Thirty miles west of Denver, in narrow, boulder-strewn Clear Creek Canyon, high on the eastern frontal range of the Colorado Rockies, the ghostlike remains of Central City stand amid the monuments of a golden past — mute, decaying mine shafts, bleak, windowless stamp mills, and abandoned gold lodes littered with the broken and rusty debris of many lost hopes and a few fulfilled dreams. Here in the “Golden Mile” between the silent works of Black Hawk and the rebuilt brick buildings of Central City a granite shaft marks the site where prospector John Gregory discovered gold dust in his pan one April day in 1859 and gave sustenance to the first fruitless “Pike's Peak Gold Rush” of the previous autumn.
