Nellie Cashman and the Tombstone Silver Rush

The wind came down from the mountain like a living thing. It howled through the pine trees and shook the tents of the small American expedition camped on the Colorado plain. Zebulon Pike pulled his coat tighter and looked up at the great white peak looming above him. It was November, 1806, and that mountain seemed to touch the very roof of the sky. Pike was twenty-seven years old, a lieutenant in the United States Army. President Jefferson had sent him west to explore the new Louisiana Territory, to map its rivers, and to find the headwaters of the Arkansas and Red rivers. Nobody had given him a proper winter coat. Nobody had warned him just how cold the Rockies could be. He pointed at the distant white summit and told his men they would climb it in a single day. His soldiers looked at one another. The mountain did not look like a one-day climb. But Pike was their commander, and they trusted him. They set out before sunrise. The cold bit at their fingers and their faces. The snow was knee-deep before midday, then waist-deep, then deeper still. Every time they reached a ridge they thought was the top, another ridge appeared above it, higher and whiter and colder than the last. The mountain kept giving them more mountain. By afternoon, frostbite had crept into the soldiers' feet. Two men could barely walk. Pike called a halt and looked back across the plain below. He could see for a hundred miles in every direction. The world spread out like a great quilt of brown and gold, threaded with silver rivers. He had never seen anything so vast and so beautiful. They did not reach the summit that day. Or the next. The mountain would not be conquered that winter, and Pike knew it. He wrote in his journal that night by the light of a small fire, his fingers stiff around the pen: I believe no human being could have ascended to its pinnacle. But Pike did not give up on the territory itself. He and his men pressed on through the Colorado wilderness for weeks, surviving on whatever game they could shoot and melting snow for water. They built small log forts to shelter from blizzards. They crossed frozen rivers on their hands and knees, feeling the ice shift and groan beneath them. One morning a soldier named Sparks stopped walking. His feet had frozen so badly he could not take another step. Pike did not leave him. He and two other men built a fire, wrapped Sparks in every blanket they had, and took turns rubbing warmth back into his feet until he could stand again. That was the frontier way. You did not leave a man behind. When spring finally came, Pike's men were ragged and thin. Spanish soldiers eventually captured them and escorted them back across the border, believing the Americans were spies. Pike was polite and calm. He had done nothing wrong. He was home by the summer of 1807. He never did climb that mountain. But the mountain remembered him anyway. For more than two hundred years, people have called it Pikes Peak. It stands today in Colorado, fourteen thousand feet high, watching over the plains below. Thousands of people climb it every year, by trail, by road, by cog railway. And every single one of them, when they reach the top and look out across that endless American landscape, feels what Zebulon Pike felt standing in the snow so long ago. The country is impossibly large and impossibly beautiful. It asks more of you than you think you can give. And somehow, if you keep going, you find that you had more in you than you knew. That is the frontier spirit. It does not promise easy summits. It promises that the trying is worth everything. Sleep well, young explorer. Your own mountains are waiting.