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The discovery of gold in Colorado in 1858 and 1859 initiated a massive influx of population into the region. Perhaps 50,000 would-be miners, merchants, and settlers reached the diggings in the first eighteen months.' With remarkable speed, knowledge of the new discoveries from the western extremities of Kansas and Nebraska territories reached civilization. Quickly, a dramatic surge of population spread into an area of the American West that heretofore lay very much in the backwater of settlement. The timing of the Colorado gold rush was propitious: the nation was floundering in an economic depression and news of potentially easy riches in the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains must surely have created great excitement in hundreds of American communities. With every rendition of the discoveries, the size and number of found nuggets undoubtedly grew and thousands prepared tojourney to the goldfields or to the nearby boomtown of Denver. Such a journey ideally required careful planning. One frequently used tool for charting the anticipated trip was the emigrant guidebook. While others have already assessed the role and often the biases of these guides, this article examines the published cartographic accompaniments to many of these volumes, the maps to the so-called Kansas and Nebraska gold mines that displayed a diverse selection ofjumping off points and routes to the new El Dorado.2
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