When visited in 1859 the Gregory Diggings were found in a gulch along which log cabins, tents and camps, hastily covered in with boards or pine boughs, were scattered for miles. There were then five thousand people in them, and more were coming in every day. Here the experiences of California life were repeated. Some men were taking out two hundred dollars a day; others who worked equally hard did not get five dollars a day for their labor. It resulted that a stream of confident and cheerful ones were constantly going in, while not a few who had failed to find fortune in the diggings were as constantly coming out, crestfallen and in rags. [Illustration: COMING OUT.] In 1859 Denver had about one thousand people, who lived in three hundred rough-hewn log houses. Very few of them had glass windows, or doors, or other floors than the bare ground. Hearths and fireplaces would be built of adobe, as in New Mexico, and chimneys of sticks laid crosswise one on the other, with the interstices filled with mud, as the New-Englanders of 1630 were accustomed to make theirs. As no rain falls except during the summer months, life in the open air caused little discomfort to people who, being obliged to make the most of every thing, easily learned to do without what are called luxuries. [Illustration: OFFICE OF "ROCKY-MOUNTAIN NEWS," DENVER.] Picturesquely set up among these homely dwellings of the whites, one saw many skin lodges. These belonged to a band of Arapaho Indians, who had thus pitched their camp in the heart of the growing city. Golden City in the north and Colorado City in the south were soon founded. The first was an intermediate point on the route to the Gregory Diggings; the second was started at the foot of Pike's Peak, near to the famous _Fontaine qui bouille_,[2] or Boiling Spring, and on the route to Santa Fé. [Illustration: COLORADO CITY, 1859.] In a few months more Denver had grown to a city of brick and frame buildings, with two theatres, a mint coining the gold of its own mines, and rival daily newspapers. It had quite reached the second stage of development of frontier cities. [Illustration: QUARTZ STAMPING-MILL.] The surface, or placer, diggings of Colorado were soon exhausted, but in their place belts of gold mixed with quartz were struck all the way from Pike's Peak in the south to Long's Peak in the north. Above this gold belt, rich silver ores were sometimes found on the very summits of the mountains. These discoveries soon changed mining from a pursuit in which every one could engage, and which had drawn such numbers into Colorado in the beginning, to the larger operations of capital, with all the appliances modern science brings to its aid. FOOTNOTES