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CHAPTER 2

A FORTUNE LOST AND FOUND

He tried looking again and still couldn’t find it. Everything was covered in thick snow, and the source of what could have been a fortune in gold was now gone. It was April 1859, several months after George Jackson made the historic find at the confluence of Chicago Creek and Clear Creek. Jackson would soon head up again to remove the gold with his team—and John Gregory found himself in something of an unfortunate predicament.

Often characterized as ornery, cantankerous, and something of an antisocial curmudgeon, Gregory was a prospector in the truest sense. He was described as bearded, red shaggy-haired, wiry, wrinkled, and dressed as a beggar. One can also be fairly certain he didn’t smell of flowers but much else about him is a mystery. Unlike Jackson, who happened accidentally upon his find, Gregory was specifically hunting the streams for gold. But gold dust or a simple handful of nuggets wasn’t at all what he had in mind. Gregory had his eye on a larger prize. He wanted to find where the gold had come from.

John Gregory had left his home of Gordon County, Georgia, in August the year before with the intention of looking for gold in British Columbia. He was detained in his travels and forced to spend the winter in Fort Laramie. The breathless news of the discovery of gold in Colorado reached him, and a classic opportunist, he decided immediately to change his plans. Gregory followed the gold flakes like bread crumbs in the mountain rivers and up the north fork of Clear Creek. A seasoned prospector, he knew exactly what he was looking for and soon found it.

John Gregory. (Courtesy of the Gilpin Historical Society)

A vein or lode of gold ore often streaks through the area where the precious metal has filled in a fissure in the rock. In time a small amount of gold washes away where it is exposed to the surface and runs into the streams. But Gregory knew that if he could indeed discover the source of the gold found in the streams, he’d find a fortune.

In what is essentially an overflow casino parking lot today, Gregory came across a ledge that had the state’s most famous lode of gold ore. A sudden spring blizzard forced him to use his gold pan to dig a shelter and build around him a brush hut. He was stuck there for days, with his supply of food rapidly dwindling. When the storm finished, and he climbed out into the blinding winter landscape, he saw his discovery was gone. In the deep snow, he couldn’t for the life of him find it again. One can imagine his frustration echoing in colorful verse off the surrounding valley walls.

With no supplies, no money, and no options, Gregory was forced to leave the state’s first gold vein discovery and head back down the mountain to the town that would later be called Golden, after George Jackson’s good friend.

Penniless, Gregory got to the town and it’s said he took a little time to recover from his adventure through the restorative powers of the local saloon. Before long he found people who believed his discovery was real and would help him outfit a small party to journey into the mountains to rediscover his gold. On May 6, with a fresh group of treasure hunters from Indiana, Gregory marched forth once again to locate the spot that had eluded him. With luck, and a seasoned eye, he found the lost vein once again.

By then word of the rich gold discoveries of Colorado had already caught fire and were roaring east, back across the Great Plains. Journalist Henry Villard recalled that an exodus took place when word reached those living in the young towns of Denver and Auraria.

“Whoever could secure provisions enough for a stay in the mountains started off without delay,” Villard wrote in his memoir. “Traders locked their stores, barkeepers set out with their stock of whiskey, the few mechanics [carpenters] that were engaged in building houses dropped their work. The county judge and sheriff, lawyers and doctors, and even the editor of the Rocky Mountain News, joined in the rush. Naturally, I did not stay behind, but started out on a fine mule.…”

When Villard reached the area where Gregory had found gold, he was exhausted from the long trip. He asked to be pointed in the direction of the prospector, found him, introduced himself, and “begged a place to lie down for the night. He complied at once, and assigned me a corner of his tent,” Villard wrote. “My animal required no care, as he had had plenty of grass and water on the way, and, after picketing him, I spread my blankets and was asleep in a moment.”

When Villard woke in the morning, he took a moment to get his bearings of the area he called the “Gregory Mine.”

“Although but two weeks had elapsed since Gregory had washed out the first ‘pay dirt’ in his pan, there were already many scores of men busily engaged in ripping open the mountain sides with pick and shovel,” Villard wrote. “Dozens of huts of pine branches had been erected, and tents pitched. Sluices, ‘long toms,’ and ‘rockers’ were in full operation, ditches crossed the gulch, and slides were being constructed—in short, the very picture of a busy, promising mining camp was before me.”

Villard met with Gregory and interviewed him about his background. Gregory describes his group’s early days being hindered by ice and snow.

“But for a week the weather has been warm enough. A great many, as you see, have tracked us to the gulch and taken up claims on other veins and are working them,” Villard reported Gregory as saying. Villard then spent about a week with Gregory and the other miners looking for gold and enjoying their “hospitality.”

“I visited every ‘lead’ and ‘claim’ then opened, witnessed the digging, hauling, and washing of ‘pay-dirt,’ washed out many a pan myself, saw the gold in the riffles of the sluices, and was daily present when the workers caught the quicksilver used to gather the fine gold from the sluices and heated it in retorts into gold-charged cakes,” Villard wrote. “Thoroughly convinced by all this ocular evidence that the new [El] Dorado had really been discovered, I returned to Denver, and felt justified in spreading this great news with all the faith and emphasis of conviction.”

Again ready to make history, William Green Russell showed up in the area on June 1, 1859, with more than one hundred followers ready to find gold. He found Gregory’s area already filled to the brim with people also hoping to strike it rich. He continued on an additional two miles from the mine, also called “Gregory Gulch,” and struck gold in what would later become “Russell Gulch.”

The miners began sanctioning the area off into claims and mining districts. Then the towns began appearing: Central City, Black Hawk, Mountain City, Nevadaville, Gregory Point. Today only the first two still exist; history turned the others into ghost towns.

Gregory himself earned $972 in six days on his claim. But like Jackson, he wasn’t destined to stay for long in the area he had discovered. Gregory sold his claim for $20,000 and in time disappeared, largely without a trace, from the pages of history.

Hung from a Yellow Pine

“[Gregory] was an experienced miner from Georgia, had been in the gold rush there and like a lot of people kind of heard what was going on in the West and thought he understood it,” said David Forsyth, executive director and curator of the Gilpin Historical Society. “They had the placer gold discoveries … which kind of got people to looking. And so what he did is he followed it up Clear Creek.”

I met with Forsyth in his office on the top floor of a giant 146-year-old schoolhouse converted into a museum. All around him and all the way to the ceiling were stacks of books and other yellowed reference materials. As we talked about Gregory, the whistling of the ancient boiler occasionally interrupted us.

“And within about six weeks of his discovery there were thirty thousand people up here,” Forsyth said. “Because placer gold is nice—but you got to work a lot of placers to get enough gold to make it worth your while. That discovery was huge and with the people coming up here, staking their claims … it was chaotic at first.”

Chaotic indeed. Russell reported in the first few months from his area that several men had already been shot, five froze to death, more drowned trying to ford a river, and eighteen died in various forest fires. A Capt. Wm. M. Slaughter recalled an incident where he and two friends were prospecting twenty miles northwest of Gregory when they came across a small party of Utes. Apparently, the men shared dinner and after the meal, the groups went their different ways—his friends to prospecting the streams and the Utes to hunting. When Slaughter later returned to the group, he was shocked at seeing the Indians busy scalping his friends. He hid among the rocks and made his way back to Gregory’s diggings to share his dramatic tale. Crime and claims jumping had to be curtailed early on because they soon discovered that more money and investors were needed as the gold was chased into the hard rock.

“So very quickly they realized this wasn’t going to work, so each mining district started making their own rules—and it was ‘This is how we’re going to handle claims, this is how we’re going to handle claim jumpers, and this is how we’re going to handle crime,” Forsyth said. “If it was a certain crime, they might shave half your head and send you out of town. They might tar and feather you. Claim jumping you could be killed for. They were not shy about it.”

A man pans for gold near where it was first discovered on Clear Creek. (Photo by L. McLean, courtesy of the Historical Society of Idaho Springs)

It was not even a full year later when the area had its first lynching when a man named Pensyl Tuck attempted to shoot Mountain City Sheriff Jack H. Kehler. The lawman was apparently quicker on that draw and shot and wounded Tuck.

“[Tuck had] gone to a miner’s court, and he had threatened everyone involved with it,” Forsyth said. “The trial adjourned, and Tuck tried to shoot the sheriff, who returned fire and hit Tuck. He was taken to his cabin, the doctor dressed his wounds.” In what probably wasn’t the cleverest move, Tuck told his physician that he planned on doing some killing in the name of revenge as soon as he was up and out of bed. Understandably concerned, the doctor decided to warn those men.

“Over the next few days he repeatedly threatened to kill basically everyone in Mountain City,” Forsyth said. “Two hundred men approached his cabin, dragged him from his bed, and they hanged him from the limb of a nearby yellow pine. That was the first lynching in Gilpin County. People objected to it, not because he didn’t deserve to be hanged, but because they thought he should have had a trial first.”

The territory’s first “legal” execution also occurred in Central City in 1863 after William Van Horn killed a man out of jealousy when the girl he was with dumped him.

“They were very serious about these rules and regulations,” Forsyth said. “Because they wanted these outside investors to come in and they realized that the easy lode gold was gone, and they were going to have to start doing hard rock mining. And you can’t do that without money. Investors don’t want to go to a place where there are shootouts in the street three times a day. They want stability.”

Before long the miners brought their wives and children, the towns were built, and schools sprang up.

A Thousand Years of Gold

Bayard Taylor, a travel writer and poet, came into Central City in 1866 and found what had grown from the seeds Gregory had inadvertently planted.

[It] is by no means picturesque. The timber has been wholly cut away, except upon some of the more distant steeps, where its dark green is streaked with ghastly marks of fire. The great, awkwardly rounded mountains are cut up and down by the lines of paying ‘lodes,’ and pitted all over by the holes and heaps of rocks made either by prospectors or to secure claims. Nature seems to be suffering from an attack of confluent small-pox. My experience in California taught me that gold mining utterly ruins the appearance of a country, and therefore I am not surprised at what I see here. On the contrary, this hideous slashing, tearing, and turning upside down is the surest indication of mineral wealth.

Taylor detailed the houses, shops, mills, and saloons in both Central City and neighboring Black Hawk. Not a happy camper by any stretch of the imagination, Taylor complained in his narrative about the high altitude, a bleeding nose, and needing to catch his breath every twenty feet. However, he does come away from the experience impressed with some of the area’s early residents.

“In this population of from six to eight thousand souls, one finds representatives of all parts of the United States and Europe. Men of culture and education are plenty, yet not always to be distinguished by their dress or appearance,” Taylor wrote. “Society is still agreeably free and unconventional. People are so crowded together, live in so primitive a fashion for the most part, and are, perhaps (many of them), so glad to escape from restraint, that they are more natural, and hence more interesting than in the older States.”

Taylor said going on a descent into a mine was one of the necessary things a traveler to the area must endure—and as such agreed to subject himself to the experience.

“It is a moist, unpleasant business,” Taylor recounted of his journey into one of the area’s larger mines. “As we were returning to the lower drift, there was a sudden smothered bellowing under our feet, the granite heart of the mountain trembled, and our candles were extinguished in an instant. It was not an agreeable sensation, especially when … [I was informed] that another blast would follow the first. However, the darkness and uncertainty soon came to an end. We returned to the foot of the ladder, and, after a climb which, in that thin air, was a constant collapse to the lungs, we reached the daylight in a dripping, muddy, and tallow-spotted condition.”

When Taylor’s tour of the area was over, he embraced the opportunity but reflected on Colorado’s gold mining future.

One thing is certain: the mines of Colorado are among the richest in the world. I doubt whether either California or Nevada contains a greater amount of the precious metals than this section of the Rocky Mountains. These peaks, packed as they are with deep, rich veins seamed and striped with the outcropping of their hidden and reluctantly granted wealth are not yet half explored. They are part of a grand deposit of treasure … and if properly worked, will yield a hundred millions a year for a thousand years. Colorado, alone, ought to furnish the amount of the national debt within the next century.

A father-and-son mining team demonstrate double jack drilling. (Photo by L. McLean, courtesy the Historical Society of Idaho Springs)

Tom’s Baby

The Phoenix, the Flag, the Chieftain, the Loch Ness monster. I was surrounded by some of the most famous and unique gold discoveries in Colorado’s history. I was in good company: standing next to me in the gold exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science was geology curator James Hagadorn. Hagadorn explained to me that many of the gold specimens in front of us received their colorful, if mildly unusual, names because of the way they look.

“For instance, we have a piece of gold in our collection called Goldzilla,” Hagadorn explained. “If you look at it—it looks just like Godzilla. People see things in gold, in their shape, just like people see things in clouds.”

And while all the gold pieces in the museum’s collection are breathtaking, I had eyes for only one: Tom’s Baby. The massive gold nugget weighs an astonishing ten pounds and takes a position of prominence, resting in its own secure display case. “This piece of gold is relevant to Coloradans and people from the Rockies because it has such a cool history to it,” Hagadorn said. “[And] it is the biggest.”

Unlike the other pieces that received their names based on their appearance, Tom’s Baby was so named because of the antics of a gold miner more than 129 years ago. Tom Groves, understandably beside himself with excitement after the discovery, eagerly showed it off along the streets of Breckenridge while cradling it in his arms like an infant.

The Biggest

In 1887 miners Tom Groves and Harry Lytton were contracted to work for a mine owner in an area called Farncomb Hill. The two were surprised when on a hot July day they came across an underground pocket, or vug, of gold. Such discoveries were amazingly rare, and the miners removed some 243 ounces of gold from the spot.

Included in that discovery, and at the bottom of the pocket, was the largest gold nugget discovered in the state, then weighing thirteen and a half pounds. According to historian and mining engineer Rick Hague, the two men were afraid the gold would be stolen on their trip back to town so Tom Groves disguised it by wrapping it in a blanket and keeping it under his jacket. But it didn’t take long for the news to get out.

“Yesterday hundreds of visitors called on … [the assayer] at his office at the concentrator on the west side, to feast their eyes on this find,” reported the Breckenridge Daily Journal.

The reporter stated that Tom Groves was so excited by the discovery of the nugget and handled it with such care that “… the boys declared that it was ‘Tom’s Baby.’ And so it goes.” The article went on to say the nugget would later be sent down to Denver so that “Denverites may learn that there are other inducements in Colorado besides Denver town lots.”

Like lots of gold. Tom Groves and Harry Lytton were paid a percentage of the gold’s worth, and the famous nugget forever left Breckenridge—and for a time disappeared from the pages of history. Hague said the nugget was last seen being handed to the train conductor just before he left the station on his way to Denver.

Lost and Found

At some point, Tom’s Baby was procured by Denver’s newly started museum, which began in 1900 when Denver residents bought several Colorado collections, including an assortment of gold specimens. According to museum records, Tom’s Baby was on display in 1930 before once again disappearing. In 1972 a Breckenridge author began trying to track down the missing gold nugget and was led to vaults in the First Denver National Bank owned by the museum. Tom’s Baby was rediscovered there—albeit three pounds lighter and in a box labeled “dinosaur bones.” It was concluded that the missing piece had likely broken off in the intervening years. Rediscovered, Tom’s Baby was put back on display in the museum in the late ’70s.

“This piece is important for its historical aspects,” Hagadorn told me as we stared through the protective glass at the specimen. “This piece is important because it is the largest gold nugget in Colorado and it is not necessarily like a nugget that you’d find tumbling down a stream in your pan. If you did, it’d be a very lucky day.”

Lucky day indeed. Based on the size and current price of gold at $1,224 per ounce, Tom’s Baby would be worth close to $200,000. But its actual value is priceless. Hagadorn said based on the gold nugget’s history, uniqueness, and because it is part of the museum’s founding collection, narrowing in on a value is almost impossible.

“For us, this collection is closely tied to the museum’s deep history,” Hagadorn said, adding it was a “mind-blowing” specimen. “It has a value that is not economic; it is historical in nature. These specimens are like art; they are worth whatever anyone is willing to pay for it.”

The value and historical significance of Tom’s Baby was also recognized in 1887 by the Breckenridge Daily Journal: “It will probably be a long time before ‘Tom’s Baby’ will be retired as Colorado’s big nugget.”

So far, that day still hasn’t come.