By Steve Plutt

In celebration of Colorado’s 150th birthday and the United States’ 250th, local historian Steve Plutt and the Ute Pass Historical Society have written a series of stories to bring the area’s colorful history to life.

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This title refers to an event that occurred just west of Cripple Creek in the year 1884, six years before Bob Wommack and his discovery of gold in Cripple Creek. A discovery that yielded at least 28 millionaires.

Mark Twain is attributed with coining the phrase “A gold mine is a hole in the ground with a liar at the top.”

Such was the case at Mount Pisgah. This hoax has been the subject of many newspaper articles, and each of the accounts always seem to differ from author to author. Certain sources, such as the book “Money Mountain,” written by the highly regarded historian Marshall Sprague, assert that the deception happened in Park County on McIntyre Mountain, and that cairn was mistakenly identified as Mount Pisgah. But several other narratives place the hoax at the actual Cripple Creek landmark.

Newcomers to western mining lands in the 1890s were under the impression that gold could be effortlessly picked up from the ground, particularly in accessible sites such as creek beds, and they often placed their faith in any uplifting gossip they heard.

One version of the hoax was started in Leadville by two men employed by the notorious mine salter “Chicken” Bill Lovell. Those two men, S.J. Bradley and D.G. Miller reportedly were hired by Cañon City businessmen to “invent” a gold rush.

In 1884, as the story goes, the businesses in the railroad town of Cañon City were encountering substantial hardships. So these “enterprising” Cañon merchants compensated Bradley and Miller with $200 to excavate a hole 18 feet deep on the slopes of Mount Pisgah. They were instructed to salt it with gold from South Park, then head back to Cañon for an assay. And that is exactly what the two men did. Their “discovery” amounted to $2,000 of gold to the ton.

News spread rapidly and before long, 5,000 men had caught the “Gold Fever” and were headed to Mount Pisgah, spending on average $30 each. The Denver & Rio Grande Railroad charged $6.50 for a ride to Cañon City and were filled to capacity. Locally, Cañon City stage men charged $5 for the final leg to the hoax. The roads leading to Mount Pisgah were congested, and merchants in Cañon experienced unprecedented sales of picks, pans and pinto beans.

The gold rush also brought a wave of excitement to the city of Pueblo. Merchants and the local newspaper asserted that the most affordable and high-quality place to purchase your outfit and mining supplies was there, rather than in Cañon City. Men were departing Pueblo by the hundreds with two-horse teams and wagons, some of them hand painted with the slogan “Mount Pisgah or Bust.”

Merchants could not keep enough blankets, pick handles, shovels and even mattresses in stock. Local ranchers discovered it challenging to resist the temptation of leaving their farms behind for a trip to Mount Pisgah. The Pueblo Chieftain reported the unusual sight of the young men in town, who typically excelled only with a billiard cue, suddenly armed with picks and shovels, making their way toward the slopes.

However, it wasn’t too long before returning miners and prospectors declared Mount Pisgah to be a “great humbug.” But the Gold Rush was too great, involving too many men engaging in it. The humbug talk was all disregarded and most still believed that valuable formations would soon be located.

But then, the bottom did drop out. Prominent mining men returning from the fields soon declared it all a scam. S.J. Bradley was found to be the fraudster and confessed under oath that the Mount Pisgah boom was a scheme of Leadville cheats, to dupe eastern capitalists and that he and his partners salted the area.

It may never be determined if the merchants of Cañon City employed them, yet they certainly profited significantly by providing supplies to the miners, regardless of their guilt or innocence.

Colorado Springs pioneer Irving Howbert said “Mount Pisgah must exist largely in the imaginations of rail officials and Cañon City merchants,” saying that nobody could stop a gold rush, even if it was a hoax.

How many of those hoodwinked prospectors would try it all over again when they found out, six years later, that just across the creek from their efforts, Bob Womack unleashed the true gold rush?