Part 10

But the dearth of water and wood on the plains is paralleled by the poverty of shrubbery and herbage. I have not seen a strawberry-leaf—far from me be the presumption of looking for a berry!—since I left the Missouri three weeks ago; and the last blackberry bramble I observed grew on Chapman’s Creek—at all events, the other side of the buffalo-range. A raspberry-cane has not blessed my sight these three weary weeks, nor aught else that might be hoped to bear an old-fashioned fruit, save the far-off blackberries aforesaid, and two or three doubtful grape-vines on some creek a great way back. The prickly pear, very rare and very green, is the only semblance of fruit I discovered on the plains; a dwarfish cactus, with its leaves close to the ground; the Spanish nettle—a sort of vegetable porcupine—a profusion of wild sage, wild wormwood, and other such plants, worthless alike to man and beast, relieved by some well-gnawed grass in the richer valleys of winter water-courses (the flora usually very scanty and always coarse and poor)—such are my recollections of the three hundred miles or so that separate the present buffalo-range from the creeks that carry snow-water to the Platte and the pines that herald our approach to the Rocky Mountains.

THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS.

And now all changes, but slowly, gradually. The cactus, the Spanish nettle, the prickly pear continue, even into and upon the mountains; but the pines, though stunted and at first scattered, give variety, softness and beauty to the landscape, which becomes more rolling, with deeper and more frequent valleys, and water in nearly all of them; the cotton-woods along the streams no longer skulk behind bluffs or hide in casual hollows; you may build an honest camp-fire without fear of robbing an embryo county of its last stick of wood, and water your mules generously without drying up some long, pretentious river, and condemning those who come after you to weary, thirsty marches through night and day. The cotton-woods, as you near the wind-quelling range of protecting heights, which rise, rank above rank, to the westward, (the more distant still white-robed with snow) grow large and stately—some of them sixty to seventy feet high, and at least three feet in diameter; the unwooded soil ceases to be desert and becomes prairie once more; but still this is in the main a sandy, thinly grassed region, which cannot compare with the prairies of Illinois, of Iowa, or eastern Kansas.

There seems to be as rich and deep soil in some of the creek-bottoms, especially those of the South Platte, as almost anywhere; and yet I fear the husbandman is doomed to find even this belt of grassed and moderately rolling land, which stretches along the foot of the Mountains to a width of perhaps twenty miles, less tractable and productive than fertile. It lies at such an elevation—from five thousand to six thousand feet above the ocean level—that, though its winters are said to be moderate, its springs cannot be early. There was a fall of a foot of snow in this region on the 26th of May, when ice formed to a quarter-inch thickness on the Plains; and when summer suddenly sets in, about the 1st of June, there are hot suns by day, and cool, strong winds by night, with a surfeit of petty thunder squalls, but little or no rain. The gentle rain of last Thursday in the mountains fell, for a short time, in sheets just at their feet—say for a breadth of five miles—and there ceased. Hardly a drop fell within five miles west, or for any distance east of this place, though the earth was soaked only ten miles further west. Hence, the enterprizing few who have commenced farms and gardens near this point, tell me that their crops have made no progress for a week or two, and can make none till they have rain. I trust wheat and rye will do well here whenever they shall be allowed a fair chance; barley and oats, if sowed very early on deeply-plowed land, may do tolerably; but corn, though it comes up well and looks rank at present, will hardly ripen before frost, even should it escape paralysis by drouth; while potatoes, peas, and most vegetables will probably require irrigation, or yield but sparingly. Yet, should the gold mines justify their present promise, farming, in the right localities at the base of these mountains, even by the help of irrigation, will yield—to those who bring to it the requisite sagacity, knowledge, and capital—richer rewards than elsewhere on earth. Everything that can be grown here will command treble or quadruple prices for years; and he who produces anything calculated to diversify and improve the gross, mountainous diet of salt pork, hot bread, beans, and coffee, now necessarily all but universal in this region, will be justly entitled to rank with public benefactors.

And the Rocky Mountains, with their grand, aromatic forests, their grassy glades, their frequent springs, and dancing streams of the brightest, sweetest water, their pure, elastic atmosphere, and their unequalled game and fish, are destined to be a favorite resort and home of civilized man. I never visited a region where physical life could be more surely prolonged or fully enjoyed. Thousands who rush hither for gold will rush away again disappointed and disgusted, as thousands have already done; and yet the gold is in these mountains, and the right men will gradually unearth it. I shall be mistaken if two or three millions are not taken out this year, and some ten millions in 1860, though all the time there will be, as now, a stream of rash adventurers heading away from the diggings, declaring that there is no gold there, or next to none. So it was in California and in Australia; so it must be here, where the obstacles to be overcome are greater, and the facilities for getting home decidedly better. All men are not fitted by nature for gold-diggers; yet thousands will not realize this until they have been convinced of it by sore experience. Any good phrenologist should have been able to tell half the people who rushed hither so madly during the last two months that, if these mountains had been half made of gold, they never would get any of it except by minding their own proper business, which was quite other than mining. And still the long procession is crossing the Platte and Clear Creek, and pressing up the “Hill Difficulty” in mad pursuit of gold, whereof not one-fifth will carry back to the states so much as they brought away. New leads will doubtless be discovered, new veins be opened, new “diggings” or districts become the rage—for it were absurd to suppose that little ravine known as Gregory’s, running to Clear Creek, the sole depository of gold worth working in all this region—and in time the Rocky Mountains will swarm with a hardy, industrious, energetic white population. Not gold alone, but lead, iron, and (I think) silver or cobalt, have already been discovered here, and other valuable minerals, doubtless will be, as the mountains are more thoroughly explored—for as yet they have not been even run over. Those who are now intent on the immediate organization and admission of a new state may be too fast, yet I believe the Rocky Mountains, and their immediate vicinity—say between Fort Laramie on the north, and Taos on the south—will within three years have a white population of one hundred thousand, one-half composed of men in the full vigor of their prime, separated by deserts and waste places from the present states—obliged to rely on their own resources in any emergency, and fully able to protect and govern themselves. “Why not let them be a state so soon as reasonably may be.

Mining is a pursuit akin to fishing and hunting, and, like them, enriches the few at the cost of the many. This region is doubtless foreordained to many changes of fortune; to-day, giddy with the intoxication of success—to-morrow, in the valley of humiliation. One day, report will be made on the Missouri by a party of disappointed gold-seekers, that the “Pike’s Peak humbug” has exploded, and that every body is fleeing to the states who can possibly get away; the next report will represent these diggings as yellow with gold. Neither will be true, yet each in its turn will have a certain thin substratum of fact for its justification. Each season will see its thousands turn away disappointed, only to give place to other thousands, sanguine and eager as if none had ever failed. Yet I feel a strong conviction that each succeeding month’s researches will enlarge the field of mining operations, and diminish the difficulties and impediments which now stretch across the gold-seeker’s path, and that, ten years hence, we shall be just beginning fairly to appreciate and secure the treasures now buried in the Rocky Mountains.

XIII. THE GOLD IN THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS.

DENVER, _June 20, 1859_.

For some ten years past, vague stories affirming or implying the existence of gold in our country’s principal chain of mountains, have from time to time reached the public ear; but they seemed to rest on very slight or insecure foundations, and attracted but limited and transient attention. An Indian’s, or trapper’s, or trader’s bare assertion that, in traversing the narrow ravines and precipitous heights of our American Switzerland he had picked up a piece of quartz lustrous with gold, or even a small nugget of the pure metal, was calculated to attract little attention, while California was unfolding her marvelous treasures, and while the fact stood forth clear and unquestioned, that not one pound of the precious dust from all the region watered by the Missouri’s mountain tributaries had ever been known to swell the world’s aggregate of the all-desired metal, and not one company, or individual even, was known to be seeking the yellow idol on this side of the backbone of our continent. So far as I can learn, the first three

## parties ever organized to search for gold in all this Rocky Mountain

region, were fitted out in the spring of 1858, from the Cherokee nation from Missouri, and from Kansas (Lawrence) respectively; and these, though they carried home or sent home large stories of the auriferous character of the country they “prospected,” took with them precious little gold. But their reports aroused a spirit of gold-seeking adventure in others, so that the ensuing (last) fall witnessed a rush of three or four hundred, mainly men of broken fortunes from the dead mushroom “cities” of Nebraska and Kansas, to the region watered b; the South Platte and the more northerly sources of the Arkansas. For some reason, this point—the junction of Cherry Creek with the South Platte—became the focus of the gold-hunt; here those who staid through the autumn and winter busied themselves in putting up log cabins, and writing home to their friends in the states, accounts of the richness of this region in gold—a metal which, except in very minute quantities, they had seen but with the eye of faith. I doubt that three thousand dollars’ worth of gold in every shape, had been taken out by the five or six hundred seekers who came to this region in hot pursuit of it, down to the first day of last month—May, 1859. I doubt it, not merely because I have never seen any reliable accounts of that much gold being sent or received from here prior to that date, but because the gold does not exist where it had almost exclusively been sought down to that day. Cherry Creek, though its extreme sources are near Pike’s Peak, is so headed off from the mountains by the South Platte, that I can hardly realize that it should bring down any gold at all; and, at best, washing for gold the sands of either of these streams near their junction, seems to me much like washing the banks of the Amazon, in Maritime, Brazil, for the gold of the Andes. Yet nearly all the gold-hunting of this region, up to last month, had been done in the sands of these creeks, most of it miles distant from the mountains. There is testimony that several dollars’ worth of dust per day to the hand was thus washed out in certain happily chosen spots; but such successes were transient; and, despite all the glowing accounts set forth in letters to the states, it is clear that all the gold-washing done throughout this region up to last month, had not paid an average of fifty cents per day’s work; while the cost of each man’s subsistence, while thus employed, cannot have fallen short of a dollar per day. And the high waters of the streams preclude advantageous washing in the spring, even were gold far more abundant and enduring in their sands than it has yet been proved.

Such was the actual state of things when the first flood of gold-seeking immigration began to pour in upon Auraria and Denver two months or more ago. Many of the seekers had left home with very crude ideas of gold-digging, impelled by glowing bulletins from writers who confounded sanguine expectations with actual results, and at best spoke of any casual realization of five to ten dollars from a day’s washing as though it were a usual and reliable reward of gold-seeking industry throughout this region. Many who came were doubtless already wearied and disgusted with the hardships of their tedious journey—with sleeping in wet blankets through storms of snow and hurricanes of hail, and urging hollow and weary cattle over immense, treeless plains, on which the grass had hardly started. Coming in thus weather-beaten, chafed and soured, and finding but a handful of squalid adventurers living in the rudest log huts, barred out from the mountains by snow and ice, and precluded from washing the sands of the streams on the plains by high water, they jumped at once to the conclusion that the whole thing was a humbug, got up by reckless speculators to promote selfish ends. They did not stop to reason, much less to explore; but, spurred by a laudable even if untimely longing to “see Nancy and the children,” they turned their cattle’s heads eastward and rushed pell-mell down the Platte, sweeping back nearly all they met. I estimate the number who have started for “Pike’s Peak” this season and turned back at not less than forty thousand, and their positive loss by the venture (in time, clothing and money) at not less than an average of fifty dollars each—or, in all, two millions of dollars.

Meantime, a few of the pioneers of this region—mainly experienced gold-miners from Georgia, California, and even Australia—were quietly proceeding to prospect the mountains, so fast as the disappearance of snow and ice would permit—and, before the snow was fairly off the hither ranges, while it still lay solid and deep on the central and higher chain, Mr. J. H. Gregory, a veteran Georgia gold-digger, had struck the lead on a branch of Vasquer’s Fork (Clear Creek) some thirty miles west of this place by an air line and forty-five by trail, which has since been the main focus and support of the gold-fever. Other leads have since been opened in the same ravine and its vicinity; Mr. Green Russell (another Georgian) is reported to be doing exceedingly well in his “gulch diggings” three miles south-west of Gregory’s; we have various reports of good leads struck at sundry points ten to fifteen miles west, south and north of Gregory’s; and we have a further report that quartz of marvelous richness in gold has been found on the other side of the snowy range, some sixty miles west of Gregory’s, and not far from the Middle Park, whence the water flows to Grand River, and thence, through the Colorado, into the Gulf of California.

I indorse none of these reports as absolutely true, though all but the last are probably so. Tens of thousands will vainly ransack these mountains for gold through weeks and months, and leave them at last ragged and despondent, as hundreds are leaving them now; yet rich leads will continue to be struck, veins to be opened, sluices to be constructed, through years to come; and I shall not be disappointed to find the district yet prospected a mere corner of the Rocky Mountain Gold Region, of which the center is very probably a hundred miles north or south of this point. It may be north of Laramie even. All that has yet been done toward the thorough development of the gold-producing capacity of the Rocky Mountains is very much what tickling an elephant’s ear with a pin would be toward dissecting him.

But will disemboweling these mountains in quest of gold _pay_? A very pregnant question. I answer—It will pay some; it will fail to pay others. A few will be amply and suddenly enriched by finding “leads” and selling “claims;” some by washing those “claims;” other some by supplying the mountains with the four apparent necessaries of mining life—whisky, coffee, flour, and bacon; others by robbing the miners of their hard earnings through the instrumentality of cards, roulette, and the “little joker;” but ten will come out here for gold for every one who carries back so much as he left home with, and thousands who hasten hither flushed with hope and ambition will lay down to their long rest beneath the shadows of the mountains, with only the wind-swept pines to sigh their requiem. Within this last week, we have tidings of one young gold-seeker committing suicide, in a fit of insanity, at the foot of the mountains; two more found in a ravine, long dead and partially devoured by wolves; while five others, with their horse and dog, were overtaken, some days since, while on a prospecting tour not far from Gregory’s, by one of those terrible fires which, kindled by the culpable recklessness of some camping party, finds ready aliment in the fallen pine leaves which carpet almost the entire mountain region, and are fanned to fury by the fierce gales which sweep over the hill-tops, and thus were all burned to death, and so found and buried, two or three days since—their homes, their names, and all but their fearful fate, unknown to those who rendered them the last sad offices. Ah! long will their families and friends vainly await and hope for the music of footsteps destined to be heard no more on earth! Thus, Death seems to be more busy and relentless on these broad, breezy plains, these healthful, invigorating mountains, than even in the crowded city or the rural district thick-sown with venerable graves.

It is my strong belief that gold is scarcely less abundant in the Rocky Mountains than in California, though it seems, for many reasons, far less accessible. It is, _first_. Much further from the seaboard, or from any navigable water or means of easy approach; _second_. Belted by deserts and by regions on which little or no rain falls in summer, so that food, and almost every necessary of life, will here be permanently dearer than in California; _third_. So elevated (six thousand feet and over above tide-water) that little can be done at mining for a full half of each year; and _fourth_. Most of the gold which has been broken down and washed out of the veins by water-courses has been so swept along and dispersed by the fierce mountain-torrents that very little of it can be profitably washed out; hence, mining here must be mainly confined to the veins, and will thus involve blasting, raising by windlass, etc., etc., and so require large investments of capital for its energetic and successful prosecution. While, therefore, I believe that these mountains will soon be yielding gold at the rate of many millions per annum, I say most emphatically to the poor men who want gold and are willing to work for it,—This is not the country for you! Far better seek wealth further east through growing wheat, or corn, or cattle, or by any kind of manual labor, than come here to dig gold. One man may possibly acquire wealth faster in this gold-lottery than in New England or Kansas; but let one thousand poor men come hither to mine, while the same number resolve to win a competence by eminent industry and frugality in the east, and the latter will assuredly have more wealth at five years’ end than the former—and will have acquired it with far less sacrifice of comfort, health and life.

And here let me say, in closing up the subject, that I think the report made by Messrs. Richardson, Villard and myself, of what we saw and learned at Gregory’s Diggings, is fully justified by more recent results. For example: we gave the first four days’ product of W. Defrees & Co. from Indiana (running one sluice) at $66, $80, $95, and $305 respectively—the four following days not returned. I have since obtained them; and they range as follows: $257, $281, $203, $193—or $388 more than those of the four days for which we gave the returns. This company then sold out their claim for seven thousand dollars, and on the eighth of June opened a sluice on another, which in four days produced as follows: $31, $205, $151, $213. Another Indiana company, miscalled Sopris, Henderson & Co., in our report, ran two sluices on the 9th and 10th, realizing about $450 per day, and on the 11th had three sluices in operation for the first, and cleaned up $1,009 (really worth about $900) from the product of that day’s labor of twelve men. Some scores are doing well, though few quite so well as this; but of the thousands who are doing nothing—at least, realizing nothing—who shall report? Some of these issue daily from the mountains, out of provisions, out of means, out of heart; and, between this and snow-fall, thousands like them will come out, still more hungry, weary, forlorn, and take their way down the Platte as gaunt and disconsolate as men ever need be. But this, and much more, will not dissuade new thousands from rushing to take their places, so long as it is known that the Rocky Mountains contain gold.

P. S.—A friend just in from the Mountains, who had a narrow escape from the flames, confirms our worst rumors of disaster and death. He says not less than _fifteen_[4] men have fallen victims to the conflagration, which is still raging, and threatens even the dense crowd of tents and cabins at Gregory’s. My friend informs me that the fire began very near where we camped during my first weary night in the Mountains, and would seem to have been purposely set by reckless simpletons curious to see the woods in a blaze! He thinks the victims were generally, if not uniformly, smothered before the fire reached them—the dense, pitchy smoke at once shrouding the vision and obstructing respiration. He says the flames swept through the pines and above their tops to a height of two hundred feet, with a roar and a rush appalling even to look on. He was obliged to run his mule at her utmost speed for two or three miles, in order to effect his escape. If this drouth continues—as it is likely to do for months—the mountains this side of the snowy range will be nearly burned over for at least fifty miles north and south of the Gregory trail, driving out all that is left of game, killing much of the timber, and rendering the country every way more inhospitable—a most superfluous proceeding.

Footnote 4:

Another friend just arrived says certainly _seventeen_.