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Lewis Ralston, first gold discovery in Colorado

Contributed by: Michael Thompson on 6/22/2008

My name is Lewis Ralston, and this is the story of how I found gold.

I was born in 1804 at Pendleton South Carolina. My daddy was a farmer named Jackson Ralston. I enjoyed growing up on the farm, but somehow it was never quite enough for me, so when I was twenty years old, I went West for the first time. Not too far west, just a hundred miles or so, across the border into Georgia.

I was a hard worker, and I prospered in Georgia. When I was 21, I married the daughter of a Cherokee chief, named Elizabeth Kells. Elizabeth and I had fifteen children who lived. Things were tough in those days.

Elizabeth and I started a farm on the banks of the Chestatee river, near a small stream that was later called Ralston branch. It wasn't the last time they named a stream after me, as I will tell you. I build a two-story log cabin there, and some cabins, a smoke house, stables, a corn crib, and I even planted a peach orchard. I built a landing on the bank of the river and ran a ferry service.

We were happy in Georgia. Then things began to change. My friend Benjamin Parks (who later married my sister) was hunting deer one day in 1828, when he kicked at a rock in his path and saw something shiny. It turned out to be gold, and that started the first major gold rush in the United States.

I was twenty-four at the time, and of course excited about gold. But it really created problems for the Cherokee. This had been their ancestral land for centuries, and now everyone was swarming around it trying to find gold. The federal government sent troops to keep order and the state of Georgia siezed the Cherokee lands. They divided them up into lots and had a lottery for people to get gold claims.

As a white man, I should have been able to keep my land, but a fellow named Henry Slaughter drew the lot for my gold mine. I took it to court, but the judge awarded the claim to Slaughter. I was really angry, so I took some family members and servants and dug out a lot of the gold. The judge fined me six thousand dollars, but it was worth it.

They began to force the Cherokee to leave Georgia and move to Oklahoma, but this time I was able to defend my rights and keep my farm, near a town they named Auraria, or "gold city."

News from the west began to arrive though, first in letters from some of Elizabeth's relatives in Oklahoma. They had a hard life there, and there was lots of fighting between some of the Cherokee who had signed a treaty with the state of Georgia, and some others who opposed it.

Meanwhile, they had discovered gold at Sutter's Mill in California. Sutter tried to keep it a secret, but his camp cook was a Georgia girl from our area, and she wrote home about the gold.

I didn't go with the "forty-niners" who were the first to leave, but I waited until the next year so my oldest son John would be old enough to help his mother run the farm. In April of 1850, my brother-in-law and I met up with some of our Cherokee relatives and friends and started a wagon train to California.

It was a long and hard trip west, and we faced many hardships, but we were after the gold so we kept on. We went across Oklahoma into Southern Colorado and turned north at Fort Pueblo. We were amazed to see Pike's Peak and the mountains of Colorado, far larger than anything back home in Georgia. We followed Cherry Creek, to where it joins the South Platte river. It took us quite a while find a place to cross the river, but we finally did, at a place where Vasquez creek runs into it.

After we built rafts and floated the wagons across the river, we followed the creek for a ways, and camped at its confluence with another small stream, not yet named. Later, they called that Ralston's Creek, and I'll tell you why.

The day after all the work of getting across the river, the captain declared a "lay by" or day of rest, where wouldn't travel. I was up early that morning, and I took my gold pan down to the creek to see what I could find. Might as well get in some practice before we got to California.

Well lo and behold, I actually found some gold in that creek, so they named it after me. Everyone was quite excited, and many of us stayed behind to see if we could find some more. Others traveled on. We didn't find a whole lot, so we caught up with them later.

We finally made it to California, though it took bad weather, starvation and even some people dying of cholera before we got there. I found some gold, but none of our group really struck it rich, so I headed back to Georgia.

I always remembered that little stream in Colorado though, the one they named after me, and the gold I found there.I used to talk about it with my friend Greenberry Russell, who had also been a prospector in California, and finally, we gathered up enough people to form another wagon train and headed west again.

We made it to "Ralston's Creek" in June of 1858, eight years almost to the day from when I had found color in my pan on the previous trip. We did pan for gold, and found some, but not much, about twenty-five cents worth each from a day's work.

Well, gold that you find in a stream has been eroded out of a hill somewhere, so we began to explore the area for better findings. Some followed Clear Creek up into the mountains, but couldn't get their pack horse up the steep narrow canyon, and turned back just short of where some fellows struck it rich the following year.

We did get some gold, but not nearly as much as we had hoped, so we got discouraged, and many of us decided to head back to Georgia. We were worried that the Cheyenne and Arapaho who lived there might attack us at any time.

Greenberry Russell challenged us that if two men would stay with him, he would keep looking for gold. Well twelve men took that challenge, but I wasn't one of them. I was lonely for my family and my nice farm back in Georgia. Those who stayed behind with Russell not only found gold in the streams after we left, but they founded a town, which they named Auraria after our old Georgia home. The following May, Russell found gold in a mountain valley, which they named Russell Gulch after him, helping to start the next great gold rush of "fifty-niners" going to Colorado

For many years, people believed that Russell's discovery in 1859, along with others by George Jackson and John Gregory, were the first discoveries of gold in Colorado, but it my "color in the pan" of 1850 that started the whole thing. And that's how I found gold.


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CONTRIBUTOR INFORMATION

Michael Thompson

Arvada , CO

Michael Thompson has posted 16 stories and 2 comments since joining on 12/5/2005. Michael Thompson 's average story rating is 5.
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