Rocky Mountain Mining Camps

Rocky Mountain Mining Camps tells how a wilderness became a string of towns in little more than a generation. The description opens with a line that sets the tone: few would have believed that this land would soon be crisscrossed by prospectors in search of gold and silver, or that permanent settlement would follow so fast.

Duane A. Smith frames the story between two dates. It starts with the first gold rush into the Rockies in 1859 and runs to the playing out of most of the area's gold fields in the 1890s. In between, the book says, crude camps turned into cities overnight, and an unsettled region went through urbanization.

This is the largest of Smith's books in our catalogue, at 316 pages. Our catalogue dates the original to 1967, and this edition carries a later ISBN, 978-1-932738-77-3, so it is a reprint of a work that has stayed useful for more than half a century. It looks at the whole mountain West rather than one valley, which makes it a good first book before the narrower town histories.

Rocky Mountain Mining Camps suits readers who want the big picture of Colorado and Rocky Mountain mining before they pick a favorite town. Students writing about the western frontier will find a clear arc from rush to settlement. Genealogists can use it to understand why an ancestor might have moved from a camp to a city within a few years. Library shelves on Western history will want a copy as a general reference. It is a long book of 316 pages, best read with a map nearby.

Duane A. Smith is the author of this survey, and the catalogue gives it the earliest date of any of his books in our list. Western Reflections carries nine of his books, and they follow mining, rail and newspaper history from this regional overview down to individual towns such as Silverton and Crested Butte. We have set out what we know of his career on his author page, and you can find his other books there too.

More about Duane A. Smith →

Colorado's first great rush was not one event but a run of strikes and stampedes. Wikipedia dates the Pikes Peak rush from July 1858 until the creation of Colorado Territory on February 28, 1861, and estimates that about 100,000 gold seekers took part. The book itself, in its description, puts the first rush into the Rockies at 1859, so you will see both years in the literature.

Early activity centered on the South Platte River, Clear Creek canyon, Breckenridge and the South Park area. By 1860 Denver City, Golden City and Boulder City were substantial towns serving the mines. Central City, Black Hawk, Georgetown and Idaho Springs survived, while many other camps became ghost towns.

The easy gold did not last. Colorado produced about 150,000 troy ounces of gold in 1861 and 225,000 in 1862, enough for Congress to set up the Denver Mint. Hardrock mining boomed for a few years, then declined in the mid-1860s as shallow free-gold veins ran out and mills could not process the deeper sulfide ores.

Source: Wikipedia, Pike's Peak Gold Rush