Project Gutenberg's A Gold Hunter's Experience, by Chalkley J. Hambleton

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: A Gold Hunter's Experience

Author: Chalkley J. Hambleton

Release Date: July 6, 2009 [EBook #29335]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A GOLD HUNTER'S EXPERIENCE ***

Produced by Steven desJardins and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

A GOLD HUNTER'S EXPERIENCE

BY CHALKLEY J. HAMBLETON

CHICAGO
PRINTED FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION
1898

I have often been asked to write an account of my
Pike's Peak Expedition in search of gold. The following
attempt has been made up partly from memory and partly
from old letters written at the time to my sister in
the east.

C. J. H.

A Gold Hunter's Experience

Early in the summer of 1860 I had a bad attack of gold fever. In Chicago
the conditions for such a malady were all favorable. Since the panic of
1857 there had been three years of general depression, money was scarce,
there was little activity in business, the outlook was discouraging, and
I, like hundreds of others, felt blue.

Gold had been discovered in the fall of 1858 in the vicinity of Pike's
Peak, by a party of Georgian prospectors, and for several years
afterward the whole gold region for seventy miles to the north was
called "Pike's Peak." Others in the East heard of the gold discoveries
and went West the next spring; so that during the summer of 1859 a
great deal of prospecting was done in the mountains as far north as
Denver and Boulder Creek.

Those who returned in the autumn of that year, having perhaps claims and
mines to sell, told large stories of their rich finds, which grew larger
as they were repeated, amplified and circulated by those who dealt in
mining outfits and mills. Then these accounts were fed out to the public
daily in an appetizing way by the newspapers. The result was that by the
next spring the epidemic became as prevalent in Chicago as cholera was a
few years later.

Four of the