Robert Womack was certain there was gold in Poverty Gulch.

He had come to the area near Cripple Creek — so named after a cow fell in and broke its leg — as a young boy with his family to homestead.

He had very little education beyond his upbringing on the ranch, but he knew one thing for sure: despite its name, Poverty Gulch was sitting on a rich vein of gold ore. He just needed to find it.

For 15 years, Womack followed creek beds and dug hundreds of prospecting holes. He told everyone he knew he was destined to find gold. Unfortunately, he also drank a lot of whiskey, so no one took him seriously. He even earned the nickname “Crazy Bob.”

In 1878, he unearthed a gold nugget. With no seed money of his own, he needed investors to develop his claim. However, his reputation kept him from finding them in the Colorado Springs bars he haunted. It also didn’t help that a group of con men had salted a prospect hole in the area, posted bogus claim signs and called the newspapers.

Womack and others exposed the scam, but it became that much harder to find people with deep pockets willing to invest in prospecting.

It took Womack years to find someone to grubstake his claim. He was eventually able to convince his dentist to take out a loan against his dental equipment.

One day in 1890, Womack dug a narrow shaft with his pick and shovel 30 feet into Tenderfoot Hill to find the gold ore. He named it the El Paso Lode, and this time people took notice. According to a Saturday Evening Post article, he came whooping into Colorado Springs, firing his gun and crowing about his discovery, “Crazy Bob” style. To gain investors, he displayed gold samples in a Colorado Springs department store window and caught the attention of geologist Ed De laVergne and Count James Pourtales. The two invested in Womack and created the Cripple Creek Mining District.

At that time there were fewer than 500 people in Cripple Creek. Three years after Crazy Bob’s discovery, there were 10,000 inhabitants. The town’s unpaved main street was lined with tents, lean-tos and other shelters to house miners, prospectors and gamblers. Saloons, dance halls and gaming houses sprung up seemingly overnight. All told, the Cripple Creek gold rush produced 28 mining millionaires.

Bob Womack, however, was not one of them.

One story tells that he gambled his claim away in one of the gaming houses. Another says he used the money to pay a hospital bill. He might have sold his share to his dentist. He might have sold his claim for $500 and a bottle of whiskey one night in a Colorado Springs saloon. Legend says he didn’t care much about the money anyway, only the vindication from those who thought he was crazy that the vein of gold ore he searched so hard for actually existed, ironically, in Poverty Gulch.

After returning from riches to rags, Womack did odd jobs for his sister at her boarding house. His friend and fellow prospector Winfield Scott Stratton gave him money periodically to keep him afloat. He suffered a stroke in 1904 and spent years partially paralyzed and bedridden, until his death in 1909. He is buried in the Womack family plot at Evergreen Cemetery.

It’s been estimated that more than $500 million worth of gold was gleaned from the Cripple Creek hills during the gold rush triggered by Womack’s discovery. Womack’s own El Paso Lode ultimately yielded $5 million. Many benefitted from the industry, and Cripple Creek morphed from a small town to a boom town.

Crazy Bob Womack might have died penniless, but his lifelong search for the gold he knew was hidden in Cripple Creek enriched many lives. And darn it all, he was right all along.

Katherine O’Neal is a teacher and writer who has lived in the Cheyenne area for 30 years. Contact Katherine with comments and ideas for her weekly column at sharingcheyenne@gazettecommunitynews.com.