The pattern repeated itself across Colorado's mining districts. Prospectors arrived chasing gold and found silver waiting in the surrounding rock. In the Central City-Idaho Springs district, gold was discovered in 1859, but silver veins lay in the outlying areas, arranged in a roughly concentric pattern around the gold-bearing pyrite core. Mining the silver had to wait until smelters were built in the late 1860s. Near Georgetown, gold veins were found in 1859, but silver -- the district's main product -- did not emerge until 1864. The first actual silver discovery in Colorado came south of Montezuma in 1864, spreading to the nearby Argentine district at the Belmont lode. Each find seeded the next, as prospectors read the geology and followed the veins deeper into the mountains.

Despite those early strikes, Colorado's largest silver district was not found until 1874, when prospectors discovered the Leadville deposits. The district became the biggest silver producer in the state, and the wealth it generated was staggering. Shopkeeper Horace Tabor grubstaked a pair of prospectors whose find at Leadville turned him into a millionaire. Cumulative production through 1963 included enormous quantities of silver alongside gold, lead, zinc, and copper. Meanwhile, in 1879, prospectors searching for "another Leadville" followed geological maps showing outcrops of Leadville Limestone to the Aspen area. Ore production stayed small until the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad reached town in 1887, providing economic shipment to smelters. By the time major operations ceased in 1952, the Aspen district had produced 101 million troy ounces of silver, along with 294 tons of lead and 11,000 tons of zinc.

Silver was discovered in the Gilman mining district around 1878 or 1879, but the deeper miners dug, the more zinc they encountered -- so much that smelters refused to buy the ore. What could have killed the district instead saved it. In 1905, a roaster and magnetic separator were installed to pull out the zinc minerals, turning the problem into an asset. The New Jersey Zinc Company arrived in 1912 and over the following years purchased all the principal mines and the entire townsite. Zinc became the economic backbone until 1931, when collapsing prices forced a pivot back to copper-silver ores. The Eagle Mine remained the state's leading silver producer as late as 1930. By 1964, the district had yielded 64 million troy ounces of silver, 348,000 ounces of gold, 578,000 metric tons of zinc, 114,000 metric tons of lead, and 92,000 metric tons of copper. The mines finally closed in the 1980s.

The Creede district in Mineral County was discovered in 1887 but did not hit its stride as a significant silver producer until 1891. The ore appeared as veins along north-south trending faults and as replacement bodies in the Creede Formation, a Tertiary ash-flow tuff. The mineral cocktail was rich and varied: sphalerite, galena, acanthite, native silver, pyrite, and chalcopyrite. Production through 1983 totaled substantial quantities of silver and gold alongside considerable lead and zinc. Creede represented the tail end of Colorado's great silver era, a final rush before the metal's price collapsed and the prospectors moved on to other pursuits -- or other metals entirely.

Today, Colorado's silver comes not from dedicated silver mines but as a byproduct of gold extraction. The largest current source is the Cripple Creek and Victor Gold Mine, a large open-pit heap leach operation near Victor, Colorado, owned by Newmont Mining Corporation. The mine produced silver as a secondary output as recently as 2006. The shift from primary to byproduct status captures the arc of Colorado silver in miniature: once the state's defining resource, fought over and legislated about, silver now rides along quietly in the shadow of gold. But the landscape remembers. From Georgetown to Gilman, Aspen to Creede, the old mine works and tailings piles mark where Colorado staked its name -- briefly, proudly -- as the Silver State.