The resultant cabins were crude affairs - built for the most part of round logs, the cracks chinked with wood shavings and plastered with mud. Floors were of packed dirt, fireplaces of adobe, chimneys of a framework of sticks and mud. In the absence of glass, strips of canvas served as window coverings. Stool tables and pole bedsteads were the standard furniture. Rough wooden boxes became bureaus and cupboards. A few cabins could boast of hand-split shingles, but most were roofed with weight poles, then covered with prairie grasses and about six inches of soil. All were very warm, very dark, and - when the snow melted - very wet.
Many of the newcomers decided to build their cabins five and a half miles above the mouth of Cherry Creek at the new town of Montana. Eighteen of the Lawrence boys were still living there, housed in a string of five or six cabins known as Lawrence Row. Town company president, Josiah Hinman, encouraged new construction. He wrote that the current residents were living “as comfortable as Robinson Crusoe ever did,” with buckskins for clothing and “meals of bread, venison, antelope, bear and elk meat.” Several of the Kansas City company accepted Hinman’s invitation and began building Kansas Row soon after their early November arrival. Leavenworth Row was started by a portion of General Larimer’s party, among them Richard Whitsett and Marshall M. Jewett. By 18 November 1858, when William O’Donnell stopped by to winter his cattle in the valley adjoining Montana, the growing town already numberered thirty-four cabins, 150 men and one woman.
The one woman was Katrina Murat. She had come west with her husband Henri and five other German-speaking emigrants. The company had outfitted at Kansas City in mid-September, buying new wagons, young bull oxen and an extensive stock of provisions, “their only regret being, that in the mountains they would be cut short of their allowance of lager beer.” Their six-week trek up the Platte River had been more of a pleasure trip than anything else. Soon after arriving in the town of Montana, Henri wrote: “My wife is well and getting fat. She looks as blooming and fresh as a maiden, so well has the free air of the prairies agreed with her.”
The industrious Murats had no trouble fitting into the tumultuous camp life of the first South Platte settlement. Henri - who styled himself a French count - immediately rolled up his shirt sleeves and felled enough cottonwoods to construct a cabin. Once inside the finished cabin, he set up a barber shop, clipping hair and shaving beards to the tune of one dollar per customer. His frau, the Countess Katrina (who would soon Americanize her name to “Catherine”), started a laundry business; she washed the miners’ heavy pants and flannel shirts for the seemingly outrageous price of fifty cents a garment. Little wonder the count wrote back to his friend Zillhard: “You must at any rate come out here, you can make your fortune as a shoe maker. But come soon, because every day you lose will be a pity.”
The early success of Montana inspired a renewed interest in the establishment of other townsites. The St. Charles site on the high land east of Cherry Creek was still practically devoid of sructures; but on the bottomland on the west side - “clustered among a little grove of ancient, gnarled and picturesque cottonwoods” - were the nine cabins of Easter and Hutchins, Jack Wright and his mountaineer friends, the Rooker family from Salt Lake City, and the ten remaining members of the Russell Party. At a public meeting held here on 30 October 1858, it was proposed to form a town company and appoint a committee to purchase the 1280 acres laying between the Platte River and Cherry Creek from the three squawmen who held claims to it: John S. Smith, William McGaa and Nick Janis. At the suggestion of Dr. Levi Russell, the townsite was named Auraria, after his hometown in Lumpkin county, Georgia.
The survey of Auraria was begun immediately. William S. Foster handled the insruments; James Pierce helped with the chains. Streets were laid out eighty feet wide, crossing each other at right angles. There were four principal avenues, two each way, all 110 feet wide. Anselm Barker of the Plattsmouth Company was the first to erect a cabin in the newly-platted town. The site he chose was at 12th and Wynkoop, in a small grove of cottonwood and scrub oak trees. Barker described the cabin construction in his diary:
“November 1, 1858 Monday. I came down to the mouth of Cherry Creek and went to haul logs for a cabin. Just as soon as the first block was surveyed I went to putting up my cabin. Block 5 L 7.
“November 2, 1858 Tuesday. Finished putting up cabin and went to work putting up roof and chinking.
“November 3, 1858 Wednesday. Worked on roof and got the timber for the roof.
“November 4, 1858 Monday [Thursay]. Put on the dirt and got moved into it.
“November 5, 1858 Thursday [Friday]. Made one door and doped our cabin.”
Even as Barker was putting the finishing touches to his 16’ X 16’ dream house, other cabins were going up nearby. John S. Smith, the old mountaineer, raised his house on l5 November. Shopkeepers Blake and Williams from Crescent City, Iowa, had theirs up the next day. Old Doc Steinberger’s cabin was next, followed by the cabins of Sagendorf and Liston, of the Dutch boys, and of the St. Louis Company. By the end of November, John Scudder could count “35 good log houses, and if the snow does not come too soon, in one month from this date the city will number at least 150 cabins, with 600 inhabitants.”
Not everyone enjoyed the work involved in raising a cabin. W.D. McLain of Omaha gave up after only one day’s labor. “I arrived at the mouth of Cherry creek on Wednesday last, the 3rd instant, about noon,” he wrote, “ and went to work to build a house. I then cut my first tree, and before night I had 23 down, and four blisters on my left hand as large as a dime. That night, whilst we were eating supper, an old trapper came into camp, and we gave him his supper. It pleased him so well that he offered us a house of his which was near the site he occupied, and the next day we bundled up and came down the river fifteen miles, and moved into the house that night.”
McLain awoke to find himself at Jim Sanders’ ranche, located on a large island in the middle of the South Platte River. This island, later known as Henderson’s Island, had been used for the previous five winters as pastureland for Sanders’ cattle. Alreay housed in another of his cabins on the island were B.B. Bernhisil and his two companions from Leavenworth. The trio had arrived on 15 October 1858 with their speedy mule team, the second team up the Platte. “We are comfortably fixed,” wrote Bernhisil on 8 November, “have a good cabin that was built some years ago by some trader, and we have the use of it until spring, there is also plenty of timber and good grass to winter our mules, and so we are better fixed than any that are on the Platte at this time.”
Twelve miles upriver from Sanders’ ranche were two other South Platte ranches, both catering to squatters wanting a place to stay for the winter. These were the recently-established ranches of Samuel S. Curtis and R.A. Spooner. Wintering at Spooner’s ranche was A.O. McGrew, famous throughout the diggings as “The Wheelbarrow Man,” who had pushed his wheelbarrow halfway across the plains before being picked up by a passing wagon train.
Even further upstream were a series of projected towns: Arapahoe City, Santa Fe, Nonpareil City, and Pike’s Peak City.
Santa Fe and Nonpareil City (both a couple miles above Montana on the South Platte) seem to have been merely paper towns, with no cabins or inhabitants and no future. Near the proposed site of Nonpareil City, however, a town was developed under the name of Arapahoe City. This short-lived town was founded by members of the Kansas City Party, including David Kellogg, a former riverman and friend of John Brown. Kellogg kept a diary of the trip west and of his later activities in the gold fields. On 1 November 1858 - the same day the Auraria Town Company was officially formed - he chronicled the completion of Arapahoe City: “We have completed two parallel rows of log houses so that by placing another at each end and thus filling the gaps, we will have a fairly good fort. Have roofed the houses with poles, brush, grass and dirt; they are warm and comfortable while the weather is dry but we wonder what they will be like when it rains. We name our settlement Arapahoe City.”
Arapahoe City seems to have disappeared when Kellogg and his companions left the South Platte for the Pike’s Peak region in late December of 1858. By then, a second Arapahoe City had been established by Thomas Golden and Samuel Curtis at the foot of Table Mountain. This second city of the same name survived for several more years.
Pikes Peak City was some distance upriver from Kellogg’s fortified settlement. It was founded at the mouth of Plum Creek by a group of German emigrants, who had come to the diggings with Kellogg’s party from Kansas City. Shortly after erecting their own 18’ X 20’ cabin on the South Platte, the Germans set about making the acquaintance of Americans in the neighborhood. “We fell in with a company among whom resides the only surveyor in this far distant country,” wrote a German named Buesche. “We took a trip up the river, where we found a beautiful situation for a town. The place is at the mouth of Plumb creek on the South Platte, in a most magnificent valley, at the entrance to the mountains. Our company surveyed a piece of land one square mile, and we have already laid the foundations for several houses.”
One of the Germans’ American friends, Dr. G.N. Woodward, helped to promote the new town. In a letter to Messrs. Van Horn and Abeel of Kansas City, Woodward wrote: “This company have located and laid out a town or city, at the junction of Plumb creek with the South Platte, and named it Pike’s Peak City...we intend building at our new location this winter. All the trade from the mountain miners must be done at this point, and if your friends wish to bring out goods in the spring, this is the point to sell them at.”
Dr. Woodward’s promotional efforts were furthered three weeks later by a letter headed “Pike’s Peak City, Dec. 7,1858.” The letter was written by W.W. Spaulding to the editor of the Journal of Commerce: “Pike’s Peak City is a new laid out town fourteen miles from the south fork of Cherry creek, and a fine location for a prosperous town, it numbers about 38 cabins and eighty-two men and one woman.” Like so many other townsite brokers, Spaulding seems to have intentionally exaggerated the numbers in an effort to promote the sale of town lots.
Spaulding’s letter was symptomatic of what was happening throughout the diggings. Paper towns were everywhere. All that was needed to organize a townsite was a plot of ground, a couple of cabins, and five or six gold seekers. Everyone seemed to have their pockets full of town papers. Town lot speculators bought and sold with abandon, each hoping to make a fortune from the expected spring migration. Auraria shareholder George Sevill wrote that he “wouldn’t take $1,000” for his lots on Chrry Creek. Noel Lajeunesse, a stockholder in not one but two of the new towns, claimed that his shares would “be worth ten thousand” by the next summer.
The humor of the situation was not lost on some of the gold seekers. John Cussons could only smile at the proliferation of towns. San Francisco, Sacramento and Auraria had all been established in the same week. “But it pains me to record the demise of the former two,” Cussons wrote, “they having ‘bust up’ from a lack of that without which no city can prosper - houses. Since the last fall of snow the ‘proprietors’ are somewhat dubious of the whereabouts of their cities, but entertain strong hope of finding them as soon as the snow thaws.”
In a similar vein, David Kellogg told of returning to Arapahoe City from a prospecting trip up Clear Creek, only to find a townsite stake set up nearby. There, in a fine grove of cottonwoods near the river bottom, was a level space for a city, but no people. Kellogg stopped, dug a hole, and planted a large stake. On the stake he inscribed the words: “Doosenbury City, Six Miles Square.”
The situation over at the St. Charles townsite, on the other hand, was hardly a laughing matter. The townsite had been surveyed and staked out on the tableland east of Cherry Creek in late September of 1858 by seven members of the Lawrence Party and two squawmen named William McGaa and John S. Smith. The squawmen remained behind when the others returned to Lawrence to re-supply; the pair were under instructions to “Build or cause to be built a cabin on Each quarter Section for the purpose of holding and securing said land for Town site purposes.” Charles Nichols was later sent back to help look after the St. Charles Town Company’s interests and, if possible, donate lots to anyone willing to build on the site.
McGaa and Smith hurriedly constructed a crude cabin on Wazee Stree near Cherry Creek. It was left unroofed, although on occasion wagon sheets were used to allow for temporary residence. For his part, Nichols donated forty lots to two newcomers from Omaha, Moyn and Rice, who began building a round-log cabin on 12 November and moved in eight days later.
By then the townsite had caught the eye of the officials sent west to establish Arapahoe county by the governor of Kansas Territory, James W. Denver. The officials were originally four in number: H.P.A. Smith, probate judge; J.H. Matthias, district attorney; E.W. Wynkoop, sheriff; Hickory Rogers, clerk of the board of supervisors.
H.P.A. Smith’s reputation had preceded him to the diggings. His lollygagging on the trail west had enabled several of his fellow travelers to outrace him to the South Platte and, once there, to spread tales of his heavy drinking and border ruffian breeding. Newly-arrived David Kellogg referred to the judge as “Red Head Smith,” and told of how the frustrated actor had flubbed his lines one night at a camp celebration, only to become the object of general derision. William O’Donnell, a Republican firebrand from Lawrence, reported that he was “treated with a great deal of impudence,” after Judge Smith discovered that he was working as special correspondent for an abolitionist paper. In O’Donnell’s opinion, the Democratic judge was nothing but a lackey for Governor Denver.
On reaching the site of the old Pueblo, Judge Smith and his colleagues had initially decided to stop there for the winter, since the trail over the divide was already white with snow. The arrival of General Larimer’s Leavenworth Company a week later, however, induced the reluctant officials to hurry on to the mouth of Cherry Creek, there to lay out the mandated county and establish a county seat. On the trip north, they persuaded General Larimer to accept the office of treasurer in the new county.
General William Larimer was everything Judge Smith was not. An ardent abolitionist, Larimer had built his reputation in his native Pennsylvania as a major general in the state militia; he had also served as a banker, railroad builder and candidate for the state’s highest office. After moving to Nebraska Territory in 1855, he had founded Larimer City near Council Bluffs and become a member of the state legislature. Three years later, he left all behind to join the rush to the mountains. Still the consummate politician at age fifty, he did not hesitate to accept the new office thrust upon him enroute, fully aware that as an official of Arapahoe county he could more easily help establish a proper city in the midst of the rough mining camps.
General Larimer - with the other county officials in tow - arrived at the St. Charles townsite on 10 November 1858. Within the week, the new appointees had contacted William McGaa about the possibility of joining the St. Charles Town Company. McGaa balked at first, remembering that no new members were to be admitted without a two-thirds vote of the original company; but a judicious mixture of whiskey and threats soon brought him around. In an affidavit written seven years later, McGaa claimed that Judge Smith, Sheriff Wynkoop and several others gathered at his cabin one November day with bottles in hand, counseling “that if I would not Interest said Commissioners appointed by Gov. Denver, they would eject me tare down my cabins, give orders for me to leave the country, and threats also that Endangered the Life of Myself and family.”
Under duress, McGaa agreed to admit thirty-one new members into the St. Charles Town Company. The new members immediately voted to adopt a new constitution, new by-laws and - at the suggestion of Sheriff Wynkoop - a new name. The company would henceforth be known as the Denver City Town Company in honor of James W. Denver, even though the governor had already resigned his office to return to Washington as U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs.
At a meeting of the Denver City shareholders on 22 November, E.P. Stout was elected president, General Larimer treasurer, and Judge H.P.A. Smith secretary. Surveyors Curtis and Lowry were contracted to plat and stake out 320 acres of the enlarged townsite. Cottonwood Point, with its 72 acres of prime bottomland, was set aside for William McGaa. Charles Nichols, who continued to protest this blatant takeover of the St. Charles townsite, was informed that a noose awaited him if he persisted in making trouble. Considering silence the better part of valor, Nichols quietly accepted shares in the new company for himself and his absent associates. He departed for Lawrence immediately afterwards, still holding to the belief that “Denver City, so called, is merely a part of St. Charles.”
The new town of Denver City experienced some very shaky beginnings. Though laid out across Cherry Creek from Auraria, there was no mutual line of demarcation. The two plats overlapped. Many of the streets ended in the middle of the other town’s blocks. Immediately after the survey, General Larimer was joined by C.A. Lawrence and Hickory Rogers in erecting three primitive log cabins. All were built of round logs, daubed with mud and covered with earth. General Larimer’s cabin was on the west side of F Street, between Larimer and Lawrence Streets, Lawrence’s on the east side of E Street, and Rogers’ directly opposite.
Almost as if on cue, the weather itself turned sour. It began snowing on the first day of December, and continued snowy and cold for almost two weeks. Several hundred sheep froze to death on the Fontaine qui Bouille. Up on the South Platte, there were reports of numbed fingers and frostbitten feet. Despite the cold, General Larimer decided to do something about his floundering town. He appointed fellow Pennsylvanian, Sheriff Edward W. Wynkoop, general agent of the Denver City Town Company, with instructions to return east “to procure a charter from the Kansas Legislature, to have plates lithographed, certificates of stock printed and attend to the business of the company generally.” The affable Wynkoop gathered up two mules, a spring wagon, and one companion - Albert B. Steinberger - and set off down the south Platte. The first day out, Wynkoop froze his feet. Undaunted, the buckskin-clad frontiersman stopped only long enough to treat his feet at a trapper’s lodge before pushing on eastward. Back in Denver City, William McGaa took over Wynkoop’s duties as sheriff of Arapahoe county.
The paralyzing snowstorms blew themselves out by mid-December. Temperatures moderated. The unseasonable warmth sparked the spread of cabin fever among the gold seekers holed up in their crude shelters along the South Platte. Games of chance were put away. Jugs of Taos Lightning were corked. The tall tales of “lying” John Smith and others like him fell on deaf ears, as the siren call of the gold chase once again lured the men outdoors and down to the river banks. Captain Cook and company, from St. Joseph, set up a Long Tom on Ralston Creek and began washing out five to six dollars in gold a day. Rooker went back to Dry Creek, where he carried his paydirt by wheelbarrow to the river, a distance of 500 yards. Over at Montana, Charlie Runyon began setting a record gophering out gold-bearing gravel and running it through his rocker. Some days he cleaned up as much as $7.50 worth of thin scale gold.
The melting snow also served to stimulate travel down the Cherokee Trail. This old trail over the Platte-Arkansas divide still provided the easiest access to Pike’s Peak and South Park. It also served as an essential link to the mountain branch of the Santa Fe Trail, and in the spring would doubtless be lined with new arrivals from Kansas City and St. Louis. Realizing this, the more daring of the townbuilders began to examine the trail with an eye to attractive townsites. General Larimer - ever on the alert for possible rivals to Denver City - wrote back to Levenworth on 2 February 1859: “There is a town laid out every twenty miles clear to Fountain City, a distance of 110 miles. They range from here as follows: Russellville, Point of Rock, and Forest City...The next town on the main New Mexico road is Junction City, on the Fountain Quasbo, or Boiling Spring. The next is Antabee (named after the old trader). The next is Fountain City, on the Arkansas.” All but one of these projected towns occupied sites used for many years as campgrounds along the Cherokee Trail.
Russellville, the first of the towns named by Genral Larimer, lay some thirty-three miles south of Denver City, alongside a little stream known as the Head of Cherry Creek. This stream marked the southern limits of Russellville Gulch, a favorite campsite for trail travelers, with its groves of pine and herds of deer and antelope. It was here that the Russell Party had paused in late June of 1858 while on their way to Cherry Creek. Here Green Russell had unpacked his shovel and pan, and washed out his very first colors of Rocky Mountain gold. The gold was judged “very fine and not in sufficient quantity to pay.”
Twenty miles of waterless prairie lay between Russellville and the next proposed townsite at Point of Rocks. The Cherokee Trail ran a near straight line between the two - over extensive buffalo pastures, across dry creek beds and deep ravines, and through lightly-timbered bottoms. Point of Rocks itself was a high, nearly perpendicular hill of pine and rock, known as La Ceja (the Eyebrow) to early Spanish traders. A rivulet called West Kiowa Creek meandered ever-so-slowly past the hill and watered the grassy campground at its base. Just to the left of the campground was the grave of Charles Michael Fagan, one of the Marcy-Loring Expedition’s teamsters, who had frozen to death during a fierce blizzard on the night of 30 April 1858.
Forest City, like Point of Rocks, was never more than a paper town. Its exact site remains unknown, although its projected location some twenty miles south of Point of Rocks and about twelve miles from Pike’s Peak would probably have placed it at Jimmy Camp, a campground along the Cherokee Trail famous for its piney ridges and cold spring water.
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 town declared county seat of the newly-formed El Paso county were successfully passed through the territorial legislature.
A few miles west of El Paso, on the site later that same year surveyed as Colorado City, a large company house of logs was constructed in mid-January of 1859. This company house was the venture of Charley Gilmore and a dozen other gold seekers from the South Platte. Named El Dorado, it was to be the base camp from which parties could be sent up the adjacent Ute Trail into South Park. In late January, George Bute and a man named Tucker footed it as far as the Petrified Forest before running out of food. On their return to El Dorado, the determined pair were provided with an ox team and a wagonload of supplies; the added supplies enabled them to reach the area later known as Fairplay, where some slight evidence of gold was found.
By late winter, the main focus of the gold search had shifted from the central mountains back to the streams west of Auraria and Denver City. The prevailing sentiment was perhaps best expressed by a self-appointed expert named George Thomas, who ended his prospecting tour of the South Park with the declaration: “there is no gold either in the mountains or out of them, south or southwest from a point twelve miles above the mouth of Cherry Creek.....” Prospects of finding the mother lode in South Park began to fade. Before long, plans for developing the town of El Dorado were laid aside. The long house beside the old Ute Trail was abandoned, and Gilmore’s party of gold seekers rushed back north to try their luck at the new diggings on Boulder Creek.
Just twenty miles down Fountain Creek from El Dorado, at a point where the old Ute Trail met up with the Cherokee Trail coming over the hills from Jimmy Camp, lay the intended site of Junction City. This 320-acre site was taken in February, 1859, and a cabin built to secure it. The Junction City Town Company, however, was not organized until June of 1860, when Hickory Rogers was elected president and N.N. Wethan secretary. The venture apparently did not progress beyond the filing of a claim a short distance northeast of the present town of Fountain.
The last town listed by General Larimer as lying on the Cherokee Trail between Denver City and Fountain City was “Antabee (named after the old trader).” This contemplated town was obviously connected in some way with Charlie Autobees, a former mountaineer and whiskey trader, who since 1855 had occupied an adobe placita on the Huerfano River. The Antabee (or Autobees) townsite named for him was probably located twenty miles down Fountain Creek from Junction City, at a Cherokee Trail campground known as Cottonwood Grove. Here, in late June of 1859, gold seeker Charles C. Post found a ranche already established.
Fountain City - the only town on the Cherokee Trail large enough to present a real challenge to Larimer’s Denver City - was built at the Arkansas River crossing near the ruins of the old Pueblo. It began as a cluster of adobe houses and log huts laid out just to the north of Marcelino Baca’s earlier cornfield on the east side of Fountain Creek. The first resident of 1858 seems to have been George McDougal, a former California gold miner turned mountaineer, who had returned west with the Cherokee Party in June and who decided to remain when the other go-backs returned to their homes. He was already living near the old Pueblo when the Kansas City Party passed through in late October. David Kellogg wrote of the encounter in his diary: “We find George McDougal living here with a Mexican woman and several greasers. McDougal took us to his smokehouse which was filled with antelope hams and invited us to help ourselves; he gives us much useful information concerning the country, the route and the Indians.”
McDougal was soon joined by Lawrence Party members, George Peck and the Middleton family, by William Kroenig from Fort Barclay, by Josiah “Si” Smith from St. Louis, and by the mercantile firm of Ming and Cooper. Ming and Cooper brought with them a considerable entourage: six wagons, thirty yoke of oxen, and 25,000 pounds of freight. After constructing a large corral and a 18’ X 50’ store, the pair arranged their goods and commenced the trade. “There being no other store in town,” wrote John Ming to his brother James, “we had a big run. Did pretty well for awhile but the money soon gave out and we had to trade in stock - horses, mules and cattle.” Supplementing their trade were the furs brought in by eighty lodges of Arapahoes, who camped just outside the city limits for three months during the winter.
The matter seems to have been settled amicably after Shaffer and Browne - two Missouri men who had come out with the firm of Ming and Cooper - made a proper survey and plat of the Fountain City townsite. The success of the survey convinced the pair to go into the business full time. “S____ and myself have formed a partnership as surveyors,” wrote Browne in an unsigned letter home, “and have more work on hand than we can accomplish in three months hence. We make as high as $60 per day in surveying town sites and claims, but the great difficulty is that we cannot get but very little cash for our work at present. We have to take stock and orders on stores to pay, but expect there will be plenty of gold and money in the spring.”
Before the winter was out, Fountain City came to number fifty cabins and “about three hundred men, three women and seventeen children.” But by then the shortage of available currency had induced John Ming to take several wagonloads of merchandise across the divide to the South Platte, with its 200 cabins and over 1,700 inhabitants. Ming opened a store at the foot of Ferry Street in Auraria.
Auraria had grown rapidly since its early November organization. Scattered for a third of a mile along Cherry, Ferry and St. Louis Streets were 125 habitations of every description: mud-covered log cabins, dugout and tent combinations, adobes, wigwams, even a few split-log houses with broad roofs and frame fronts, and one with a plank floor. Interspersed among the dwellings were a city bakery, a large hotel, several stores with very limited stocks, a blacksmith’s, a shoemaker’s and even a watchmaker’s shop, as well as the usual disproportionate number of groggeries.
Denver City - the rival town across Cherry Creek - lagged far behind Auraria in business establishments, but did contain nearly as many dwellings, most of which remained unroofed with only the walls up. There were no plank floors in Denver City, no glass windows, very little whipsawed lumber, and not a well in town. Despite the obvious growing pains, General Larimer remained optimistic. His town had weathered the granting of a territorial charter to the old St. Charles Town Company on 11 February and the election of new Arapahoe county officials on 4 March. “This country is shaping matters for a glorious future,” Larimer wrote on 19 March, “by establishing all kinds of societies, such as historical, pioneer, etc., also, laying off lots for all the different denominations to build churches and schoolhouses; also beautiful cemetery grounds, called Mount Prospect.”
The future did not look quite so bright for Montana. This Lawrence Party development five and a half miles up the South Platte had been incorporated by the territorial legislature on 9 February 1859, the first gold rush town to receive such a designation. Town company members Josiah Hinman, Jason Younker, Charles Nichols, Howard Hunt, William Parsons and J.H. Sweeney had been empowered to make contracts, use a common seal, plat up to 640 acres, and bring water from the South Platte for mining purposes. But the charter came too late to save the dying town. Residents were already beginning to tear down their cabins and to haul the materials by ox team down to Auraria. A few simply floated their logs downstream. Montana resident, John Buell, wrote back to the Missouri Democrat on 20 February: “Montana though once a flouirshing town may be considered over board.”
Henri and Catherine Murat fled the moribund town with the others. They rebuilt their cabin just behind the David Smoke house on St. Louis Street in Auraria. Here Murat and Smoke established the Eldorado Hotel, the first public house on the South Platte. Instead of a sign, their hotel was marked by a large silk flag, which floated from the peak of a lofty pine pole; the flag was said to have been sewn by Countess Catherine from a gown purchased in Paris.
By the spring of 1859, Montana was practically demolished. What cabins remained were appropriated by the more enterprising town builders of Auraria, who - according to Jason Younker - “sent ox teams up to ‘Montana,’ tore down every house in that town but one, hauled them down and built them up to decorate the streets of Auraria! A clear case of stealing a town.” The abandoned townsite was taken over by town company secretary, William J. Boyer, who incorporated it into his ranch claim.
Even as Montana was dying, a new town was being developed to the northwest along Boulder Creek, where quantities of shot gold had been recently discovered. One of the founders of Boulder City was A.A. Brookfield, the former mayor of Nebraska City. “I did not come out here for town speculation,” Brookfield wrote his wife in early March, “but after we made what we considered by far the best discoveries of the ‘precious metal,’ we thought as the weather would not permit us to mine, we would lay out and commence building what may be an important town. By the time E.H.N. Patterson arrived in mid-June, the new town numbered “about 59 log houses, a few of them completed and occupied, the rest awaiting roofs and tenants.”
The many unoccupied houses in Boulder City were an indication of what was happening throughout the diggings. With the onset of spring, town improvements came to a virtual standstill. All who could do so went prospecting. Those who remained in the towns appeared to be waiting only for some promising new discoveries to open up . One of the great ironies of the gold rush was that the townbuilders, who had put so much thought and effort into their townsites, were largely absent when the great influx of 1859 reached its height. Of the 120 cabins constructed in Denver City during the winter, only forty were still occupied by the first of May. The remainder was open to preemption, available to any newcomer who needed a temporary home.
The front range towns, so bright and promising during the winter months, paled under the critical gaze of the incoming Fifty-Niners. Fountain City was described by newly-arrived Dr. George Willing on 6 June 1859 as “a miserable village of about thirty log huts, on the Fontaine qui bouile, or Boiling Spring creek. The population is a conglomeration of Mexican, American and Indian, but all ugly alike, filthy alike, and lazy alike. The men at present are in the mines, but do nothing when at home beyond trapping and hunting. They make a small pretence at farming, but it hardly goes beyond a feint. Their bread, when they have any, they obtain from Taos, their meat from the mountains, a few vegetables from their patches, and fish from the stream. Such is their life.”
The South Platte towns fared little better. “Denver City and Auraria together make up but an inconsiderable village,” wrote the same Dr. Willing on 13 June 1859, “with Cherry creek - when there’s any water in it - running through the middle of it...It is a dull hole, this town, and as a speculation has not, I suspect proved extraordinarily profitable. It had its origin in rascality, and therefore deserves to prove a failure- There is no doubt that all the flaming reports of rich gold discoveries that blazed so dazzlingly through the newspapers, were concocted in this very spot, and sent forward by men who had never washed a pan of dirt, but who were largely interested in attracting hither a population, so that the value of their ‘city lots’ might be enhanced.”
The good doctor’s criticisms were probably well deserved. But by the time they were written, most of the townbuilders were already off to the mountains in search of further profits - not from the sale of town lots, but from the discovery of the elusive golden nuggets.
1. Letter fron H. Murat, 5 November 1858. Published in the Kansas City Journal of Commerce, 14 December 1858.
2. Letter from John Scudder, 24 November 1858. Published in the Kansas City Journal of Commerce, 20 January 1859.
3. Letter from W. D. McLain, 7 November 1858. Published in the Omaha Times, 9 December 1858.
4. Letter from B. Bernhisil, 8 November 1858. Published in the Leavenworth Times, 18 December 1858.
5. Letter from G.N. Woodward, 19 November 1858. Published in the Kansas City, Journal of Commerce, 25 December 1858.
6. Letter from W.W. Spaulding, 7 December 1858. Published in the Kansas City Journal of Commerce, 14 January 1859.
7. Letter from George Sevill, 20 November 1858. Published in the Leavenworth Times, 1 January 1859.
8. Letter from Noel Lajeunesse. Published in the Nebraska Advertiser, 27 January 1859.
9. Letter from John Cussons, 15 December 1858. Published in the Missouri Democrat, 1 February 1859.
10. William McGaa, "A Statement Regarding the Formation of the St. Charles and Denver Town Companies," The Colorado Magazine Vol. 22.
11. Edward W. Wynkoop, "History of Colorado," ms. in the Colorado Historical Society Library.
12. Letter from William Larimer, 2 February 1859. Published in the Leavenworth Times, 5 March 1859.
13. Letter from J.H. Ming, 7 January 1859. Published in the Hannibal Messenger, 18 February 1859.
14. Frank Cobb, "The Lawrence Party of Pike's Peakers and the Founding of St. Charles," The Colorado Magazine.
15. George Willing, "Diary of a Journey to the Pike's Peak Gold Mines in 1859," edited by Ralph P. Bieber. The Mississippi Vallry Historical Review, Vol. XIV.
At a second meeting held on 1 November, the constitution and by-laws of the Auraria Town Company were read and adopted. William McFading was elected president, Levi Russell secretary and Henry Allen director. One hundred shareholders enrolled their names on a list. Each shareholder was to receive “26 lots of 66-foot front and a solid block of low land not surveyed into lots.” The one condition was that each was to build a 16’ X 16’ house within the city limits before July of 1859. Failure to build would forfeit his shares in the town company.
Other cabins were slow abuilding. Part of the problem lay in the perceived townsite jumping, part in the almost universal repudiation of the officials sent out by Governor Denver. “We thought we were out of the pale of civilization,” wrote G.N. Hill on 28 November, “and would be allowed to regulate our domestic affairs to our own liking, but it seems we could not be allowed that privelege.” Especially adamant on this matter of squatter sovereignty were the Georgia boys, led by the secretary of the Auraria Town Company, Dr. Levi Russell. There was talk of tar and feathers, even of hanging, if Denver’s officials attempted to exercise any functions of office. At a public meeting held in late November, the officials were publicly asked to resign. Privately, G..N. Hill confided: “If they do not resign, look out for squally times in the valley of the South Platte.”
Later arrivals came to disagree. They considered three cents to the panful sufficient inducement to stay; after all, a hard day’s work might result in two or three dollars worth of fine scale gold. Several dozen miners began to work the stream bed. Pans soon gave way to rockers, tents to cabins. By the time Henry Allen dropped down from Auraria in mid-December of 1858, he could count as many as five or six log cabins gracing the little community named for Green Russell. Their number would more than double before the winter was out.
Despite its desirable location, its rich farmland and abundance of wood and water, Point of Rocks was never developed as a townsite. It remained a town on paper only. A stage station was built there in the early 1860’s, and in the spring of 1863 a frontiersman named Fleming Neff settled his wife, Mary, and their five children in a log cabin near Point of Rocks, while he hunted antelope in the valley that headed West Kiowa Creek.
Forest City was not the only town proposed for the Pike’s Peak region. West across the hills lay El Paso, founded by William O’Donnell, who was known throughout the diggings as the most outspoken opponent of the Arapahoe county officials and their county seat of Denver City. O’Donnell came down to Pike’s Peak in the fall of 1858 with several other members of the newly-formed El Paso Town Company. They selected a site on the prairie plateau just above the junction of Monument and Fountain Creeks in present downtown Colorado Springs. Their embryo city was to be a second Sacramento. 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 eastern Kansas Territory to the new town. A. Cutler, the city engineer of Lawrence, was to precede him with a large party of settlers via the Smoky Hill route.
Those who remained at the company house on Fountain Creek passed their time forming the El Dorado Town Company and laying plans for the future. One dreamer named James decided to enroll his friend in Auraria, George Stephen, as a member of the company. On receipt of the news, Stephen engaged in a bit of playful revelry: “If I was to consult my own interests, as certain pious and learned persons do here, I would write to you and the rest of mankind thus: Pike’s Peak is thirteen thousand miles above the level of anything. Eldorado is situated at its base, at the entrance to the only rich gold mines in these regions. By an easy passage up the Arkansas, you come to our town, where you can buy lots and trade, or you will be furnished with long-winded, sure-footed mules, which cannot fail to take you where you can make your fortune in a day. Our town is the town. I expect the president of the United States will come and spend the winter with us, when he gets through with his other business.” 
Diarist David Kellogg himself moved down to Fountain City in early January of 1859. He and his friend, Cliff Rogers, took possession of an empty log cabin and settled in. Already housed nearby were other members of the Kansas City Party, including John Winchester, Hamp Boone, and a surveyor named Wagoner. Wagoner was persuaded to act as engineer in laying out a town, which was to encompass both sides of Fountain Creek to its mouth. His survey aroused the anger of George McDougal, who stormed into Kellogg’s cabin one winter day, claiming that as the original settler “he and he alone had any right to lay out a town. That a half mile square was his by ‘squatter right.’ He had no fears that previous settlers might appear to dispute his title.”
Copyright © 1999-2007 Richard Gehling. All Rights Reserved.
E-mail me at GehlingR@aol.com