The discovery of gold in Colorado in 1858 ushered in a turbulent era. A few fortune hunters, almost a decade before, had paused on their way to the California gold fields to pan gravel along the Rocky Mountain streams. Among them was Green Russell, a miner from the Georgia gold fields, accompanied by his brothers, Oliver and Levi. They "raised color" on Cherry Creek, within the present confines of Denver, and on the Cache la Poudre, forty miles to the north. On his return from California, Russell was reminded of this when he heard from his Cherokee wife that a party of her people also had found traces of gold along the Rockies. In 1858 Russell organized a party, which included many Cherokee, and set out for the mountains, searching along their base to the mouth of Cherry Creek. The gold they panned was negligible, but exaggerated reports of their activities drifted eastward to fall upon the ears of the credulous who instantly recalled the fabulous California discoveries of '49. By Christmas 1858, several hundred impatient fortune-seekers were gathered in two small settlements on opposite banks of Cherry Creek close to its junction with the South Platte.

Mining operations were impeded during the winter, but this only increased the excitement. Some gold-hunters returned to the Missouri Valley to purchase supplies, and took with them minute samples of Pikes Peak "dust" to be shown in stores, saloons, and newspaper offices. Stories and rumors spread, becoming steadily more glowing; emigrant companies were organized in many communities and spent the winter preparing for the race to the Rockies in the spring.

All kinds of conveyances took to the Overland and Santa Fe trails as early as February 1859; the more impatient and reckless blazed a new and shorter route, the Smoky Hill Trail, across central Kansas. By March the rush was well under way. Many in this frantic migration had left home with sanguine expectations of finding creeks bedded with golden sands and mines studded with nuggets. Within a few weeks at most, so they believed, they would be rich and on their way home. Disappointment overwhelmed them when they found no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow in the hodge-podge of mud-plastered huts along Cherry Creek. They were increasingly alarmed to find that even pots of pork and beans were scarce. Outraged and disgusted, weary of sleeping in wet blankets through freezing storms of snow and hail, their spirits at low ebb after having fruitlessly urged their starved and weary cattle over the immense barren plains—those same plains so unflatteringly described by Major Long forty years before—hundreds of Fifty-niners abruptly faced about and began an equally reckless stampede back to "The States." Along the way they met westbound travelers, many of whom, having heard their disillusioned and often angry tales, joined the retreat without having come within sight of the mountains. Yet enough pushed on to overcrowd the adjoining camps of Denver City and Auraria, which continued to grow at a lively pace, peopled by men who desperately wanted to find gold but had not the slightest idea where to look for it.

Into this scene of restless inactivity rode a horseman with a report of rich new diggings on Clear Creek, some 40 miles west in the mountains. George Jackson had found gold-bearing sands on Chicago Creek early in January, and on May 6, 1859, John Gregory had made his great strike at what soon became the booming camp of Central City. Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, who had come to inspect "the Kansas gold fields," dashed up to Gregory Gulch and a month later described the scene for his readers: "As yet the entire population of the valley—which cannot number less than 4,000, including five white women and seven squaws living with white men—sleep in tents or under booths of pine boughs, cooking and eating in the open air. I doubt that there is as yet a table or chair in these diggings. . . . The food, like that of the plains, is restricted to a few staples—pork, hot bread, beans, and coffee forming the almost exclusive diet of the mountains; but a meat shop has just been established, on whose altar are offered up the ill-fed and well-whipped oxen who are just in from a 50-day journey across the plains." Greeley added that less than half of the 4,000 inhabitants had been there a week, with 500 more arriving daily.

Greeley's report on the gold camp further stimulated the rush, and the Clear Creek fields were soon staked out. With picks and shovels scarring the hillsides in all directions other strikes were made, notably in South Park and along Boulder Creek. In isolated mountain valleys and gulches lusty new camps appeared. Tarryall, Hamilton, Buckskin Joe, Fairplay, Golden, Gold Hill, Boulder, Colorado City, and other towns were established in the frantic year of '59.

Pioneer merchants with wagonloads of supplies from the Missouri River and New Mexico followed close upon the heels of gold-hunters. Tent stores and log saloons did a brisk business along the muddy streets of raw new towns. Barrels served as counters over which storekeepers, with cheerful impartiality, dispensed salt, sugar, picks, coffee, nails, gold pans, potatoes, onions, rice, flour, shoes, and a particularly villainous brand of whisky known as "Taos Lightning"; prices rose sharply until flour sold at $40 a hundred pounds. As the winter of 1859 approached, many miners returned home to bring back their families in the spring, after which the camps began to assume an air of permanence. Some 10,000 persons, it was estimated at the time, stayed through the second winter.

Late in 1859 the first school in the gold fields was established by "Professor" 0. J. Gold rick, who had come thundering down Cherry Creek cracking a bull whip at a plunging ox team. Goldrick looked the part of the "professor," having arrived in silk hat, yellow kid gloves, and broadcloth frock coat, the pockets of which contained a B.A. from the University of Dublin, an M.A. from Columbia University, and cash to the sum of 50 cents. His salary insured by passing the hat, which netted him $250, Goldrick opened the Union School in a one-room, mud-roofed log cabin on Blake Street, Auraria, on October 3, 1859. A small unglazed hole in the gable provided light, and a strip of canvas from a wagon top covered the slightly larger opening that answered for a door. Thirteen pupils were in attendance that first day, "two Indian, two Mexican, and the rest white, and from Missouri." Goldrick wrote to inform John D. Philbrick, superintendent of schools at Boston, of the momentous event, and the latter sent warm greetings "from the cradle of the free school on the Atlantic shores . . . to your Union School on the frontier of civilization at the foot of the Rocky Mountains." Twenty-three years later, after an inspection of Denver schools, Philbrick reported that "the creation of a system of schools on so large a scale, of such exceptional merits, and in so brief a space of time, is a phenomenon to which the history of education affords no parallel."

Settlers were so proud of their initial institution of learning that they met every wagon train with the cry, "We've got a school," urging immigrants with families to tarry. Enrollment increased rapidly; two more private schools were established at Denver within the year; schools were opened in Central City, Blackhawk, and Georgetown. At Boulder, a community of some twenty log cabins, the first schoolhouse in the State was built in 1860 with funds raised by Abner R. Brown, a schoolmaster of New York and Iowa, who had come West to prospect for gold; finding none, he resumed his teaching. That same year Goldrick organized and became secretary of the first library association, with one book on its shelves, probably the Bible.

The gold fields had a newspaper soon after the arrival early in 1859 of William Newton Byers, a sometime surveyor, who had come from Omaha "with his shirt tail full of type," accompanied by Dr. George C. Monell, a fellow-townsman, and Thomas Gibson, a printer of Fontanelle, Nebraska. Four days before they had hauled in their Washington hand press, John Merrick had arrived from Leavenworth, Kansas, with a press that had been fished out of the Missouri River. Thrown into the river after it had been used by Mormons at Independence, Missouri, the press had been rehabilitated and employed to print the St. Joseph Gazette for some years before it passed into Merrick's hands. The spirited race to publish the first newspaper at the diggings was won by Byers, who got his Rocky Mountain News on the streets of Denver City and Auraria twenty minutes before Merrick's Cherry Creek Pioneer made its first and last appearance, for Merrick immediately sold out to his rivals for a $30 grubstake and departed for the boom camps in the mountains.

The Rocky Mountain News has since been continuously published, and on June 1, 1859, issued its first "extry," printed on brown wrapping paper, to headline Horace Greeley's enthusiastic report on the previously discredited gold fields. General news was obtained by pony relay from Fort Laramie, Wyoming, the nearest post office 220 miles to the north. This expensive procedure necessitated a charge of 25¢ a copy, or $25 a year, payable either in coin or in gold dust, the general medium of exchange. Occasional issues sold at $1.25 a copy, and the scarcity of news was such in the isolated camps that readers were never wanting. Thomas Gibson, Byers' partner, soon withdrew and on May 1, 1860, established the Rocky Mountain Herald, Colorado's first daily (now a weekly), which forced the News to begin daily publication.

The Merrick press, with the demise of the Cherry Creek Pioneer, began another phase of its already remarkable career, being carted here and there throughout the mountains to print newspapers in one boom camp after another. Upon it Thomas Gibson ran off the short-lived Gold Reporter at Gregory Gulch (Central City) in August 1859, the pioneer journal in the golden "Kingdom of Gilpin." The press was then removed to the town of Golden to print the Western Mountaineer during 1860. With the demise of this journal, Merrick's press was hauled to southern Colorado in 1861 to print its pioneer newspaper, the Canon City Times. The next spring it journeyed to the boisterous camp of Buckskin Joe in South Park to compete with the Miner's Record of Tarryall near by. Again the valiant hand press was carted through the hills, to Valmont, where it gave birth to the Boulder Valley News. But within a few weeks the Valmont editor was plied with strong drink by citizens of Boulder, who kidnapped him, his press, and type cases, and carried them home in triumph to establish the Boulder News. The Colorado career of the press terminated when it was sold to a publisher at Elizabeth, New Mexico.

It was an era of personal journalism, and it left its mark upon the Colorado press. Editors indulged in lively personalities with one another and with all-comers. "The Black Hawk (sic) Journal appears diurnally now, printed on half a sheet of cartridge paper," remarked the Rocky Mountain News in 1868. "Its editor dislikes to use that kind of paper for what it was intended, so he makes it do service to fulminate his daily lies." A six-shooter in the hands of an irate reader was the only libel law, and many a frontier editor faced such a "suit." Byers edited the News with several revolvers within easy reach; on one occasion desperadoes attacked his office for uncomplimentary remarks published about them, and a spirited fusillade ensued as his printers snatched up the rifles always stacked near the cases. A few days later Byers was kidnapped by the gang and escaped with his life only because their leader was a fellow lodge member.