The Cripple Creek District, 45 miles southwest of Colorado Springs, near Pikes Peak, is the leading gold producing district in Colorado and second in the United States, next to the Homestake Mining Company in Lead, South Dakota.
Colorado Gold
If one image best symbolizes the state of Colorado, it is the familiar photograph of the gilded dome of the State Capitol Building in Denver. Behind the dome, along the western horizon, rises the Rockies, a snow covered line of high ridges and peaks that the early explorers knew as the "shining mountains". The capitol dome reflects brilliantly with the rich luster of gold for a good reason, it is gold.
In 1907 the entire outer surface of the 42 foot diameter dome was covered with gold,
Colorado was born with the Pike's Peak gold rush, an event triggered somewhat prematurely by modest gold discoveries made almost in the shadow of where the capitol stands today. In the fall of 1858 the nation's attention was fixed on a handful of small placer mines along the South Platte River know collectively as the "Cherry Creek diggings." Today all traces of the Cherry Creek diggings and its miners' camps are covered by the sprawl of rail yards, highways, warehouses and parking lots that surround downtown Denver. Today we find the loss of those historic sites unfortunate, but not because of the miners' success in finding gold. The Cherry creek diggings amounted to a bust, turning the first nine months of the Pike's Peak rush into one of the western frontier's biggest fiascoes.
"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."
Cherry Creek
...1857
R.M. Peck, Late June 1857
In its darkest hour, however, the Pike's Peak rush was redeemed by bonanza strikes in the gulches of the high mountains to the west. Within fifteen years, dozens of mining districts and towns extended from the Cherry Creek diggings 150 miles southwest into the San Juans. Miners turned steadily to rich lode deposits, developing hard rock mines with legendary names like the London, Little Jonny, smuggler-Union, Camp Bird and Sunnyside.
One of the world's greatest gold deposits, which bestowed upon Colorado a quarter century of prosperity and national prominence, helped establish the United States mint in Denver and, literally and figuratively, put the gold on the capitol dome.
Although, after this bonanza, Colorado experienced no more gold rushes or Cripple Creeks, and Colorado's miners turned increasingly toward silver, lead, zinc and molybdenum, gold mining survived.
When "free market" gold emerged in the 1970's,
the soaring prices brought back the miners and prospectors.
They found new deposits, and many historic mines and districts found new life.
Today's modern mining methods and metallurgical extraction and recovery processes have allowed Colorado's gold output to enjoy a modest but sustained recovery. Colorado gold is booming on the tourism and recreational fronts. Each year, tens of thousands of individuals tour old underground mines to touch veins of gold ore or try their luck at gold panning, hoping to wash out what may be the ultimate Colorado Souvenir. And serious amateur miners, equipped with everything from the traditional gold pans to sophisticated dredges, still coax a little more gold out of the gravels once worked by the '59ers.
By the 1960's Colorado had produced over 40 million troy ounces of gold nearly 1,400 standard tons worth over $1 billion.
We can measure the legacy of Colorado gold in more than millions of troy ounces and billions of dollars. It also includes grand tales of fortunes made and fortunes lost, daring feats of exploration and mineral prospecting, technical achievements, intriguing legends of hidden mines and buried gold, quaint mountain towns and haunting ruins, and, perhaps most importantly, the promise of new bonanzas awaiting discovery in the canyons and gulches of the shining mountains.
Today, the allure of gold pulls as strongly as it did in 1859. There's still a lot of gold out there waiting to be found, and one thing is no different than it was a hundred years ago. You won't find gold just talkin' about it. You have to go out there and look for it.
When it comes to gold, Colorado has been and always will be just that
"a place "to go out and look for it."
This bird nest wire gold specimen was found by Larry Boyes with a metal detector in Breckenridge, Colorado.
He was tuning his detector behind the camper when he heard a strong signal. This gold was in a piece of ore that was discarded along a roadside. The specimen weighs 27.2 Grams, but because wire gold is rare, the value is well over the spot gold prices, matter of fact, wire gold is worth between $175-300 per gram!
The streets are paved with GOLD!
"C'mon Mother...we're gonna get us some gold!"
Colorado Prospecting Today...
But the richer ores were long gone, inflation had eroded the fixed price of the metal, and gold mining had nearly ceased. Gold mining in Colorado seemed about ready to join the narrow gauge railroads and the buffalo in the history books.
200 troy ounces of the yellow metal donated by Colorado mining companies and fashioned into gleaming, film-like gold leaf. Architecturally, gold provided the crowning touch to the dome; historically, the state could not have chosen a more appropriate medium.
Colorado - Pike's Peak
Of all the Colorado gold discoveries, nothing before or after approached the fabulous strike at Cripple Creek...
