A “tailing tale” of the Pike’s Peak bust

Colorado Pioneers

By Maggie Magoffin

While financial depression still ruled the land and men were without money, credit, or opportunity for business of any kind, fanciful fabrications of the discovery of gold at Pike’s Peak caused a wild rush to the new Eldorado. Good, bad and indifferent; the educated and illiterate; the merchant, the speculator, the mechanic, the farmer, the gambler, some of every kind, a sort of human mosaic, marshaled under a banner which bore the forceful, if inelegant legend, “Pikes Peak or Bust.”