Location of Name
On the walls of Spaulding's Cavern inside North Gateway Rock.Condition of Name
The name was still clearly visible when the cavern was re-discovered in 1935. Nearby was the date 1858.Biography of Augustus Voorhees
Augustus Voorhees was of German-Dutch ancestry. He was born in New York state on 14 December 1828. He moved to Wisconsin when he was eighteen, and to Kansas Territory when he was twenty-eight. In Kansas he farmed and did some coal mining. He was working at the Coal Bank, nine miles northeast of Burlingame, K.T., when he heard that the Lawrence Party had started for Pikes Peak in late May of 1858. He raced thirty-five miles on foot to overtake the train, finally catching the ten wagons at Bluff Creek.
Voorhees was the only member of the Lawrence Party to keep a daily diary. He wrote the diary on sheets of paper, 8"x10" in size. His entries began on 31 May 1858 and continued until 12 July 1858, the date when the gold seekers moved to Jimmy Camp from the Garden of the Gods and there met the returning Cherokees. On that date his diary came to an abrupt end. It is not known if he kept any further records of the trip.
While encamped in the Garden of the Gods during the summer of 1858, Voorhees and two others climbed to the top of Pikes Peak. Of this climb Voorhees wrote in his diary:
"(July)8 Miller cooked four days provisions to go to Pikes Peak.Voorhees stayed with the Lawrence Party during the trip south to the old Spanish Diggings in Grayback Gulch, then north to the new diggings on Cherry Creek. In the fall of 1858 he returned to Kansas with other members of the Lawrence Party. When the Civil War broke out he enlisted in the Fifth Kansas Cavalry. He served for three years. Later he moved back to Wisconsin, then - in 1890 - returned to Kansas. Despite all this moving around, he found time to get married and rear a family of seven. Augustus Voorhees died in Kansas in 1905."(July)9 We started in the morning, followed up the creek valley three miles, and found three soda fountains or boilling fountains. They are quite sour and resemble Congress water. They boill up very strong. We also found a log shanty there. We climbed the mountain all day, found some hard climbing and large rocks. I killed one sage hen which we roasted for supper. We made our camp between two rocks and built a large fire. We had a light shower in the night. They had a heavy hail storm at the camp. We crept under some rocks.
"(July)10 Started early and went to the foot of the main peak and left our blankets, and went on up. We had a heavy hail storm, which kept us three hours under a rock. The mountain was covered with hail. We got to the top at three o'clock, but it was so cloudy we could not see the country beyond. We cut our names on a stick and p(ut) it in a pyramid of stone that we piled up. The top is levle twenty-five or thirty acres, nothing but small rock tumbled together. We started down at four o'clock, it was so cloudy that we could see nothing below us. We could not find the way to our packs, and we stoped at the first timber which was pick pine, and found a rock to shelter us from the wind and the rain. We built a great fire and stoped for the night. It was so cold we did not sleep much without our blankets. We were one mile from the top. It blew very hard all night.
"(July)11 The fog blew off this morning so that we could find our packs, and we started for home. The mountains are covered with spruice, the fire has burnt the most of them dead. The red raspberey and strawbereys are quite thick. Some of them are ripe and some are in blossom. The fog was so thick that we could not see much as we came down. We found some quarts rock and some creystal quarts. We came into camp at four o'clock."