The New Eldorado: The Story of Colorado's Gold and Silver Rushes
464
The New Eldorado: The Story of Colorado's Gold and Silver Rushes
464eBook
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781682750582 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Fulcrum Publishing |
| Publication date: | 07/20/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 464 |
| File size: | 15 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Phyllis Flanders Dorset: Phyllis Flanders Dorset is a freelance technical editor and the author of Historic Ships Afloat, published in 1967.
Read an Excerpt
The New Eldorado
The Story of Colorado's Gold and Silver Rushes
By Phyllis Flanders Dorset
Fulcrum Publishing
Copyright © 1970 Phyllis Flanders DorsetAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-68275-058-2
CHAPTER 1
Raising Color
Men came looking for gold in Colorado. Its discovery in bonanza quantities was no accident as it had been in California in 1848, ten years before "Pikes Peak or Bust!" became the rallying cry of a 100,000-man, gold-hungry army that stormed the Rockies.
For three centuries before 1858, the idea that the Rocky Mountains held stores of gold and silver was continuously nurtured. It first took firm hold in the New World in 1530 when Nuño de Guzmán, governor of Mexico's northernmost province, sat entranced in his palatial quarters in Compostela on the Pacific side of the country listening to the story told by an Indian who had come to the city from the north. Tejo, the Indian, described in full and graphic detail the trips he had made with his father some forty days' travel north of their village to a country called the Seven Cities where the streets were lined with shops of silver workers and where his father traded feathers for great quantities of gold and silver. With visions of treasure crowding out all else in his mind, Don Nuño immediately mounted a four-hundred-man expedition for the north. But after months of wandering in the wastes of the desert, he failed to find the riches or the Seven Cities described by Tejo, and with his ragged and hungry army nearly on the verge of mutiny he returned to Compostela in deep disillusion.
For five years the idea of the Seven Cities lay dormant. Then in 1536 it was vigorously revived when Cabeza de Vaca, a survivor of an ill-fated Spanish exploration party that had landed on the Gulf Coast from Florida, staggered wearily into the presence of Antonio de Mendoza, the viceroy of Mexico, to tell what he had seen on his six-year jornada back to Spanish-occupied territory.
De Vaca told of being held captive by Indians who lived in very large houses among mountains showing "many signs of gold, antimony, iron, copper, and other metals." The Spaniard went on to say that his captors were great hunters and traders who carried on a lively commerce in much sought-after feathers, exchanging them for gems and hides among their neighbors to the north. Mendoza was impressed. Here were echoes of the story told by the Indian Tejo. With only this much to go on, the viceroy called for another expedition to be sent into the desolate north to find the Seven Cities. De Vaca was too weak to travel after his ordeal, but his aide, the Moor Estebán was more than eager and able to undertake the task. He went as second-in-command to an adventurous Franciscan, Fray Marcos de Niza, who had been with Pizarro in Peru and who was well grounded in the techniques of running and exploration expedition.
After a long and arduous trek from Culiacán up the west coast of Mexico, Fray Marcos and his party reached the Gila River where they camped for several weeks to rest and to plan the remainder of the journey. The friar's Indian guides assured Marcos that from where they were camped their goal was barely sixty leagues off. Fray Marcos then dispatched Estebán and a small party to prepare the way for the entry of the Spanish into the first of the Seven Cities. Estebán's route took him across the Colorado Plateau and to the northeast where he came to the pueblo of Zuñi, claimed by his Indian guides to be one of the Seven Cities of a country they called Cíbola. Unfortunately, the Moor used the wrong approach in paving the way for the arrival of the main group of Spaniards. His swaggering demands for gems and women insulted the Zuñi and they killed him, sending one of the guides back to Marcos warning him not to come closer. On hearing the news of Estebán's murder and the threats of the Zuñi, Marcos was assailed by indecision. Should he push on to verify the wealth of Cíbola supposedly there for the taking, or should he turn back in the face of the natives' hostility? He compromised. He decided to take two Indian guides and travel to some vantage point from which he could at least gaze on the reported splendor of Cíbola and then withdraw so that he might safely carry the word of what he had seen back to Mendoza. With his two reluctant companions, Marcos trudged doggedly over the hot dusty sands until he came to a ridge from the top of which he could see across a barren plain to the large, dun-colored, multistoried village where Estebán had met his death. The Franciscan peered for a long time through the shimmering haze at the scene in the distance. Search and squint as he might, he saw no streets of gold or silver sparkling in the sunlight, and no glints of light from sun-touched gems shone out from the walls of the buildings. Instead, the irregular pile of stonework appeared uncannily repelling. Remembering the styles of punishment the Indian practiced on interlopers and recalling also that the provisions of his expedition were nearly exhausted, Marcos wondered no longer about what was contained in the mysterious village across the plain but quickly turned tail for camp. When he arrived, he ordered an immediate return to Culiacán under forced march, traveling the six hundred miles "with more fear than food," as he later put it. Once in Culiacán, Marcos disbanded the expedition and with a small retinue hurried on to Mexico City to report his findings.
Marcos's vision of what he had seen was apparently transformed by the trip, for when he was safely in the viceroy's palace he declared to Mendoza that he had indeed found one of the legendary Seven Cities of Cíbola, "larger than the city of Mexico," with its riches fully obvious. All that remained was to conquer it.
Once more the viceroy was impressed and once more an expedition set forth to the north, this one under the leadership of the young and ardent Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, who had replaced Guzmán as governor of the latter's province. Coronado's force was the largest yet gathered for the quest — two hundred helmeted and armored young men of rank on spirited, hand-picked mounts, seventy foot soldiers well armed with arquebuses and crossbows, shouldering brightly painted shields, and a thousand Indians, their skins daubed with red and black, equipped with bows and arrows. Added to the train were extra horses, pack animals carrying artillery pieces and boxes of ammunition, and herds of sheep and cattle for food. By late February 1540, the juggernaut was ready. Mendoza rode the hundred leagues all the way from Mexico City to Compostela to see them off, and it was with high hopes that the cumbersome expedition got underway amid the braying of mules, clanking of armor and harness, and the shouts of officers and drovers.
Following the route of the Marcos expedition, Coronado got to Zuñi in July, but to his dismay the village produced no hoards of gold and silver. All that he could find in the way of gems were a few pieces of turquoise. His disappointment was reflected as rage among the rest of his company, and they rained curses down on the name of Fray Marcos who, fortunately for him, was not at hand. Less fortunate were the hapless Zuñi. Frustrated and angry, the Spaniards took out their fury on the people of the pueblo, subduing and occupying the village, to use it as a base for further explorations. According to the legend they followed, there were seven cities of Cíbola. If Zuñi was one of them, there were six more to find. Perhaps the next one would be the storehouse of gold and silver. With a new set of guides, Coronado dispatched his lieutenant, Cárdenas, to probe northwest of Zuñi. Cárdenas explored as far afield as the Grand Canyon, marveling at its magnificence but reporting no gold- and silver-encrusted villages.
To the east, Coronado sent Pedro de Alvarado with another group of soldiers. Alvarado reached all the way to the pueblos on the Rio Grande, where he found no gold but great stores of food. When Coronado heard of this he decided to move his main force to join Alvarado's for the winter since he had just about depleted the food reserves of the Zuñi.
But he had another reason to travel to the pueblos on the Rio Grande. Alvarado had sent word that one of the Indians in the pueblos, whom the Spanish soldiers called Turk, knew of a rich land to the northeast named Quivira. As soon as Coronado arrived at Alvarado's camp he called Turk before him and listened intently as the beguiling Indian vowed he had seen with his own eyes the lord of Quivira take his afternoon nap beneath a great tree hung with golden ornaments that tinkled in the breeze, lulling the monarch to sleep. Nor was it only the ruler of Quivira who lived in the splendor of wealth, said Turk, but everyone in the village dined off golden plates and drank from golden jugs.
That was enough for Coronado. As soon as spring came he set out eagerly for the fabled Quivira with Turk as his guide. Their path wound northeastward over the high plains and sharp-edged mesas, across the southeastern corner of Colorado into the valley of the Arkansas River to western Kansas where once again the conquistadors were to be disappointed. Quivira turned out to be but another settlement of lackluster Indians, Wichitas this time, whose only suggestion of mineral wealth was a single copper ornament hung around the neck of their chief. For his fantasies Turk paid with his life at the hands of the Spaniards, and Coronado, after wintering on the Rio Grande, brought the bedraggled units of his once proud expedition back to Mexico in gloomy depression.
The great quest for the Seven Cities of Cíbola was over and, from the point of view of finding rich deposits of gold and silver, fruitless. If it seems incredible that a government as shrewd and sophisticated as that of sixteenth-century Spain gave evidence of being in other matters would finance such large and costly exploratory expeditions on the basis of what seemingly was out and out fantasy, it must be remembered that Spain had indeed found a profusion of riches in the New World, notably Cortez in Mexico among the Aztec and Pizarro in Peru among the Inca, on the strength of stories no less flimsy than the ones that captivated Guzmán, Mendoza, and Coronado.
With Coronado's return, the Spanish dream of another Mexico or another Peru lying to the north was dissolved, but with ever an eye on expansion, Spain proceeded to colonize the fertile region of the pueblos of the Rio Grande. In time, the colonizers turned up some placer gold deposits on the river, reawakening interest in the prospect of mineral wealth locked in the "shining mountains" of the north. In 1765, Juan Maria Rivera sought signs of gold in the fastnesses of the Sangre de Cristos and the San Juan Mountains of southern Colorado, and in 1776 the San Juans were once again explored by two Franciscan friars. Neither of these parties turned up any noteworthy traces of gold.
After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the US government sent several expeditions west to determine the boundary of the new acquisition, to map the area, and generally to report on its resources. In 1806, on one of these expeditions, Lieutenant Zebulon Pike attempted unsuccessfully to climb the magnificent peak to which he gave his name and that later became the single most important landmark in the rush to the Rockies. When Pike gave up his try to climb the peak and came down the mountainside, he and his party camped on what they thought was the Red River. In reality, Pike was camped on the Rio Grande in Spanish territory. Shortly after he and his men bedded down, the lieutenant was arrested by Spanish soldiers and carted off to jail in Santa Fe. In his account of the experience, Pike tells of hearing from his cellmate, a trapper named James Purcell, that he had found gold in 1805 on the South Platte in Bayou Salade, the alpine park on the west side of the Rampart range of the Rockies. Land, however, not gold was the preoccupation of the period, so there was little official interest taken in Pike's report of Purcell's find.
Pike was followed into Colorado by Major Stephen H. Long in 1820 and by Captain John Charles Frémont, of the US Topographical Corps, who led five sorties into the region between 1842 and 1853.
Included in the party of Frémont's second expedition in 1844 was quixotic young William Gilpin. At thirty, Gilpin could look back on a career that already included enough variety to last the average man a lifetime. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Gilpin entered West Point in 1834 only to resign in good standing the following year. But the Army still held its appeal for adventure and he reentered its ranks, serving with distinction in Florida in the Seminole War of 1836. He next turned to journalism, editing a newspaper in St. Louis until the processes of the law attracted him and he became an attorney. Now, bored with the briefs and torts of the courtroom, he borrowed $100, bought a horse and gun, and joined Frémont's westbound troop. Once in the Rockies, he was fascinated. The great stands of pine, the groves of slender aspen clinging to the silent and sheer-sided mountains cleaved by coursing streams fired his imagination for the future of this ruggedly beautiful country. He went on to Oregon with Frémont but turned back alone to the Rockies, crossing them in the occasional company of trappers and stopping now and then to pan the stream beds. He could not be sure, but mixed in with the sand at the bottom of his pan he thought he saw a flicker of color not unlike that of gold. For William Gilpin, this was a prophetic find. His fortunes would become fatefully tied to the discovery of gold in Colorado.
Gilpin was not the only one at this time to give credence to the probability of masses of gold in the Rocky Mountains. Verification of Gilpin's find came from a group of men who knew the region of the Rockies better than any white man alive. Scarcely distinguishable from Indians with their long flowing hair and fringed buckskin garments, scores of trappers and traders had for some thirty-odd years followed the trail of the beaver, otter, and fox into the remote canyons and peaks of the mountains. Many of these men came from Kentucky and Missouri; many were descendants of the French voyageurs who had explored west of the Mississippi in the eighteenth century. Some came as employees of large fur companies, some as independent hunters. They moved among the Indians as friends, taking the women as wives, and living simply but well by the dint of their accurate gun eye, the acuity of their tracking sense, and their savvy of bartering. No region of the mountains was closed to them. In their roamings through ravines and over ridges looking for their prey the mountain men often ran across traces of gold, but as long as the demand for pelts was high, the adventure of the hunt, not the search for gold, drew their energies.
Once a year, in the summer, the mountain men — men like Jim Beckworth, Uncle Dick Wootton, the Sublettes, Louis Vásquez, Ceran St. Vrain, and the four Bent brothers — gathered at a rendezvous to deliver their pelts to company representatives and to restock for another go at the hunt. The rendezvous was a time of letdown for these hard adventurers who roamed the mountain wilderness for months at a time in near isolation. In a few exuberant days they haggled for their price over bundles of sleek skins, downed vats of whisky, stuffed themselves with sizzling venison, and caroused with their friends, white and red, gambling away half their profits, and an occasional gold nugget, on horse races and wrestling matches, spending the rest of trinkets for their squaws and on a few supplies, and finally, with throbbing head and bloodshot eyes, moodily dragging themselves off to the mountains for another year.
Then fashion changed. Fur hats gave way to silk ones. Commerce in skins shifted from fur skins to buffalo and deer hides, most of which were gotten by trading with the Indians. Mountain men turned from trapping to trading. Trading posts sprang up along the ancient hunting trails of the Indian. And the doughty hunters whose rovings among the mountains were at an end found they had an abundance of time on their hands to recollect where and when in their travels they had come across trace gold.
Purcell, Pike's cellmate, was only one who remembered. Frémont reported that "Parson" Bill Williams and a trapper named Du Chet had supposedly picked up nuggets from streams they crossed in their wanderings on the headwaters of the South Platte. A man named Poole recalled he had found traces of gold on the streams that fed the Arkansas River, and one Norton showed some gold flecks he had reputedly panned in the Sangre de Cristos. Antoine Pichard, another trader, told of finding traces of gold at his campsite near what is now Golden, Colorado.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The New Eldorado by Phyllis Flanders Dorset. Copyright © 1970 Phyllis Flanders Dorset. Excerpted by permission of Fulcrum Publishing.
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