For forty years they flooded Colorado—gold diggers, silver miners, outlaws, gamblers, and pioneers—looking for another Golden Fleece. Colorado comes alive in this classic overview of the gold and silver rushes, where fortunes were won and lost. Phyllis Flanders Dorset has re-created a lusty frontier scenario of one of the most exciting chapters in American history. Crammed with colorful characters and unforgettable incidents, The New Eldorado races through lawless, thrilling, turn-of-the-century Colorado with the fascination of a novel and fidelity of scholarly history. Phyllis Flanders Dorset is a freelance technical editor and the author of Historic Ships Afloat . Phyllis Flanders Dorset: Phyllis Flanders Dorset is a freelance technical editor and the author of Historic Ships Afloat, published in 1967. The New Eldorado The Story of Colorado's Gold and Silver Rushes By Phyllis Flanders Dorset Fulcrum Publishing Copyright © 1970 Phyllis Flanders Dorset All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-55591-723-4 CHAPTER 1 Raising Color Men came looking for gold in Colorado. Its discovery in bonanza quantities was no accident as it had been in California in 1848, ten years before "Pikes Peak or Bust!" became the rallying cry of a 100,000-man, gold-hungry army that stormed the Rockies. For three centuries before 1858, the idea that the Rocky Mountains held stores of gold and silver was continuously nurtured. It first took firm hold in the New World in 1530 when Nuño de Guzmán, governor of Mexico's northernmost province, sat entranced in his palatial quarters in Compostela on the Pacific side of the country listening to the story told by an Indian who had come to the city from the north. Tejo, the Indian, described in full and graphic detail the trips he had made with his father some forty days' travel north of their village to a country called the Seven Cities where the streets were lined with shops of silver workers and where his father traded feathers for great quantities of gold and silver. With visions of treasure crowding out all else in his mind, Don Nuño immediately mounted a four-hundred-man expedition for the north. But after months of wandering in the wastes of the desert, he failed to find the riches or the Seven Cities described by Tejo, and with his ragged and hungry army nearly on the verge of mutiny he returned to Compostela in deep disillusion. For five years the idea of the Seven Cities lay dormant. Then in 1536 it was vigorously revived when Cabeza de Vaca, a survivor of an ill-fated Spanish exploration party that had landed on the Gulf Coast from Florida, staggered wearily into the presence of Antonio de Mendoza, the viceroy of Mexico, to tell what he had seen on his six-year jornada back to Spanish-occupied territory. De Vaca told of being held captive by Indians who lived in very large houses among mountains showing "many signs of gold, antimony, iron, copper, and other metals." The Spaniard went on to say that his captors were great hunters and traders who carried on a lively commerce in much sought-after feathers, exchanging them for gems and hides among their neighbors to the north. Mendoza was impressed. Here were echoes of the story told by the Indian Tejo. With only this much to go on, the viceroy called for another expedition to be sent into the desolate north to find the Seven Cities. De Vaca was too weak to travel after his ordeal, but his aide, the Moor Estebán was more than eager and able to undertake the task. He went as second-in-command to an adventurous Franciscan, Fray Marcos de Niza, who had been with Pizarro in Peru and who was well grounded in the techniques of running and exploration expedition. After a long and arduous trek from Culiacán up the west coast of Mexico, Fray Marcos and his party reached the Gila River where they camped for several weeks to rest and to plan the remainder of the journey. The friar's Indian guides assured Marcos that from where they were camped their goal was barely sixty leagues off. Fray Marcos then dispatched Estebán and a small party to prepare the way for the entry of the Spanish into the first of the Seven Cities. Estebán's route took him across the Colorado Plateau and to the northeast where he came to the pueblo of Zuñi, claimed by his Indian guides to be one of the Seven Cities of a country they called Cíbola. Unfortunately, the Moor used the wrong approach in paving the way for the arrival of the main group of Spaniards. His swaggering demands for gems and women insulted the Zuñi and they killed him, sending one of the guides back to Marcos warning him not to come closer. On hearing the news of Estebán's murder and the threats of the Zuñi, Marcos was assailed by indecision. Should he push on to verify the wealth of Cíbola supposedly there for the taking, or should he turn back in the face of the natives' hostility? He compromised. He decided to take two Indian guides and travel to some vantage point from which he could