When we last left the Pikes Peak Region’s story,
General William J. Palmer had left the principal scene, and we had yet to move beyond him and what he did.
The next phase of this story, and the leaders who led it, were products of one chance discovery by a young cowboy in the center of what is now Teller County, but was El Paso County (the County whose Seat is Colorado Springs) then.
His name was Bob Womack. From Wikipedia:
For many years Cripple Creek's high valley, at an elevation of 9,494 feet (2,894 m), was considered no more important than a cattle pasture. Many prospectors avoided the area after the Mount Pisgah hoax, a mini gold rush caused by salting (adding gold to worthless rock).[7]
On the 20th of October, 1890, Robert Miller "Bob" Womack discovered a rich ore and the last great Colorado gold rush began.
source
Ironies
There are a few ironies associated with the Womack story. First, the gully where he discovered the ore which put Cripple Creek on the map is named Poverty (!) Gulch. Another one is that despite eventually producing over $500,000,000 worth of gold (and this is in 1910 dollars!), Womack himself died, penniless and bedridden, in Colorado Springs. Still another is that he died the same year, and in much the same medical condition, as General Palmer did; both men passed away, bedridden due to paralysis, in 1909.
Where all this fits in
Now, you may well ask, what the F does all of this have to do with the high price of tea in Shanghai? Actually, quite a lot. Without the economic impact of Womack’s gold strike and the gold rush it caused, Colorado Springs itself might well have simply faded away not long after Palmer’s death. The next two major socioeconomic leaders of the Pikes Peak Region, Winfield Scott Stratton and Spencer "Spec" Penrose, would never have come to prominence without the money afforded them by their share of that half-billion dollar gold strike.
These men, and their social circle, loved good food and fine alcohol. (Especially Penrose, who was still living during Prohibition and had acquired some notoriety for his stashes of booze during those years!) It is these habits which brought my father’s family here, of which I will write more in future Diaries of this series.
With that, I hand it over to our weekly State Open Thread! (Thinking Fella, have you dug your way out of your house from all that lovely powder yet?)