Let me tell you how the gold got found up here, because it involves a wounded man, a piece of rock, and about seven thousand people who did not know what they were getting into.
The story goes that in the eighteen sixties a Ute man — accounts differ on his name and his circumstances — showed a piece of ore to some soldiers or settlers over toward Fort Union, as a thank-you for a kindness. Maybe. That is the version the old books tell, and I pass it on the way I got it, because there is no way now to check it and it may say more about how white settlers liked to tell these stories than about what actually happened.
What we know for certain is that in eighteen sixty-six, gold turned up in these mountains. And what happened next was the same thing that happened in California and Colorado and the Black Hills and everywhere else there has ever been a strike.
They came. On foot, on horses, in wagons, over passes at nine thousand feet with winter coming. Men who had been farmers in Missouri three months earlier, standing in a freezing creek at altitude, working a sluice box with hands they could no longer feel.
And here is the arithmetic that nobody in the crowd ever wants to hear. In a gold rush, a few men get rich. A few more make a living. The great majority spend everything they have — their savings, their health, sometimes their marriages — to end up poorer than they started, and go home, or don't.
The people who reliably got rich were the ones selling to the miners. The man with the wagon of flour. The woman running the boarding house. The saloon keeper. They mined the miners, and it was the better claim every single time.
Meanwhile the mountain got carved up. They dug, they hydraulicked, they cut the timber for the mines and the fires and the buildings. Whole hillsides came down. And then, inside of about six years, the easy gold was gone.
Seven thousand people. Then a hundred.
Look up these side canyons as we climb. Every one of them had men in it. There are collapsed adits back in those trees, and tailings piles the willows have grown over, and the stubs of sluice boxes in the creek if you know what you are looking at. For about six years this drainage was one of the loudest, greediest, most desperate places in the American West — and almost every one of those men went home with nothing but a story.
Some of them didn't get to go home at all. And that's the next one.
Photo: Thomas J. Washbourne · Public domain