On the seventh day we skirted along the eastern slope of the mountains and now once more upon the plains we passed numerous herds of antelope and elk. At night we arrived at the Planter's House in Denver. It had been eight years since George A. Jackson, a trapper and companion of Kit Carson, discovered gold in Cherry Creek near the present site of that settlement. As Pike's Peak (discovered by Zebulon M. Pike in 1806) was hardly a hundred miles distant and was the nearest object bearing a name that had appeared on the maps at any time prior to the Cherry Creek discovery, the diggings were first known as Pike's Peak Gold Mines. In the following autumn of 1858 intelligence unaccompanied by any particulars reached the States by the way of Omaha that gold had been discovered at Pike's Peak. The news vividly colored by excitable men spread like wild fire through the country. Early in the following spring I saw a small train roll out with a party of adventurers whom I well knew to be on the alluring quest for Pike's Peak gold. One wagon bore the legend which later became familiar "Pike's Peak or bust." I saw members of the party in the autumn of the same year after they had returned "busted." Their hunt was like the storied search for the bag of gold at the foot of the rainbow. Before the rumor of the discovery of the precious metal had barely had time to rouse the average fortune seeker George Scofield of Council Bluffs, who had been a successful placer miner in California in 1849, joined with his neighbors, Samuel Dillon, William Kuhn, George Ritter, and Joseph Wheeler and late in 1858, fitting out a four ox team with supplies, started immediately for Pike's Peak. As they wandered among the foothills near the mountains the snow began to fly. With the view of establishing winter quarters they moved down to Cherry Creek and built the first log house erected in that part of the territory. This was the beginning of Denver. This record with the print of the house is furnished by Ira Scofield who was in at the house warming. Thus was planted, in what was then Kansas territory, another active aggressive center of population which was to open the slumbering wealth of the hills, rouse the latent energies of the soil and carve out the new state of Colorado. The rush of fortune-seekers, the majority of whom went broke, brought to the Cherry Creek country a legion of adventurers. The town, which at the beginning represented a shifting, unstable population, was named Denver in honor of James W. Denver, then Governor of Kansas territory. [Illustration: FIRST HOUSE IN DENVER. BUILT ON CHERRY CREEK IN 1857, BY GEORGE SCOFIELD] After a brief sojourn in Denver I devoted a few days to a tour through the new mining district back in the mountain gulches, and later through South Park to Mount Lincoln, which at that time was said to be the highest peak in the Rocky Mountain Range, and which I ascended on horseback, finding it an easy task.