Further north, near the base of Long’s Peak, a Fifty Niner named Samuel Stone discovered shallow mining shafts and the remnants of several crude cabins. Near the cabins were a copper kettle and coiled copper tubing from what appeared to have been a portable outfit for distilling liquor.
Lieutenant Zebulon Pike saw none of these Spanish mines when he first led his half-starved expedition into the Rocky Mountains in December of 1806. Pike was looking not for gold, but for the sources of the Red River. In the course of his journey past the present site of Canon City and up into South Park, he did pass several Spanish and Indian campsites, including the remains of one large camp, “which had been occupied by at least 3,000 Indians, with a large cross in the middle. Query: Are the people Catholic?”
Pike would find the answer to his query ten weeks later, shortly after wandering into Spanish territory and being taken prisoner to Santa Fe. In Santa Fe Pike met a Kentuckian named James Pursley, who told of having camped in South Park with a party of 2,000 heathen Indians a year and a half earlier. Near the headwaters of the South Platte Pursley found gold. For ten months he carried a few nuggets in his shot pouch, until at length - despairing of ever seeing civilization again - he threw the samples away. On finally reaching Santa Fe, he “imprudently mentioned it to the Spaniards, who had frequently solicited him to go and show a detachment of cavalry the place; but conceiving it to be in our territory, he had refused....”
An experience very similar to Pursley’s would be claimed in later years by another mountaineer named Eustache Carriere. In an interview published in the Kansas City Journal of Commerce, Carriere told of being lost near the headwaters of the South Platte in 1835. As he wandered through the mountains, he said, he collected numerous mineral specimens, which he stored in his shot pouch. Eventually, he stumbled into Taos, where some Mexican friends assured him that he had indeed found nuggets of pure gold. A party of them returned with him to unearth the mother lode. But he was “unable to find the stream where he had collected his specimens, and was tied up and severely whipped by the Mexicans, under the supposition that he did not wish to disclose their location.”
Carriere’s story was told and retold in the newspapers of the day. Several 1859 guidebooks picked up on the details, providing him with a measure of national notoriety. Before long, other mountaineers and Indian traders were induced to step forward and tell of their own experiences with Rocky Mountain gold.
A. Pike Vasquez, who established one of the early provision stores in the gold rush town of Auraria, told The Rocky Mountain News of how he began his career in 1836 as an Indian trader on the South Platte. For several years he worked for his Uncle Louis at Fort Vasquez, an adobe trading post since reconstructed near the modern town of Platteville. Occasionally, he said, Indians and Mexicans would bring in quantities of gold dust, which they would exchange for trade goods at the rate of $2.50 an ounce.
William Bent, of Bent’s Fort fame, was quoted in the Kansas City Journal of Commerce as saying that the existence of gold had been known to the Indians ever since he first took up residence among them in the late 1820’s. “The Indians, however, have always remonstrated against the knowledge being made known to the whites. The country is their ancient hunting grounds, their best wintering country, and as one old chief told Bent, if the white men ever found the gold they would take from them ‘their best and last home.” Despite these Native American concerns, rumors continued to surface in the Rocky Mountain west of tomahawks and peace pipes fashioned out of pure silver, of tribes who pointed their arrows with gold, and of a site on the Blue River called the “Ute Bullet Pouch,” where the mountain Utes were said to dig gold for use in molding their rifle bullets.
Western adventurer Rufus Sage remembered such a story while camped on the headwaters of Beaver Creek in the spring of 1843. The central figure in his story was Whirlwind, an Arapaho chief, who some twenty years previous led a war party against the Pawnees. This war party was possessed of only three guns, and soon expended what lead bullets they had in shooting small game. Finally - out of ammunition and nearly starving - they called a council atop a small hill near Beaver Creek to discuss the necessity of calling off the expedition.
Stories of Indian gold told around the campfire led a few of the mountaineers to do a little desultory prospecting of their own. Oliver Goodwin made a tour of the front range in 1849 - from Fort Laramie south to the Spanish Peaks - and at several locations found good prospects, but none equal to the $4.50 panful he took from the headwaters of St. Vrain’s Fork. A year later, Antoine Pichard reported to the Chouteau camp of traders at the mouth of Platte Canyon that he had found gold near the site of present Golden. And throughout the mid-1850’s there was talk at Fort Laramie of nuggets having been found in the streams down near Pike’s Peak. William McGaa, John Smith, Bisonnette and one of the Janis brothers were said to have traveled south to prospect Clear Creek and other tributaries of the South Platte in the summer of 1856.
But most mountaineers seem to have subscribed to the dictum of the old master trapper himself - Bill Williams - who believed that to be a successful beaver trapper was to have arrived at the acme of human ambition. It might have been stimulating for them to carry a few golden nuggets around in their shot pouches, but it was really much easier to purchase the gold from the Indians than to grub around in the streams for it. So it was that, in 1849, Seth Ward returned to St. Louis with $2,000 worth of scale-like gold he claimed to have purchased from an Arapaho at the Platte River crossing.
An early, systematic gold search of the Rocky Mountains might never have been made were it not for the renewed interest sparked by two groups of Cherokee Indians, who passed along the front range on their way to the California gold fields.
News of the 1848 gold strike at Sutter’s Mill in far-away California precipitated a fevered rush of preparation among the Cherokee Indians, then inhabiting Indian Territory in what would become Oklahoma. Many of the Cherokees had grown up in the gold diggings of North Georgia. They knew that fortune favored the first arrivals. By 3 February 1849, a band of Cherokees met in the town of Tahlequah to organize a company for California. They also arranged for a rendezvous on the Grand Saline with a group of like-minded white men from Fayetteville, Arkansas.
The combined parties left the Grand Saline on 24 April. Included among the 124 gold seekers were three women, five Negro slaves and fourteen Cherokees. A white man named Lewis Evans was elected captain.
The Evans Company broke a new trail to the Arkansas River, traveling to the northwest between two branches of the Verdigris. On reaching the Arkansas, their route was due west along the Santa Fe Trail to Bent’s Old Fort, then along the Arkansas River Road to the Pueblo at the mouth of Fountain Creek.
The thirty remaining wagons, carrying the majority of the Evans Company - among them the nine remaining Cherokees - turned north at the Pueblo to follow the Taos-Fort Laramie Trail up the Front Range of the Rockies. At the mouth of the Cache la Poudre they crossed the South Platte, to blaze a new trail across the Laramie plains and through present southern Wyoming to a meeting with the California Trail at Black’s Fork. They reached Salt Lake City during the second week of August. From there they continued on to California.
Even though the Evans Company of 1849 followed established trails wherever possible (opening new trails only from the Grand Saline to the Arkansas and from the South Platte to Black’s Fork), the route they took became known thereafter as “the Cherokee Trail to Californy.” Other Forty-Niners flocked to use it, including the 1850 McNair Party of Cherokees, members of which would pause long enough to discover gold just leeward of the Rocky Mountains.
The McNair Party was organized in the spring of 1850 at the home of Mrs. Susan Coodey on Bajou Menard, southeast of Fort Gibson. It was comprised mostly of Cherokee Indians, along with fifteen Negro slaves and a few whites. Numbered among the whites was one Louis Ralston, who had married into the Cherokee Nation. The Cherokees of the party included Sam Myers and his three sons, Ned and Dennis Bushyhead, Benjamin Trott, Brice Martin, and a Baptist minister named John Beck. The captain of the party was Clement Vann McNair. Going along as unofficial diarist was a young Cherokee who signed himself John Lowery Brown.
The party captained by McNair followed the Evans’ route of 1849 all the way to the mouth of Cherry Creek. There, at the present site of downtown Denver, the Cherokee gold seekers built a raft to cross the South Platte. Six miles further west they camped on a tributary of Clear Creek. One of the party waded into the water to take a panful of sand off the bottom. The pan yielded two or three dollars worth of gold. Brown’s diary told the story:
“June 21 Finished crossing at two o’clock. Left the Platt and traveled six miles to creek. Good water, grass, and timber. Camp 44. We called this Ralstons Creek because a man of that name found gold here.
“June 22 Lay bye. Gold found.
“June 23 This morning all, except three messes who traveled on, concluded to stay and examine the gold. Bell, Dobkins and R.J. Meigs traveled on.
“June 24 Only 14 waggons. Snow toped mountains in view today. Left Ralstons creek and made twenty-six miles. Rainy and very muddy....”
From Ralston Creek the McNair Party traveled northwestward into present Wyoming, taking a route somewhat different from that of the Evans Company of the year before. Their passage helped further imprint the designation, “the Cherokee Trail,” on the minds of western travelers. More importantly, their incidental discovery of gold at the foot of the Rockies was never forgotten.
So impressed by the find was one member of the McNair Party - John Beck - that he took upon himself to compare the geological formations of the California gold fields to the terrain of the South Platte. Even while mining fifteen to twenty dollars a day in West Coast gold, he remained convinced that the South Platte country was “equally as rich in the precious metal as California.”
On his return to Indian Territory, Beck began to talk of his Ralston Creek experience. He told of how he and several others had originally wanted to remain at the creek and pursue their search for gold, but had been forced to hurry on to California by the will of the majority. For several years, Beck continued to bend the ear of every listener, to write numerous letters and to publish some of his correspondence in an all-out effort to raise a company of gold seekers for further prospecting on the South Platte.
Partly as a result of John Beck’s efforts, bouts of gold fever continued to stir up Indian Territory and nearby settlements in Arkansas and southwestern Missouri. The St. Louis Evening News of 14 May 1855 told the story of Civil John, an Osage Indian, who “found gold boiling up in a spring” while hunting buffalo. He brought several specimens back to Missouri’s Newton County, where a man named Pool organized a gold seeking party to return with the Indian to the Pawnee Fork of the Arkansas River. Pool’s Party and others that followed searched for gold, but found only “something that imitated gold a little, enough to deceive an Indian.” By mid-summer of 1855, the gold strike was considered a bust.
In the early summer of 1857, four companies of the First Cavalry met up with another such party of gold seekers from Missouri. The cavalry, under the command of Major Sedgwick, were headed north up the Front Range of the Rockies to meet with Colonel Sumner’s detachment on the South Platte. From there the united commands were to make an expedition against the marauding Cheyenne’s. It was while following the Cherokee Trail down Cherry Creek that Sedgwick’s cavalry met a party of six or eight Missourians, all afoot, with a little wagon and a single yoke of oxen. A big Negro, the slave of one of the men, was driving the wagon. Inside lay one of the party, who had accidentally shot himself in the hand a few days before. The wound had already reached the gangrenous stage, so the Missourians halted to ask surgical aid from the cavalry’s doctor. It was at this point that a cavalryman from Company E named Robert M. Peck was finally able to ask some questions of the Missouri gold seekers:
“...Our surgeon decided that it would be necessary to take the man along with us, and while halting to bring up a wagon and transfer the man, we got a chance to talk to them a little, and they told us their troubles. I think they had been in the mountains between the mouth of Cherry Creek and Pike’s Peak all winter and spring prospecting, and had found plenty of gold, some of which they showed us, put up in bottles and little buckskin bags.
“They had originally intended to keep the discovery of gold a secret, but the Indians had run off all their stock, except the yoke of steers, and had otherwise made life such a burden to them that they finally concluded the only way to make mining safe and profitable was to go back to Missouri, proclaim their discovery, make up a strong party that would be able to hold their own against the Indians and return determined to have the dust.”
Shortly after parting company with the Missourians, the military surgeons amputated the wounded prospector’s hand. A few days later they found it necessary to take off his arm above the elbow. The poor fellow survived the ordeal, continuing the while to talk up his recent gold discoveries. When one or two desertions occurred shortly after leaving Cherry Creek, some of the officers instructed the Missourian to contradict his earlier statements and to deny ever having discovered gold in any paying quantity. The officers were obviously afraid that others of the command might also slip away to go gold hunting. Unknown even to Major Sedgwich, one of the expedition’s Indian hunters - a Delaware named Fall Leaf - carried home a few golden nuggets tied up in an old handkerchief.
Earlier in the spring of 1857, four white men and the son of John Beck had also set out to do some prospecting along the South Platte. When still sixty miles from their destination, the small party began to fear for Indians, and decided to turn back. Before returning, however, young Beck dug a panful of dirt, which he later presented to Indian agent, George Butler. The pan was found to contain some white gravel, a little black sand, and about fifty cents worth of gold.
The events of 1857 convinced John Beck that the time was right to finally raise his own party of gold seekers for a return to Ralston Creek. The party must of necessity be large enough to properly defend itself against the troublesome Cheyennes. Beck’s position as a member of the national legislature helped him persuade Indian agent, George Butler, to write a letter to the Southwest Democrat, outlining plans for the proposed expedition. Beck helped out with a lengthy letter of his own. Beck’s letter was subsequently published, and drew a favorable response from Ray and Bates counties in neighboring Missouri.
Contact had already been made with the Russell brothers of Lumpkin county, Georgia. The brothers were four in number: William Greenesberry, commonly known as Green, John, Levi and Oliver. All had grown up in Georgia’s gold country. Green, the eldest and the acknowledged leader, took John overland with him to the California diggings in 1849, returning by way of Panama the following year. In the fall of 1850, Green took Levi back to the West Coast by boat to work a mine north of Sacramento. Two years later, the pair returned to Georgia with $10,000, which Green invested in what he called the Savannah Plantation, a farm large enough to support his entire extended family. Young Levi went off to the Philadelphia School of Medicine to become a doctor.
While in California, the Russells failed to meet John Beck or any other members of the McNair Party of 1850. But on their return to Georgia, they learned of the events on Ralston Creek through Samuel Ralston, an uncle of the Louis who first panned the gold. Green’s wife, Susan, was a Cherokee, and through her the brothers were also kept informed of the continued spread of gold fever in Indian Territory.
During the financial panic of 1857, Green and Oliver Russell, their cousins Robert and James Pierce, and a young friend named Samuel Bates decided to file for some of the free government land available in Kansas Territory. They chose Pottawatomie County, there filing their claims and putting in a few crops. That fall, the Pierce boys were left behind to look after the farms while Sam Bates and the Russells returned to Georgia. On their way home, the trio seem to have stopped off in Indian Territory to meet with John Beck. At this meeting final plans were laid for the spring of 1858. John Beck was to continue organizing a party of gold seekers from among the Cherokees even as Green Russell attempted to raise a similar group in Georgia. They decided that they would all come together as soon as the spring grass began to green.
1. Henri Folmer, "French Expansion toward New Mexico in the Eighteenth Century," (Ms. University of Denver Library, 1939).
2. Columbian Magazine, March, 1787.
3. Kansas City Journal of Commerce, 15 September 1858.
4. Rocky Mountain News, 1 February 1860.
5. Rufus B. Sage, Rocky Mountain Life, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982).
6. Hannibal Messenger, 22 March 1859.
7. Denver Republican, 26 January 1881.
8. John Lowrey Brown, "Diary," Chronicles of Oklahoma, Vol. XII.
9. Robert M. Peck, "Recollections," The Far West and the Rockies Historical Series, Vol. IX, (Glendale: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1959).
10. James H. Pierce, "With the Green Russell Party," The Trail, Vol. XIII.
11. James H. Pierce, "First Prospecting in Colorado," The Trail, Vol. VII.
12. J.C. Smiley, Semi-Centennial History of the State of Colorado, Vol. I.
While the council was in session, several small pieces of a glittering yellow substance were discovered on the surface of the ground. The substance proved to be soft and easily worked into any shape, and soon a supply of bullets was fashioned. Not long after, these Arapahos met up with the Pawnees, fought with them and were victorious, every bullet discharged killing an enemy. “The victory was so signal and complete that the superstitious warriors attributed it solely to the medicine-doings of the yellow balls,- three or four of which were finally buried with the chief at his death.” 
At the Pueblo, four of the forty wagons turned back. Six others were sold to some traders from the Greenhorn, who warned that the company would never make it through the Rocky Mountains so encumbered. Thirty men, including several of the Cherokees were talked into trading what provisions they could not carry in exchange for mules and pack saddles. These novice packers hired a guide named Owens for $7 a day, and headed into the mountains for Salt Lake City, which they reached on 24 July 1849.
Copyright © 1999-2007 Richard Gehling. All Rights Reserved.
E-mail me at GehlingR@aol.com
