Greeley had spent most of his life in the newspaper business. Born a farm boy in New Hampshire, he had early on been apprenticed to a printer. After four years as an itinerant journeyman, he had settled in New York City, becoming editor in turn of the New Yorker, the Jeffersonian and the Log Cabin. In 1841, Greeley had established the New York Tribune. The success of this newspaper had insured his reputation as both an influential political writer and the acknowledged dean of American journalism. In 1856, he had helped organize the Republican Party. Three years later he came West, partly to spread his views on Republicanism, partly to promote the idea of a transcontinental railroad.
Greeley’s 1859 odyssey was intended as a western tour, with prolonged stops planned for Kansas Territory, Denver City, Salt Lake City and California. He left New York City by Erie Railroad on 9 May. After passing through Buffalo, Cleveland and Chicago, he finally reached St. Joseph, where he crossed the Missouri River into Kansas Territory.
Kansas was then in the grip of severe spring thunderstorms. These storms chilled the air, swelled the streams, and turned low-lying prairies into miry swamplands. Undaunted, Greeley hired a two-horse wagon and set off for the Republican Convention at Oswatamie. There he addressed more than a thousand rain-soaked delegates on his notions of free-state democracy and squatter sovereignty. After similar addresses in Lawrence and Topeka, he continued on to Manhattan, where he hoped to catch the express coaches for the gold diggings of western Kansas.
The impatient editor was detained at Manhattan nearly a day longer than he had hoped. The spring rains had made the streams nearly impassable. Rock Creek, seventeen miles to the east, was running so high that the express coaches Greeley was expecting were forced to wait nearly fourteen hours before attempting a ford. But towards morning of 27 May the waters subsided, and the coaches again moved westward. They reached Manhattan at high noon. As they left the station an Indian girl was overheard saying: “Horace Greeley in his old white coat is sitting in that coach.”
The coaches would be Greeley’s home-on-wheels for the next eleven days. They had been manufactured by the Abbott-Downing Company of Concord, New Hampshire, and were of the sturdiest construction: built of white oak, strengthened with iron bands, and equipped with two shock-absorbing leather thoroughbraces that extended the length of the body. When first delivered to the Leavenworth and Pike’s Peak Express Company in mid-April of 1859, they were said to have been the first such coaches ever used in Kansas Territory. They “were new,” Greeley observed, “costing $800 apiece, painted red and attached to four fine Kentucky mules, trained to start at a dead run. The stage drivers were well-paid, experienced and fearless.”
The Leavenworth and Pike’s Peak Express Company itself had been in existence for only a few months. First conceived in early February of 1859 by William H. Russell and John S. Jones, it had been financed on $200,000 worth of borrowed capital and ninety-day notes. In mid-March a survey party had been sent west from Leavenworth to establish a right of way to Denver City. The route chosen was along the military road to Fort Riley, then over the Solomon-Republican River divide into western Kansas Territory. The entire route was measured by roadometer at just 689 miles. In early April an advance train consisting of forty wagons, 120 men and women, and 450 mules was sent out to locate and stock the proposed stations. The stations were to be approximately twenty-five miles apart and to be twenty-seven in number, counting both the first at Leavenworth and the last at Denver City.
The first coaches left Leavenworth on 18 April and arrived in Denver City on 7 May. They carried nine through passengers and a couple of company officials picked up along the way. One of the passengers was a thirty-year-old letter writer to the Bennington, Vermont Banner named Libeus Barney. Barney would be but the first of several correspondents to be attracted by the express coaches’ speed of passage and relatively low $100 fare. Aboard the second pair of coaches was Henry Villard, a young journalist covering the gold rush for the Cincinnati Daily Commercial. Villard was working under a commission of $20 a week and “reasonable traveling expenses.”
A third reporter boarded the express coaches on 25 May 1859. This was Albert Deane Richardson, already at age twenty-six a veteran frontier newspaperman. Born on a farm in Massachusetts, he had moved as a teenager to Pittsburgh, where he had learned shorthand and been schooled in journalism. He had later served as editor for various Cincinnati newspapers. In the spring of 1857 he had moved with his wife and son to Kansas Territory. There he had taken up the position of general land agent, become interested in Free-State politics, and variously corresponded for the Cincinnati Times and the Boston Journal. It was as a correspondent for the Journal that he arranged for passage to the gold fields on the Leavenworth and Pike’s Peak Express. On the day of his departure from Leavenworth a crowd gathered in front of the Planters’ House to see the coaches off. “Goodbye, old boy,” someone shouted. “Do write the facts about the gold.”
The route west from Manhattan led the two newspapermen over several rocky hills, then down into the rich prairie bottoms of the Kansas River. By mid-afternoon they reached Fort Riley.
The fort was situated on an elevated, rolling prairie above the Kansas River. It was surrounded by stands of timber, and framed by prominent limestone bluffs. All the main buildings were two stories high. They were built of a light limestone that resembled marble. The garrison was composed of several companies of cavalry and infantry. Though impressed with the beauty of the post - the comfortable barracks, the elegant officers’ quarters, the extensive stables - Greeley felt compelled to note “that two millions of Uncle Sam’s money have been expended in making these snug arrangements, and that the oats largely consumed here have often cost three dollars per bushel.”
The coaches crossed the Republican River a half mile beyond Fort Riley. At the crossing they met several ox-wagons loaded with disheartened Pike’s Peakers. Some were making their way back home; others were headed into southern Kansas in search of farming claims. Most of those interrogated said they had been as far north as Fort Kearney before turning back on reports that the Pike’s Peak gold was nothing but a humbug.
Greeley and Richardson spent the night of May 27 at nearby Junction City, the last settlement on their route to the gold fields. At the time of their visit the town had been in existence for only a year. It boasted one store, two hotels, some thirty frame and log houses, and a frontier newspaper called the Sentinel. Before retiring to his hotel room, Greeley was prevailed upon to preach republicanism to an appreciative audience at the town’s unfinished stone church.
The coaches left Junction City at 6 A.M. the following morning. Their course lay north by west up the divide between the Republican and Solomon rivers. Ten miles into the journey a stop was made for breakfast at a little tent set up beside the route. The tent was a rudely-constructed affair, consisting of an old sailcloth drawn over a ridgepole and supported by crotched stakes pounded into the ground. Encouraged by a large sign labeled “groceries,” Richardson approached the rumpled proprietor:
“Have you any crackers?”
“Nary cracker.”
“Any bread?”
“Any what?”
“Bread.”
“No Sir,” (indignantly,) “I don’t keep a bakery.”
“Any ham?”
“No.”
“Any figs?”
“No.”
“Well what have you?”
“Why I have sardines, pickled oysters, smoking tobacco, and stranger, I have got some of the best whiskey you ever seen since you were born.”
The disappointed newspapermen decided to curb their appetites until they reached Station 8 on Chapman’s Creek. And they were not disappointed. Lunch was served on “a snowy table-cloth” inside a tent. There were greens sprinkled with bacon, fresh-baked bread, homemade applesauce, and pie for dessert. Greeley reckoned that he had “rarely made a better dinner,” although the landlady felt obliged to apologize profusely because the Kansas wind had not allowed her to serve them under her newly-erected brush arbor.
The coaches were back on the road again a few minutes before noon. They still had thirty-five miles to travel before stopping for the night at Station 9 on Pipe Creek. As at the previous station, the hostess here could boast of only two tents, although a log cabin was in the process of being constructed. After “a capital supper, butter included,” the two reporters settled down in one of the coaches to do their letter writing by the light of a lantern. About 10 P.M. a thunderstorm passed over, and the vehicle was so shaken by the wind that Richardson thought it likely that “the Tribune printers will find Mr. Greeley’s manuscript even less legible than usual.”
Greeley and Richardson were up by dawn. They breakfasted early, and were on their way by 7 A.M. Their course was westward over a rolling prairie, some two to six miles to the right of the Solomon River. On cresting their first hill of the morning, they came in sight of a small herd of buffalo. Soon more were visible, then herd after herd of the shaggy beasts, several hundred thousand in all.
They stopped at Station 10 for lunch. It consisted entirely of fresh buffalo meat.
That afternoon the coaches paused for a few minutes near what could only be described as an arboreal post office - a large tree that was completely covered with names, dates and messages left by passing gold seekers.
This curiosity held no surprises for the two reporters. Their coach had been passing hundreds of gold seekers every day. Richardson estimated that perhaps as many as 10,000 Pike’s Peakers were traveling the Leavenworth & Pike’s Peak Express route to the diggings in the spring of 1859. “Six weeks ago not a track had been made upon this route,” he wrote. “Now it resembles a long-used turn-pike.”
West of Station 10, the express coaches began to encounter hundreds more, who were rushing backwards down the trail. These were the stampeders, turn-backs who brought with them ominous warnings about the gold diggings: “There is scarcely any gold there; those who dig cannot average two schillings per day; all who can get away are leaving; Denver and Auraria are nearly deserted; terrible sufferings have been endured on the plains, and more must yet be encountered; hundreds would gladly work for their board, but cannot find employment - in short, Pike’s Peak is an exploded bubble, which thousands must bitterly rue to the end of their days.”
Greeley and Richardson listened politely to these tales of woe, but each kept his own counsel. Richardson noted with some satisfaction that the two coaches continued to pass hundreds of Pike‘s Peakers, very few of whom seemed to be turning back. Greeley thought it not unlikely that the reports were true, but added “we shall see.”
The reporters spent the night of 29 May at Station 11 on Dog Creek. This station served as the junction for the express road and a 172-mile parallel road leading due west from Atchison. The new road had been surveyed by the Atchison and Cherry Creek Bridge and Ferry Co. to provide shorter access from the great western bend of the Missouri River, but it seems to have been little used by the Fifty-Niners. From Station 11 to Denver City the two routes were identical.
That afternoon, the express coaches were delayed at a stream crossing by a party of Ohio gold seekers, whose wagon had become stuck in the mud. The loquacious Greeley climbed down to help with the extrication. He was soon recognized for who he was, although one late-arriving Missourian, who had been “born and raised in Missouri,” felt it necessary to ask Richardson for some clarification:
“Stranger, is that John Greeley those fellows talk so much about?”
“No - Horace.”
“Horace - Horace Greeley - who is he?”
“Editor of the Tribune.”
“Which?”
“Editor of the New York Tribune.”
“What’s that?”
Not long after this encounter the express coach itself became mired in the mud, and had to be drawn out by the oxen of an obliging Pike’s Peakers. That evening, at Station 13, the conductor requested that the two reporters do their writing in a tent while some much-needed grease was applied to the front and rear axles of their coach.
The next day the coaches crossed over the Solomon-Republican divide. After fifty-five miles of rough road, they were parked for the night at Station 15 on Prairie Dog Creek, which was said to drain into the Republican River. The weary reporters were now just halfway from Leavenworth to Denver City.
Of far greater concern to the conductor was the report that the return coaches had twice been stopped by wandering bands of Cheyenne Indians, who had demanded payment for the express line’s use of their grass, water and game. One station-keeper, it was said, had even been threatened with loss of life and hair if he didn’t leave the country.
The reporters’ first encounter with the Plains Indians took place at Station 16 near Sappa Creek. The station was kept by a young Vermont native, who for the moment at least was playing host to an Arapahoe encampment of about twenty lodges. The men were off in pursuit of the Pawnees. Most of the women were busy cooking soup or making moccasins, but the children - some several dozen in all - swarmed around the coaches, begging by signs for food and drink. “Those under four or five years,” Richardson wrote, “were entirely naked. The older boys wore breech-clouts of buffalo skin, and the girls were wrapped in robes or blankets. All were muscular and well-developed.”
The Indian presence at the next station would cause Greeley more than a little pain and suffering. As the coach descended a creek bank on its approach to Station 17, the mules suddenly became agitated at the sight of three Cheyenne from a nearby encampment. Richardson leaped from the coach to take the leaders by the head. The terrified animals, however, broke a line and ran down the steep bank, not only upsetting the coach but also galloping off with the fore-wheels in tow.
The driver quickly emerged from the wreckage to limp off in pursuit of the mules, leaving the New York editor to slowly extricate himself from a pile of cushions and mail bags. His left cheek and leg were fairly streaming with blood. He was helped to the station by the landlady, where his wounds were cleaned and bandaged. Richardson meanwhile - though pressed on all sides by the acquisitive Cheyenne - stood guard over the scattered luggage until it could be carried to a place of safety.
Greeley awoke the next morning tired, hurting, and out of sorts. The gash in his leg proved to be the most painful of his injuries, one that would leave him lame for the next several weeks.
To make matters worse, the day’s journey would be through a barren region of seemingly utter desolation. “We left Station 17,” Greeley wrote, “and did not see a tree and but one bunch of low shrubs in a dry water-course throughout our dreary morning ride. . . Of grass there is little. . . The dearth of water is fearful. . .Even the animals have deserted us. A dead mule - bitten in the jaw this morning by a rattlesnake - lies here as if to complete the scene. Off the five week old track to Pike’s Peak, all is dreary solitude.”
When he wrote these words, Greeley was lunching at Station 18, the only station to be located in Nebraska Territory. The express route had taken the coaches northwestward to a meeting with the Republican River, which forked just above the station. That afternoon they turned southwestward to follow the south branch of the Republican back into Kansas Territory. They spent the night at Station 19, where they were once again surrounded by an encampment of Cheyenne Indians.
The next day, the reporters met up with another return coach, and Richardson was finally able to report some good news: “As usual passed hundreds of emigrants. The latest coach from Denver brings fine specimens of gold dust, and reports new rich discoveries, to the great elation of all the pilgrims.”
The route to Stations 20 and 21 continued along the south fork of the Republican, through a barren country of seemingly endless sand hills, all un-watered and un-wooded. The lack of wood had forced the station-keepers to construct mule corrals fenced in by trenches and walls of sod, with moveable wagons serving as gates. Even the company tents were not staked, but sodded at their bases.
Station 21, where the reporters spent the night of 3 June 1859, was said to be only 185 miles from Denver City. It was located just inside of what would soon become Colorado Territory. It also served as the terminus of a shortcut that came in from Station 17. This shortcut was becoming increasingly popular among the gold seekers, since it saved them more than two days of travel time.
Six miles beyond the station, the shallow waters of the Republican (that “apology for a river,” as Greeley called it) completely disappeared into the sand. For the next twenty-three miles there was no water to be seen anywhere. Richardson observed several thirsty Pike’s Peakers digging holes into the river sands; one finally found some brown ooze at a depth of five or six feet.
Station 22 served as the veritable sink of the Republican. There two large pools of cold water greeted not only those who had traveled the two dozen miles up the south fork, but also the thirsty multitudes who had abandoned the main Smoky Hill route some sixty or more waterless miles to the southeast. “Emigrants whom have come by the Smoky Hill,” Richardson wrote, “tell us they have suffered intensely, one traveling seventy-five miles without water. Some burned their wagons, killed their famishing cattle and continued on foot.” At Station 22 most of the Smoky Hill travelers abandoned their northwesterly course to follow that of the Express line. The combined routes continued up the south fork of the Republican for another twenty-five miles, then trailed over a twenty-mile wide plateau before following up the dry bed of the Big Sandy, crossing and re-crossing it for another twenty miles.
The reporters spent the night of 4 June at Station 23, still surrounded by what Richardson called “the desert with its soil white with alkali, its stunted shrubs, withered grass, and brackish waters. . .” They awoke the next morning to their first sight of Pike’s Peak, still dim and hazy in the distance, but offering to the weary travelers a hint of the cooling breath of the mountains.
Beverly D. Williams, superintendent of the express company, boarded the coaches as they left Station 23. Concern over the severity of Greeley’s injuries and the possible liability of the Express Company apparently induced Williams to order that the remaining 130 miles to Denver City be covered in one stretch, with stops made at the intervening three stations only for meals and changes of mules.
East Bijou Creek was reached by late afternoon. Here was Station 25 where they dined, here too the first small clump of shade trees they had seen in more than 200 miles. Among the Pike’s Peakers resting under the trees were several of Richardson’s old Kansas acquaintances, so sun-burned and covered with dust that it was several minutes before he recognized them.
Just as dusk was falling they came in sight of forests of pine and the many fires of gold seekers camped beside the road. “And it was a pleasure to see them. . .,” Greeley wrote, “after their long journey through a woodless region, surrounding great, ruddy, leaping fires of the dead pitch-wood, and solacing themselves for their long privation by the amplest allowance of blaze and warmth.”
After a hurried dinner at Station 26 on Kiowa Creek, the reporters were soon rocked to sleep by the swaying of the coaches, which were rolling along at a rate of seven miles an hour. At sunrise a stop was made for a last change of mules. One day and one night’s worth of travel had brought them to the banks of Cherry Creek, only twelve miles below Denver City. They reached the express office in Denver City at 8 A.M. on the 6th of June, their eleventh morning out from Leavenworth.
The curious bystanders congregated around the express office were somewhat taken aback by the appearance of the weary New York editor as he descended from the coach. His clothes were torn, his left cheek was bandaged, and he walked with a decided limp. He was helped to the Denver House, where rooms were procured. Despite a near-constant stream of visitors, Greeley immediately set to work on his column for the Tribune. Still preying on his mind were the many Pike’s Peakers he had met on his trip across the plains: “For the sake of the weary, dusty, foot-sore thousands I have passed on my rapid journey from civilized Kansas to this point, I pray that gold may be found here in boundless extent, and reasonable abundance. Throughout the next six weeks, they will be dropping in here, a hundred or more per day; and I trust that they are not to be sent home disappointed, spirit-broken, penniless.”
Greeley need not have worried. Among his many visitors that afternoon was Henry Villard, a reporter for the Cincinnati Daily Commercial, who gave him the scoop on the new gold finds at the Gregory Diggings. Villard had arrived in Denver City aboard the second pair of coaches on 12 May 1859. He had been present at the express office three days later, when a miner walked in with a little bottle of flour gold taken from the mineral veins that John H. Gregory had discovered on north Clear Creek, just thirty airline miles west of the settlements on the South Platte.
The exodus that followed this revelation nearly emptied Auraria and Denver City. The sheriff, the county judge, even the editor of the Rocky Mountain News led the rush to the mountains. Villard allowed that he himself “started out on a fine mule, borrowed from the Express Company, with my bedding strapped on behind, and with three days supply of hard bread and bacon, and ground roasted corn. . . .”
Once at the new diggings, Villard was able to induce John H. Gregory, “a slight, wiry, red-haired, and full-whiskered Georgian,” to tell his story.
Although born in South Carolina, Gregory had spent many years working in the gold fields of Cherokee County, Georgia. There he had honed his skills as a miner, married a local girl named Christina Payne, and started a family. When the Georgia placers finally played out in the late 1850’s, Gregory decided to try his luck at the Frazier River gold diggings in British Columbia. He left Georgia in August of 1858, and headed northwest. At Leavenworth, Kansas he was offered a job driving a government wagon to Fort Laramie. Once at the fort he was greeted with news of Green Russell’s gold discoveries on the South Platte. He decided to change directions, and in January of 1859 headed south, prospecting several Front Range streams along the way. On reaching Clear Creek he decided to follow that stream all the way to the mountains. When it forked, he followed the north fork into a gulch that would later bear his name. There he found traces of gold.
1. An Overland Journey by Horace Greeley, (New York: C.M. Saxton, Barker & Co., 1860).
2. "Diary of Albert D. Richardson," The Southwest Historical Series, Vol. XI, edited by LeRoy R. Hafen, (Glendale, Calif: The Arthur H. Clark Co., 1942).
3. Beyond the Mississippi by Albert D. Richardson, (Hartford: American Publishing Company).
4. "Letters of the Pike's Peak Gold Rush" by Libeus Barney, (San Jose: The Talisman Press, 1959).
5. Diary of Christian L. Long, tpewritten copy, Colorado Historical Society Library, Denver, CO.
6. Memories of Henry Villiard, (New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1904).
7. The Past and Present of the Pike's Peak Gold Regions by Henry Villiard, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1932).
For the first day and a half Richardson was the solitary passenger aboard the pair of coaches, the rest of the space being taken up by bulky, uncommunicative mailbags. At Station Six in Manhattan he was joined by the indomitable Horace Greeley. The two quickly became agreeable travel companions, although in his correspondence home the New York editor never once mentions his younger companion by name. “We two passengers of a scribbling turn,” remained the extent of his identification. Richardson, for his part, was somewhat taken aback by the amount of attention Greeley’s reputation constantly generated. Even before the coaches left Manhattan one inquisitive citizen wanted to know if Greeley was there to start a newspaper. Another asked if Greeley had suffered a financial setback and needed to go to Pike’s Peak to look for gold.
Also parked at Station 15 were the two return coaches from the mountains. Greeley was soon engaged in conversation with one of the passengers - a young clerk, who was traveling homewards after several months spent in the mines. The clerk said that he had frozen his feet on the winter journey out, had tired of the gold chase, and was now returning to his parents’ home in Indiana to continue his education. Greeley thought it a wise decision. Only after the coaches had parted the next morning, was Greeley advised by the conductor that the young stampeder was really a woman in disguise.
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