W. Eugene Hollon, biographer of Zebulon Pike, called him “The Lost Pathfinder.” It was true, no matter where he was going, Pike seemed to have a knack for taking the wrong road. In 1806 General James Wilkinson, Governor of Upper Louisiana, sent him with an expedition to find the source of the Red River. A section of the border of the Louisiana Purchase was vaguely defined as this River which had not been charted.
Pike’s party reached the site of modern day Pueblo, Colorado on November 23--Late in the year for exploring in the Rocky Mountains. Why, no one knows, but Pike became obsessed with a very high peak within sight to the west. It seemed to have no name, but Stephen Long called it Jame’s Peak. Pike called it “the Grand Peak.” With two soldiers and the doctor, Pike set out to explore it. They climbed what they supposed to be the lower part of the Grand Peak. When they had ascended high enough to see beyond, they discovered that the higher peak towered above him, a day’s march away.

He and his companions were in snow waist deep, the men were dressed inadequately for the cold, 28 degrees Fahrenheit. Pike had no choice but to return. Zebulon Pike had again made the wrong choice--this time it was the wrong mountain--but even though he never set foot on the higher peak, they named it for him anyway, Pike’s Peak.

This material is from Destination Denver City: The South Platte Trail by Doris Monahan, published by the Ohio University Press, 1985.

p.24 Pike’s party continued on southwesterly across the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in an attempt to find the source of the Red River, On the other side of the mountains in an attempt to find the source of he Red River. On the other side of the mountains they found themselves in Spanish territory where they were soon taken into custody by Mexican territorial soldiers, but since the Governor of New Mexico was uncertain what to do about the group of trespassers, they were detained in Santa Fe.
While in that city Zebulon Pike met a trader from Kentucky named James Purcell, who was also being entertained indefinitely by the Mexican government. Purcell was acquainted with the area through which Pike ad just passed, and during their conversation Purcell mentioned finding some gold in the mountains where the South Platte had its source. When Pike later wrote of the meeting he said, “[Purcell] assured me that he had found gold on the head of the Platte and had carried some of the virgin metal in his shot pouch for months, but that being in doubt whether he should ever [return to] the civilized world—he threw the samples away.” Zebulon Pike published the substance of their conversation in his Observations of the Interior of New Spain, but the United States was not yet ready for that phenomenon called a “gold rush.”

After the great ,migration of 1849 to California in search of gold, a few traders, hunters and some professional miners had traveled along the banks of the South Platte scarcely disturbing the grass. Even though gold had been found in Colorado during these intervening years before 1859, it had not been brought to the attention of the general public. The events which brought about the hysteria of the Pike’s Peak gold rush must be traced from a number of sources.

Discounting the group of Missourians who met Sedgwick’s troops in late June of 1857, the first organized and competent search for old in the Rocky Mountains was initiated by William Green Russell of Georgia. Russell was an experienced miner, having worked in George mines and in California. By association and correspondence with men who had actually found gold in the Rockies, Russell planned an expedition composed of his two brothers, six friends and a party of Cherokee Indians from the lower Arkansas River. They started from Georgia in February of 1858, met the Indian party, and in the early spring they passed Bent’s Fort and entered the central Rockies, where they prospected streams along the front range, including the South Platte in the neighborhood of Cherry Creek. The pickings were slim, and when summer arrived all but a dozen of the party had given up and returned home. Russell and his brothers wee among those who stayed, and in early July they finally found some gold in paying quantities at the mouth of Dry Creek. In the autumn, when the traders from Fort Laramie brought their wagon to the Missouri river, they confirmed the rumor on the frontier that William Green Russell had found gold in the Rockies.

On his return to Kansas in 1857, Fall Leaf, the Delaware scout, had been presented with a “full moon-size silver medallion bearing the likeness of President Franklin Pierce in honor of the Indian’s distinguished served to the government. He had served as a scout for more than ten years—having traveled with Fremont in the 1840s—and he had numerous certificates signed by various important people to prove that he was of good character and ability. When Fall Leaf told his story about finding the gold nuggets in the sand while he stooped to drink from a stream in the foothills of the Rock Mountains, he was readily believed. It is possible that the story was actually true. No one will ever know.

John Easter, a butcher from Lawrence, Kansas, and forty-two other men, including William Parsons who wrote about the journey, gathered together to form a prospecting expedition. They hired Fall Leaf for “six dollars a day in gold in advance” to lead them to his mountain stream. The party was almost ready to depart when Fall Leaf unfortunately had a little too much to drink one night and became involved in a fight. Several broken ribs incapacitated the old scout so that he was unable to consider leading the expedition.

Parsons wrote that he and his impatient friends decided to go without the guide. They started off in the middle of May, 1858, with about ten weeks’ provisions and “not the slightest knowledge of where we wished to go or how to get there and still we were happy.” This group of amateur prospectors, later to be known as he Lawrence Party traveled along the Arkansas River over the Sangre de Cristo Pass to Fort Garland without finding any gold. Somehow a rumor reached the party about a discovery at Cherry Creek, so the group hurried back over the mountains. They camped in the angle formed between the mouth of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River on September 23, 1858. That day the son of a mountaineer had washed $2.50 worth of gold out of Cherry Creek and Parsons said, “We saw it, handled it, and tasted it . . . the gold was there.”

Panning gold on Cherry Creek proved to be disappointing for the party however, and it broke up. A number of men, including Parsons, returned to Kansas. “We had in our possession,” Parsons wrote, “less than half a dozen wild turkey quills, nearly all of the gold which had thus so far been taken out . . “ . Nevertheless in the tight money economy of the Missouri river arterial, the sight of actual gold was the spark that started the conflagration.

The contagion and feverish activity of the gold rush of 1858—59 was spread chiefly by the printing presses of Missouri and Kansas. There were newspaper editors and merchants who remembered from the California rush of 1849 that not all of the profit from gold fields came from nuggets and shining dust. The streets of Leavenworth, Kansas, blossomed with freshly painted signs. Some were new names for old businesses, such as “Pike’s Peak Hotel,” “Pike’s Peak Ranch,” and “Pike’s Peak Lunch.” Other signs were raised over brand new establishments advertising ‘Pike’s Peak Outfits.” Miners would need equipment and supplies, and the Missouri Valley suppliers were very willing to bolster their sagging economy by providing these commodities to anyone who had the price of a pick and a pan.

Indirectly it was the financial panic of 1857 which brought about an abrupt focus on the glowing western horizon. General unemployment and lack of money in 1858 caused normally level-headed men to give credence to he irrepressible newspaper reports of gold discovery at Cherry Creek or Pike’s Peak. Pike’s Peak, in its lofty eminence, actually had nothing to do with the gold strike, it was ninety miles away from the first recorded gold find.

Along the Missouri River frontier the rumors were spreading and igniting susceptible imagination. It was the treasure hunters who cut the first wagon tracks along the southern bank of the South Platte. In 1859 thousands of would-be prospectors came surging across the Kansas-Nebraska territories. There were three routes available, all originating on the Missouri River in the area from St. Joseph through Leavenworth to Kansas City. One of these trails ran southward along the Arkansas River and thence north to Cherry Creek. The northern route followed the west bank of the Missouri, on along the Little Blue River, to the Platte River then westward along the Platte Valley to branch at the South Platte and follow this river to the site of present Denver. The central route, which was new and scarcely cut, was called the Smoky Hill Trail. This uncertain path vaguely followed the meandering Smoky Hill River though Kansas and crossed the present border of Colorado opposite Pike’s Peak. From this point the untried route passed through long stretches of waterless county. Even though this was the shortest way to the rainbow’s end, wiser men preferred the longest and safest route, the much-traveled Oregon Trail along the Platte. The South Platte Trail was therefore born.

One traveler observed that along the Platte in Nebraska, there was a hierarchy in the ranks of emigrants who moved slowly westward. Among the long lines of dust-clouded wagons, the aristocrats were he through traffic to California. Sometimes these sturdy wagons had their destination emblazoned on the canvas superstructure, but even without this identification they were recognized by their well-planned equipment and easy measured pace. The Mormons occupied second place in the apparent class distinction, only because even if hey were not so well stocked or so carefully prepared, they were still serenely confident and self-sufficient. The Rocky Mountain gold rushers, on the other hand, could be distinguished because they were more often than not inadequately provided, and the main body was “without discipline or discretion.” They were regarded with suspicion by the other travelers, and for good cause, since the majority of Pike’s Peakers had no conception of what life in the wilderness would provide, not to mention what it would require.

Frequently the gold rushers traveled in small wagons and even two-wheeled carts. Especially notable was one all, thin-face prospector with mutton-chop whiskers named A. O. McGrew, who gained fame as “The Wheelbarrow Man” because it is said that he had “trundled his entire outfit across the plains with just ten cents in his pocket.” A later source of information reports that, though McGrew had started out trundling, he was picked up by a passing wagon after about two hundred miles. As the tale was told to the tenderfoot on the streets of Denver, it picked up a little embroidery, and there was one staunch witness who claimed that, not only did McGrew push that loaded wheel barrow all the way to Denver, he also took on a passenger to defray expenses.

Among those who traveled in one of these small wagons was a young man from Ohio named Jared (or Judd) Brush. Accompanied by a friend named Bates in 1859. Judd traveled to Sioux City, Iowa, where they joined a wagon train which was setting out for the mountains. Brush and Bate invested in a strong wagon, two pairs of oxen, a load of provisions and what Judd called “small traps.”

The train crossed Nebraska from the Missouri River to Fort Laramie in sixty days, from this point Judd and his partner turned south on the old trail along the foothills heading towards Denver City. Suddenly it became apparent that the partners differed in their ideas of destination. Judd preferred Central City while Bates intended to go farther south. At LaPorte their routes separated and here they were faced with the complicated business of dividing their property. The two teams of oxen were no problems, and their provisions could be portioned easily, but there was only one wagon and it was indispensable to both of the young men. For either of them to sell his half to the other was out of the question because there was no place to buy another. They gave the situation a great deal of though while they camped at LaPorte, until finally a Solomon-like idea came to Judd—they would cut the wagon in two and each would take half.

The only drawback to this plan was that a certain inequality would result: each would have a pair of wheels and an axle but there was only one operative end of the wagon. It was decided that they would cut a deck of cards to see which of them would get the front and which the back. Judd drew the back wheels. With cheerful acceptance of his fate, he cut a pole and fashioned a new wagon tongue, closed up the open front of the box with branches and set off with his half wagon for Russell Gulch in the mountains.

On the Platte road, the westbound wagons were traveling billboards with their white canvas covers bearing various legends, many of them warmed-over from the California gold rush of ’49. The freight carriers, their occupations firmly bound to their ox-drawn wagons, honored their prairie schooners with names similar to those of water-going vessels, dignified names like Constitution, Excelsior and Republic. There were simple business notices on some of the emigrant wagons such as “FAMILY EXPRESS—Milk for sale” and “Old Bourbon Whiskey sold Here.” One particular inscription must have caused five hundred miles of strained neck muscles as it advertised “Cold Cuts and Pickled Eel’s Feet.”

Most wagons carried the name of their destination, further elaborated by the individual variations which depended on the frame of mind of the owner when he painted the letters across the new white surface. There was optimism in “Ho for California,’ grimness in “Oregon or Death.” A slight deficiency of confidence was probably the motive for the well-worn slogan, “Pike’s Peak or Bust.” Friendly camaraderie may have inspired, “I am off for the Peak, Are You?” and lusty bravado proclaimed “Hell-Roaring Bill from Bitter Creek.” In any case, there is no explanation except downright unfriendliness in the pithy comment, “The Eleventh Commandment: Mind your own business.”

The number of wagons which traveled across Nebraska has been reported variously and unreliably. Most witnesses agreed that during the good weather there was an endless stream of wagons going west. The much lamented drudgery of the pioneer woman is somewhat tempered by the report of a lady who seemed to have had nothing better o do than sit in front of her cabin in central Nebraska on a sunny day in the early sixties. At one sitting she counted 900 wagons passing before her . Lt. Eugene Ware, who recorded this feat of endurance said that he observed that it took two minutes for an ox drawn wagon to cross his line of vision; at this rate 900 wagons would have taken thirty-six hours if the they passed one at a time. Lt. Ware assumed that the lady was counting the wagons which were coming as well as those going. It is well known however, that wagons did not necessarily travel one at a time in single file; frequently as many as three or four trains would move along side by side. In the summer of 1859, one party of men counted all thre wagons going and coming for thirty days. They determined that the combined number would provide a continuous line of wagons, four abreast, from Pike’s Peak o St. Joseph, Missouri, a distance of seven hundred miles. The concept of an orderly row of wagons traveling along a clearly defined path however is merely hypothetical. Groups of vehicles and animals usually met and passed in a more or less disorderly manner, The wide swath cut in the prairie by the South Platte Trail was still clearly visible near Fremont’s Orchard in 1878, an observer reported that the average width of the trail was about seventy-five feet.

Of course this was transcontinental traffic, and not all of these wagons were going to Denver country. For those who did intend to turn south, heading for that area, there were two possible routes. Some would turn to the south bank of the South Platte, others would go on to Fort Laramie in present Wyoming, then turn south along he foothills of the Rockies. An exact count of the number of vehicles cannot be determined, only estimates are available—60,000, 80,000,and either more or less. There were certainly enough to make their presence obvious. They deepened he ruts beneath them, stirred up stifling shrouds of dust, and frightened the buffalo away from their watering places.

This was not entirely a spontaneous migration. Actually, there were many people who came to believe that one man alone was responsible for the entire movement to the Rockies. This man had been accustomed to moving westward throughout his life. Daniel C. Oakes had responded to the California gold rush in ’49 and by the time he was twenty-four years old he had four years of profitable mining experience behind him. When he returned to his home in Iowa in 1855, he had over $5000 worth of gold. He then married, settled down and invested him money in a contracting and building business. Unfortunately the recession of 1857 affected his income to the point that he turned his ear toward the siren song of the waters of Cherry Creek. Consequently in October of 1858 Oakes gathered four friends together to form a party which traveled to the Rocky Mountains from Glenwood, Iowa. During the autumn of that year the weather in Colorado was especially mild, and in a short time D. C. Oakes and his friends were well satisfied with their results, each of them finding as much as ten dollars worth of gold per day. Oakes soon became convinced of the potential wealth of the foothills.

Soon afterward while washing gold on the upper South Plate, Daniel met and became friends with an experienced miner named Luke Tierney, who had also prospected in California. Tierney had been in Colorado for six months and had become familiar with Cherry Creek and portions of the headwaters of the South Platte. He had also kept a diary and had written a guide for the other gold seekers which he called the “History of the Gold Discoveries of the South Platte River.”

Oakes was very enthusiastic about Tierney’s “history” and could see the likely possibility of profit to be made by providing first-hand information to eastern prospectors. When the party from Iowa packed up to return home for the winter, Luke Tierney was persuaded to allow Oakes to take the diary back to the States with the hope that a publisher might be found. On the trip east Oakes made observations and notes about the trail along the South Platte, and when he arrived home he soon found a partner, Stephen W. Smith, for the publication of the guidebook. Oakes worked up the guidebook section from his notes, recommending the South Platte Route, the only one with which he was familiar. With a scope of vision that was typical of him eh also remarked the country was suitable for cultivation—an alien though in a guidebook to the gold fields.

Early in 1859 the booklet was published and widely distributed at the outfitting stations along the Missouri River. The book had been put together with a healthy optimism, but the effect of the printed page on the average reader was more of a metallic gleam than a rosy glow. Nearly every Pikes-Peaker who started across Nebraska Territory in 1859 carried a copy of the History of the Gold Discoveries in the South Platte River by Luke Tierney. The title further stated “To which is appended a Guide to the route by Smith and Oaks.” Perhaps it was fortunate for D. C. Oakes that his name was misspelled, there were times when he would wish that it had been omitted altogether.

Having seen the possibilities for development at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, Oakes decided that his conventional business of contracting and constructing would be more profitable than prospecting in the long run. He found a partner and bought a sawmill, which was loaded on several wagons in segments. Proceeding slowly westward in the spring of 1859, Oakes and his partner had plenty of time to talk with fellow travelers. Those who were headed in the same direction as Oakes were pleased and proud to be in the company of the man who wrote the guidebook. Those who confronted him as they returned along the trail wee grimly hostile. Already there were disappointed would-be miners going home with empty pockets. Poorly prepared an expecting miracles, most had become disillusioned. With no other ready target for anger, these bitter and thwarted gold seekers converged on the hapless writer of the guidebook. No amount of argument could persuade the complainers that the actual fault lay in their lack of vision. After nursing their resentments day after weary day, they had come to the conclusion that D. C. Oakes was to blame; he had cheated them all and he alone was responsible—the worst fate they could wish for him was better than he deserved.

In later years, Oakes wrote about his ultimate punishment:
It happens sometimes when talking of the early days of ’59 that some of the old-timers will mention having seen my grave in the spring of that year, on the banks of the Platte River near the town of Julesburg. That the old-timers spoke the truth and did really see my grave . . . I knew to be so, for I too, saw it myself and at the same time and place.

The grave was a lonely little mound, near the river bank and close beside the main-traveled road of the emigrant trail, at a position where it might readily be seen, and the epitaph easily read by all the emigrants that traveled that way. It was marked with buffalo bones for tombstones, crudely written with a mixture of charcoal and axle grease.

The epitaphs inscribed thereon were of a character not so much of sorrow as of wrath. One epitaph was as follows: ‘Here lies D. C. Oakes, dead, buried and in Hell!

Another, more poetical, bore these lines. ‘Here lie the remains of D. C. Oakes, who was the starter of this damned hoax.’

The writing of guidebooks to Pike’s Peak soon became a lucrative business, judging from the number of them which have survived, and among those written was one by a man who had not yet set foot in what would become Colorado Territory. In 1852, on the way to Oregon, W. N. Byers stopped at Fort Laramie for repairs and provisions. During this stopover, Byers first learned of the dribble of gold which hunters and trappers of the Pike’s Peak area sometimes brought into the fort. It seemed an intriguing bit of gossip but had nothing to do with Byers or with his occupation that time.

W. N. Byers proceeded with his surveying crew across Wyoming to Oregon, then in 1852-54 he went to California and soon returned to Nebraska. Apparently he made a living there, working as a surveyor, until 1859 when a memory of the trickle of gold he had seen at Fort Laramie and visions of unmeasured land inspired Byers to sponsor the second of the most famous of the guidebooks. Early in 1859, William N. Byers and John H. Kellom published A Handbook to the Gold Fields of Nebraska and Kansas. Whether written by Byers of Kellom, this book contained the statement that it was “Compiled from the notes of William N. Byers, who traveled the route in 1852,” Almost true, yes, he traveled over part of the route, but had not yet seen the latter half, the more difficult and less known part of the trail, along the South Platte. Although Byers had interviewed Ned Wynkoop and Albert Steinberger when they arrived in Omaha in January of 1858 the boys had been more interested in writing stories about the colorful mountain men than offering any useful advice for the guidebook.

Like that of D. C. Oakes, the book also received more blame than was justified, and it too became immortalized by he poetic souls of frustrated miners. The graffiti of the trail was the chief source of reading material for the bored emigrants who waited for oxen to graze and rest, and there was an abundance of authentic grave markers memorializing the many who did not survive to see the mountains. These improvised headstones were read carefully and sometimes mentioned in diaries. Any sort of sign post was systematically notes. It is not surprising that Byers’s name was added to that of D. C. Oakes, and soon a string of graves of guidebook writers reached from the mouth of Cherry Creek to Fort Kearny. The inscriptions were seldom original and the sentiments in agreement, “Hang Byers and Oaks—for starting the Pike’s Peak Hoax.”

That other reading matter, the wagon-cover inscription, became mournful in tone when borne eastward on dirty and bedraggled canvas. “Pike’s Peak Not for Me,” “Pike’s Peak-Over the left,” and “Pike’s Peak Not for Joseph, No, No!”

Since the South Plate road was a thoroughfare. A large part of the traffic which passed over its sandy stretches consisted of freight wagons. Freighting to Pike’s Peak country soon became a much more profitable business than mining. Wagon trains of all types and sizes originated on the Missouri River at St. Joseph, Leavenworth, Atchison, Nebraska City, Omaha, and lesser known places. Steamboats unloaded their cargo on the docks where it was loaded into the massive wagons designed for the long hauls of prairie transportation. These wagons were named either Murphy or Espanshied, made in St. Louis, or the Studebaker, manufactured in South Bend, Indiana. This type of vehicle was made of the best timber, wide tracked, strong and tight, high double box and heavy tired, covered with heavy canvas over the bows. A wagon like this could carry three to five tons of freight if skillfully packed. To allow for crossing rivers and streams the cargo was balanced with all perishable items stowed at the very top of the load. The wagons were piled full, and the canvas was drawn so tightly and fastened down so securely that it was difficult for anyone to steal anything from the cargo without attracting attention.

The appearance of a wagon train as it moved out from the Missouri River outfitting post presented a spectacle as moving as the launching of a fleet of ships. Wind rippled wagon covers of shining white over majestic hulls decorated with red and blue, inched in sinuous lines as far as the horizon. Dots of men were visible in their bright-colored flannel overshirts, moving beside their unruly teams. Here and there at the end of a line a herder moved more rapidly on his pony to control the extra cattle, mules and ponies. As the train disappeared in the cloud of its own dust, another outfit would be forming itself ready for the command to move out. “Civilization” was headed for the South Platte Valley.