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Introduction

Gold! Clear as day and twice as bright, the glittering piece of metal winked up at me from the tide pool of black sand. Hardly daring to breathe, I adjusted my pan again and coaxed another little wave to further reveal the treasure. The dirt drew back, and my heart began beating faster. Mouth dry, I could hardly believe it. I’d found an actual piece of Colorado gold.

It was the same gold that tempted the Spanish to venture into dangerous new lands hundreds of years ago. It was the same gold that inspired legend, provoked madmen, dreamers, and treasure hunters. It was the same gold, even when found in the smallest quantities, that set fire to a gold rush that swept across the United States in 1859 and drew to the Rockies a staggering 100,000 people. Towns formed, laws were cast, and a state was born—all because of the same gold that I now gazed down at.

As a newspaper reporter, I’d spent years working in and around the towns and cities established in the desperate scramble for gold. I’d worked in the brick buildings, walked the narrow streets, and seen the amber-colored stains running from forgotten mines like the aftermath of bullet holes from a gunfight.

I’d looked at a bygone era’s hulking relics, left to lean dangerously from the hillsides and valleys, rusted tributes to a time when a fortune could be dug from the ground and anyone, regardless of their economic status, could change it all in the blink of an eye. They also serve as memorials to crushed dreams, lives, and an environmental legacy that will chain us to the sites for all of time.

What I found more compelling were those that still hunted for their fortune in the shade cast by the gold rush more than 150 years ago. Prospectors, miners, and treasure hunters who ignored popular sentiment that the gold was gone, that it had disappeared or was too hard to remove. A small community engages in dangerous, backbreaking work even today to pry wealth from the dirt and rock of the Colorado mountains.

Fascinated with both the history of the gold rush and those who still toiled in its legacy, I spent a year meeting with them, hearing their stories, and trying to understand why it is they continue to do what they do—often in the face of extreme hardship. Many times by word of mouth, I went and met with one after the other and discovered the dubious inheritance of the gold rush included far more than just miners and prospectors.

But for the moment those thoughts were far away. I’d found gold in a chilly Colorado stream, and that is, after all, how it all began.