A “tailing tale” of Henry Villard

To the Pike’s Peak Country in 1859 on the Smoky Hill Route – Part I

Henry Villard was a young newspaper correspondent who joined the Pike’s Peak gold rush early in 1859. The article presented here was his first story to his newspaper, the Cincinnati Daily Commercial, and appeared June 3, 1859. It was dated “Denver City, Mouth of Cherry Creek, May 17, 1859.”

In 1853, at the age of eighteen, Ferdinand Heinrich Gustave Hilgard (who later changed his name to Henry Villard) had come to the United States from his home in Germany. He worked at various jobs in the Middle West, learned English, and became a newspaper correspondent. After returning from the Pike’s Peak country in the fall of 1859 he wrote an interesting book, The Past and Present of the Pike’s Peak Gold Region. (St. Louis, 1860.) Some years after his visit to the Pike’s Peak country Villard experienced a spectacular rise to fame and fortune, becoming president of the Northern Pacific Railroad and a person of power in the financial world. He died Nov. 12, 1900.