole Creek divide. He warned the Patterson Party about high water in the foothills and advised them to proceed instead into North Park. He also presented them with a map of the country and the ham of a mountain sheep. Little wonder that Patterson ever after regarded the elder Janis brother as “the most celebrated mountaineer of the times - and as courteous as he is intelligent.”
The Janis brothers were not the only ones to profit from the fresh influx of gold seekers. By the time the first spring wave of Fifty-Niners hit the front range, most of the mountaineers had already left their winter camps at Fountain City and the mouth of the Big Thompson. They fanned out into the mountains, some to prospect for gold, others to hire out their services as experienced guides. George Jackson went back to his diggings on West Chicago Creek. First he built their reputation as a major bonanza, then quietly sold out to the Chicago Company and retired to Arapahoe City with his profits.
John S. Smith temporarily abandoned the Indian trade to return to his lodge in Auraria. There he became something of a celebrity, all the newcomers - it was said - profiting from “his experience and knowledge.”
Charles Gardner also came down to the Cherry Creek settlements and, for a time, lived off his reputation as “Big Phil the Cannibal.” His presence there may have contributed to the highly negative accessment of the mountaineers sent back home by Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune: “The old mountaineers form a caste by themselves,” Greeley wrote on 21 June 1859, “and they prize the distinction. Some of them are Frenchmen or Franco-Americans, who have been trapping or trading in and around these mountains for a quarter of a century, have wives and children here, and here expect to live and die...Others came years ago from the states, some of them on account of a ‘difficulty,’ wherein they severely killed or savagely mained their respective antagonists...This class is not numerous, but is more influential than it should be in giving tone to the socity of which the members form a part. Prone to deep drinking, soured in temper, always armed, bristling at a word, ready with rifle, revolver or bowie-knife, they give law and set fashion which, in a country where the regular administration of justice is yet a matter of prophecy, it seems difficult to overrule or disregard.”
Greeley’s accessment may have been somewhat severe. More representative of the mountaineers was Uncle Dick Wootton, who by the spring of 1859 had established his Western Saloon and began making plans for an accomodating hotel. He was joined on Cherry Creek by his old friend J.B. Doyle, who brought several wagonloads of merchandise up from New Mexico.
Also attempting to cash in on the gold rush was that master of front range entrepreneurs, William McGaa. During the height of the spring migration, McGaa set himself up for business in a large army tent on Larimer Street in Denver City. Inside the tent he welcomed gold seekers to the new El Dorado by offering fabulous discounts on such varied items as whiskey, biscuits and bacon, and town lot certificates. Of all the mountaineers, McGaa seemed to best realize that the profits to be made from the Indian trade were fast coming to an end. The day of catering to the needs of the gold seeker was at hand.
1. Letter from William McKimens, 11 November 1858. Printed in the Leavenworth Times, 18 December 1858.
2. Louis H. Garrard, Wah-To-Yah and the Taos Trail, (Norman: Univwersity of Oklahoma Press, 1955).
3. Elbridge Gerry's Account Book 4, State Historical Society of Colorado Library.
4. Jason T. Younker, "The Early Pioneer," The Trail, Vol. II.
5. Letter from John W. Jones (William McGaa), 7 January 1859. Printed in the Missouri Republican, 23 February 1859.
6. A.M. Gass, "Diary," Overland Routes to the New Gold Fields, edited by Leroy R. Hafen, Southwest Historical Series, Vol. XI, 1942.
7. Howard Louis Conrad, Uncle Dick Wootton, (Chicago: The Lakeside Press, 1957).
8. Rocky Mountain News, 18 January 1860.
9. "Statement of Messrs. Wynkoop and Steinberger." Published in The Hand Book to the Goldfields of Nebraska and Kansas, by Wm. N. Byers and Jno. H. Kellom.
10. "George A. Jackson's Diary, 1858-1859." Edited by LeRoy R. Hafen, The Colorado Magazine, Vol. XIII.
11. Letter from Samuel S. Curtis, 24 November 1858. Published in the Council Bluffs Nonpareil, 22 January 1859.
12. Letter of Antoine Janis, 17 March 1883, in Ansel Watrous' History of Larimer County Colorado, (Fort Collins, 1911).
13. Luke Tierney, History of the Gold Discoveries on the South Platte River.
14. E.H.N. Patterson, "Diary," Overland Routes to the Gold Fields, 1859, edited by LeRoy H. Hafen, (Glendale, Calif: The Arthur H. Clark Co., 1942).
15. Horace Greeley, An Overland Journey, (New York: C.M. Saxton, Barker & Co., 1860).
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E-mail me at GehlingR@aol.com