Definitely! Prospectors were fanning out, pushing deeper in to the canyons west of Boulder, exploring every quartz vein in the area of nearby rich strikes and looking to make it big. The pic is from the 1892, a few years after the gold strikes of nearby Russellville (Central City and Blackhawk CO). The attached map is from 1920.
I presume those are all mining claims? Sure a lot of overlap happening. Must have been some conflicts there!
Yep and yep!! The overlaps on the claims map are hillside claims where, if you think of it in 3D, your claim may be 100yds uphill from my claim and appear to overlap horizontally on the map but vertically there are several feet between them. There is a sweet layered, etched glass, claims map at the Cripple Creek museum that is a 3D perspective. The claim owner that hit a vein had rights to follow that vein, and that is where the courts stayed busy, settling who had "claim" to the vein. One of the richest miners of CO, WS Stratton, spent a small fortune in Victor/Cripple Creek fighting other mine owners while trying to defend his claims. Even now in CO, I have to buy water and mineral rights on my undeveloped property or outside industries, namely gas/oil, can come in and set a drill rig on that property to recover an identified resource below and all I get is a surface lease fee for the surface area occupied - no royalties on the resource unless I've bought the mineral rights. Water rights for a well is another topic all together!
The small flume along the right side of the creek and passing under the trestle or a hanging flume along a river is a component I haven't seen added.
