PIKES PEAK GOLD RUSH

Colorado was born with the Pike's Peak gold rush, an event triggered somewhat prematurely by modest gold discoveries made almost in the shadow of where the capitol stands today. In the fall of 1858 the nation's attention was fixed on a handful of small placer mines along the South Platte River know collectively as the "Cherry Creek diggings." Today all traces of the Cherry Creek diggings and its miners' camps are covered by the sprawl of rail yards, highways, warehouses and parking lots that surround downtown Denver. Today we find the loss of those historic sites unfortunate, but not because of the miners' success in finding gold. The Cherry creek diggings amounted to a bust, turning the first nine months of the Pike's Peak rush into one of the western frontier's biggest fiascoes.
"I think they had been in the mountains between the mouth of Cherry Creek and Pike's Peak all winter and spring prospecting, and had found plenty of gold, some of which they showed us, put up in bottles and little buckskin bags."
Cherry Creek 
...1857
R.M. Peck, Late June 1857
In its darkest hour, however, the Pike's Peak rush was redeemed by bonanza strikes in the gulches of the high mountains to the west. Within fifteen years, dozens of mining districts and towns extended from the Cherry Creek diggings 150 miles southwest into the San Juans. Miners turned steadily to rich lode deposits, developing hard rock mines with legendary names like the London, Little Jonny, smuggler-Union, Camp Bird and 
Sunnyside.