Following up the Arkansas River from Pueblo, a route goes northward behind and west of Pike's Peak into the Cripple Creek district, situated at an elevation of nearly ten thousand feet among the mountains, where in 1890 was a remote cattle ranch. The next year gold was found there, a new population rushed in, and it has since become a leading gold producer, its output of fourteen to twenty millions of gold annually almost turning Colorado from a silver to a gold State. There is now a population of twenty thousand, and the town has many substantial buildings. Westward the route crosses the Continental Divide and descends into the extensive South Park, covering two thousand square miles, reaching Leadville beyond, renowned as a mining camp that has developed into one of the highest cities of the world. In the early Colorado days this was the great gold placer mining camp of California Gulch. Afterwards it produced enormous quantities of silver from the extensive carbonate beds discovered in 1876, and the population expanded to thirty thousand, its name being changed to Leadville. Of late, its gold mining has again become profitable, and its population now is about fifteen thousand, the yield of silver, which once reached $13,000,000 annually, being much reduced owing to the decline in value. To the westward, the Colorado Midland Railway crosses the Continental Divide by the Hagerman Pass, at eleven thousand five hundred and thirty feet elevation, the highest elevation of any railway route across the Rockies. It descends rapidly to Aspen, where $8,000,000 of silver and gold are mined in a year. North of Leadville is the noted Mountain of the Holy Cross, fourteen thousand two hundred feet high, named from the impressive cruciform appearance of two ravines crossing at right angles and always filled with snow.