Popular Culture Review Vol. 1, December 1989 | Page 75

returned to the world they knew but with a different message on
their wagon canvas. This time it read, “Busted by God!”(15)
But gold and silver were in the “fourteeners” o f the Colorado
Rockies, and they showed up in Clear Creek, Gregory Gulch, and
areas around Blackhawk, Central City and Idaho Springs, and
Fairplay. Nonetheless, during the first ten years of Colorado
mining, the territory produced only five per cent of the riches
produced by California in its first decade of gold discovery.
Miners necessarily are movers and their rambling now took
them about one hundred and twenty miles southwest o f Denver, by
the present town of Leadville, at over ten thousand feet, the highest
city in the nation. The date was April of 1860 and gold was struck
near there at a site called Oro, but known to the locals as California
Gulch. In a short time, some five thousand miners were working its
placers, but within three years the gold was gone. The city, small
as it was, remained, however, and one of its later shopkeeps and its
postmaster was a man by the name o f H.A.W. Tabor. Originally
hailing from Vermont, he and his wife, Augusta, tried homestead
ing in the West, but quit when he got fired up with enthusiasm in the
Pike’s Peak rush. He had been prospecting unsuccessfully for over
a decade but by 1878, was fairly settled down. Few visited the place,
since its gold had been worked out, but occasionally some optimis
tic souls would come around to rework the tailings, looking like
dogs for scraps from a sumptuous meal. Two such men entered
Tabor’s store, seeking a grubstake in supplies in return for part
ownership in any paying claim they made. Tabor obliged, as he was
wont to do, for despite his more sedentary life now, his heart still
was with the miners. His own search for a glory hole was a disap
pointed dream, but perhaps he could share in that dream kept alive
in others younger than he.
Within a short time, his debtors discovered a rich vein of
quartz and silver and the kind of blackish sand discovered around

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