The name Pike's Peak Gold Rush was used mainly because of how well known and important Pike's Peak was at the time. The participants in the gold rush were known as ' Fifty-Niners' after 1859, the peak year of the rush and often used the motto Pike's Peak or Bust! In fact, the location of the Pike's Peak Gold Rush was centered 85 miles (137 km) north of Pike's Peak. An estimated 100,000 gold seekers took part in one of the greatest gold rushes in North American history.

The Pike's Peak Gold Rush (later known as the Colorado Gold Rush) was the boom in gold prospecting and mining in the Pike's Peak Country of western Kansas Territory and southwestern Nebraska Territory of the United States that began in July 1858 and lasted until roughly the creation of the Colorado Territory on February 28, 1861. Nineteenth-century gold-prospecting frenzy in Colorado, US Gold prospectors in the Rocky Mountains of western Kansas Territory