Larimer's plan to promote his new town worked almost immediately, and by the following spring the western Kansas Territory along the South Platte was swarming with miners digging in river bottoms in what became known as the Colorado Gold Rush.
Congressional grant of territorial status for the region was delayed by the slavery issue, and a deadlock between Democrats, who controlled the Senate, and the antislavery Republicans, who gained control of the House of Representatives in 1859.