A.D. GAMBELL WAS A 49er IN CALIFORNIA, A 59er IN COLORADO & A 79er IN WYOMING

Linda Jones

01/18/2007 - A.D. Gambell lived history in three states. He founded towns, including Nevadaville, and laid foundations for several giant companies. Less than a month after Gregory’s gold strike in Kansas Territory (in present-day Black Hawk), Gambell was prospecting up South Boulder Creek. From his experience in California ten years earlier, he knew the vein he found (in present-day Gambell Gulch) was a rich one.

  This restless adventurer was born in Ohio on January 27, 1822, and shipped out on a whaler. When his ship sailed into San Francisco harbor in the midst of the 1849 gold excitement, the young man jumped overboard with nothing but the clothes he was wearing, swam ashore and headed for Sacramento, the center of the frenzy. In the gold fields, he not only prospered but learned well the science of mining.

  Returning to Toledo in 1851 to his betrothed, he married and fathered a daughter, returned in 1855 to California for a year, traveled back to Toledo, then came to Colorado in May, 1859, to try his luck. He camped on the site of a trading post for the whites and the Indians in times of peace; the site is now Union Station. He led a prospecting expedition from Golden City up South Boulder Creek, their pack mules loaded with supplies. A late spring blizzard caught them at the present site of Rollinsville in early June, and the prospectors sent the mules back down the creek because there was no forage for them. All the prospectors who had ventured further up had returned to Golden City previously, saying there was no “color” up there, but this group shouldered their packs and kept going. When they found indications of gold, they couldn’t scrape up any dirt to pan because the ground was frozen. Gambell thought of a plan; he built a huge fire and thawed the dirt they could dig out and then panned it in melted snow. He realized instantly that they had made a good strike.

  The date of that discovery was June 5, 1859, and the gulch is still called Gambell Gulch, although his name is often misspelled. His gulch proved to be a prolific producer and four towns sprang up along it. The group couldn’t work the find until the snow and frost thawed, and they needed supplies which would require payment in gold dust, so Gambell perforated a piece of tin and sifted dirt from his claim through it. In no time he had about $90 in gold dust to trade for goods. When he returned to Golden City, this amount of gold dust aroused everyone’s interest, but Gambell and his companion, Bolinger, wouldn’t reveal its source. However, on the first morning of their journey back to their find, they awoke to discover a dozen covered wagons had followed them and were camped across the stream, prepared to follow them further. Five men from the wagons, seeing that the two men were awake, crossed the stream and gave the prospectors two choices: one, come across the stream with them, join them for breakfast and then lead them to where they found the gold or two, be hung from a tree.

  Gambell didn’t much care for his new neighbors in his gulch and soon moved on to southern Gilpin County on the advice of a friend. However, his gold from Gambell Gulch played an important part in the Pikes Peak or Bust Gold Rush. When the popular editor of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley, visited Denver in June of 1859, he addressed the assembled crowd and expressed skepticism about this new gold strike. Greeley asked if anyone in the audience could show him gold from the mountains. Gambell could and did—he was carrying a small bottle of dust and nuggets from his claim. Greeley asked if Gambell would consent to a citizen’s committee investigating the contents of his bottle and the miner agreed, on condition the gold be returned to him. In a few days, the committee reported his bottle held several hundred dollars’ worth of gold, which the editor duly reported in the Tribune, adding to the fervor of the gold rush.

  Governor Steele, elected leader of the extra-legal Jefferson Territory, urged Gambell to move to the gulch one mile above Central City where the rich Burroughs Lode had just been discovered. Gambell staked out a claim close to Burrough’s claim and built one of the first cabins there, and a few days later he and Sam Link organized a mining district and formed a townsite company. Gambell suggested the name of the town—Nevada (now Nevadaville). During this time Gambell formed a close friendship with a legendary eccentric miner named Pat Casey, who owned one of the claims on the Burroughs lode (which would make him a fortune). Another close friendship developed with a young lawyer named Henry Teller, who lived alone in a cabin in the town and wandered the hills at dawn memorizing from a law book he carried.

  In 1860 Gambell returned to Toledo for a sluice mill and his family. After constructing the mill in Ohio, he transported it all the way across the Great Plains. This was the first mill in the town, and many more soon followed. An early Rocky Mountain News article states, “All the early mills are his [Gambell’s] handiwork”. When it became obvious that the mills could not work continuously because of the scarcity of water, the resourceful miner solved the problem by creating the Nevada Ditch in 1860. On another plains crossing, he returned with saloon fixtures and billiard tables for some of the booming town’s 13 saloons.

  In the late 1860s the Indians were on the warpath, yet Gambell planned to return east again for a visit with his family. Red Cloud, chief of the Pawnee and a good friend of the miner, heard of his planned trip and worried. He took Gambell and his family into his own wigwam for several days until the danger subsided. When the family left, Red Cloud sent venison and bison with them for the journey and presented them with several special gifts—pictures of himself, his wife, his wife’s mother, his son and his daughter.

  Gambell, always restless, eventually moved on to Clear Creek County, then Middle Park, and finally to Wyoming. In Laramie County, Wyoming, he founded another town, Hartford. In both Wyoming and Colorado he increased his fortune by discovering iron mines for the Colorado Fuel and Iron Co. The mines in Wyoming were so productive that in 1903 over 3,000 men were working in them.

  In his old age, Gambell moved back to Denver, where the Rocky Mountain News called him “the old man of Colorado mining” and where he was an esteemed member of the Pioneers Association. He died in Denver on October 10, 1908.

  Mining boomed in Gambell Gulch long after its discoverer left. One lode, the Gold Dirt, was fabulously rich. When news of that discovery reached Black Hawk, a boat repairman from Massachusetts heard of the find and rushed to the gulch. He staked a claim on the Gold Dirt lode and made a million dollars. With that fortune, he founded the W.L. Douglas Shoe Co. in Brockton, Massachusetts. John Q.A. Rollins sold a short 33-foot-long claim on the Gold Dirt lode for $250,000. The Gold Dirt lode would eventually produce over $2 million, as would the rich Perigo lode nearby. Towns were named for those lodes; in 1860 Gold Dirt’s population was 500. Hundreds more lived in cabins up and down the gulch and the town of Hawkeye. The best-named town in the gulch however, was at the head of the gulch. During a long night meeting to name the new mining town, someone suggested, “Let’s put this off until we’re more wide awake.” Another person replied, “That’s it—we’ll call the town Wide Awake.” Mines in the gulch included the Golden Sun, Ophir, Savage, Crown Point, Free Gold and Virginia, and they poured out a golden current for several years. All the towns faded after the turn of the 20th century and are now abandoned and unrecognizable.