Colorado Gold Rush Research Paper

The Colorado Gold rush had the slogan “Pikes Peak or Bust”. Ironically the gold rush turned out to be mostly a bust for every miner in Colorado. Very few actually made it out of the gold mining business with a profit let alone rich. The Gold rush started in 1858, a decade after the California gold rush. 50,000 to 100,000 gold seekers came from the east in search for gold. It was significant because it brought the people to Colorado that were the foundations of the cities. The Colorado gold rush was the most influential event to Colorado’s history through the discoveries of William Russell, the social structure, towns and cities, and advancements in gold mining technology. The lives of Coloradans would be significantly different if the

The gold rush started with just rumors of gold. Many different people had supposedly found gold in Colorado. Such as the French trapper Eustace Carriere. He had gotten lost from his group of trappers for multiple months and spent time panning in the rivers while trying to find civilization. He found gold and took it back to New Mexico once he was rescued. The gold was proven to be real but people thought he was lying and when he tried to find the place where the gold was he could not. Finally, after Green struck gold the big boom of the gold rush had started. People came from the east around the Mississippi and traveled west through Kansas. They first started gathering around the South Platte River then moved up toward Clear Creek. Charles Post, a miner in Colorado, took this observation down in his

It originally was developed in California but made its way to Colorado miners eventually. This process had water being shot through a hose at high-pressure. It washed gravel off a hillside sending it into a long Tom. This cut down the number of men needed to mine but had a lots of costly effects on the environment. It could tear down whole mountainsides and the rivers were filled with the excess dirt. This device caused a lots of controversy throughout many towns and people. The editor of the Miner’s Record visited Georgia and Humbug Gulch and said, “They are tearing up ‘Mother Earth’ at a fearful rate, undermining houses, and removing every obstacle to their progress in searching for precious ore.” He along with many others thought that hydraulic mining had taken a step to far and was ruining the environment. Miners downstream from hydraulic mining would get upset because the excess dirt wood clog the river and ruin their place or dirt. In either case Hydraulic mining was a big step up in the technology produced during the gold