The Pikes Peak Gold Rush In Colorado

"It made my heart thump, for I was certain it was gold.” James Wilson Marshall upon finding gold at the base of Sierra Nevada Mountains. Before the United States had been birthed into existence, even before Colorado had been an idea that had been staked out and called a state, the land was quite open and dominated by the Native Americans. There wasn’t much of a drive for settlers to push into the rugged mountain country compared to their Eastern, developed counterparts. These mountain ranges and peaks were, for the most part, uninhabitable to those who didn’t have close ties to the lands. The settlers would have to brave the elements as well as the indigenous peoples who lived there in order to just live; however, there would be one deciding

Colorado had actually become its own state because of how big the population had started to grow, but what really was the main stunt of why Colorado dramatically increased? The main reason that Colorado had grown in size was due to the Pikes Peak Gold Rush that followed after the California Gold rush. “Many settlers had not been very enthusiastic initially about the Gold Rush within Colorado due to the fact that there hadn’t been large amounts of gold reported by the miners and panners. Even as settlers moved along their way to California, they panned the creeks and rivers of Colorado, but found nothing that caused them to set up camp in the soon to be state1”. As Johnson states in the article, Mining Artifacts, for several years, many settlers could care less about Colorado due to its lack of rewards; however, a massive discovery in 1857 would change the state and its History forever. A party of Spanish gold seekers that are from New Mexico had worked a placer along the South Platte River at Cherry Creek, which later is known as Denver. The next major discovery was found by William Greeneberry Russell, he was a miner who was married to a Cherokee woman. William led an expedition to Cherry Creek, but was unable to find high yields in the beginning2. According to Brown this didn’t stop him either, he lead another expedition to Little Dry Creek and found another deposit that

Europeans had moved from the Eastern industrialized areas to the natural location of Colorado with dreams of a mineral rich future. With every type of person from every walk of life, Colorado became a melting pot of different ethnicities. Even with Native Americans, who had not been pushed out of the region, staying and giving up their ancestral ties to integrate within European society6. The ecosystem had also taken a heavy blow that caused it to stagger backwards due to the sudden change of land that the miners had brought about. Even with these negatives that plagued the state in the past, the economy flourished within and the population massively increased, resulting in it being 5.356 million as of 2014. With high numbers and people immigrating at a rate that had been heard of, Colorado was in no doubt born a powerful