Go to the mobile version of this Web site.

Login | Contact Us | Site Map | Paid archives | Electronic edition | Subscription Questions | Extras

Denver @ 150: History sifts fact from fable

Bill Gallo, Special to the Rocky

Published November 20, 2008 at 4:29 p.m.
Updated November 21, 2008 at 1:15 p.m.

Text size  
Former Denver Mayor Robert Speer

Photo by Colorado Historical Society

Former Denver Mayor Robert Speer

The first train to go through the Moffat Tunnel on Feb. 25, 1928.

Photo by Colorado Railroad Museum

The first train to go through the Moffat Tunnel on Feb. 25, 1928.

Related Links

Related Stories

More Denver @ 150

More stories »

"History would be a wonderful thing," Leo Tolstoy once observed, "if it were true."

Still, the untidy collision of fable and fact — punctuated by violence and greed, folly, vision and heroism — that comprises the 150-year history of Denver is splendid to behold. Even in miniature.

Here are six pivotal events in the Mile High City's struggle for selfhood. Our principal collaborator in these choices is Bill Convery, who in March became Colorado's new state historian. A fourth-generation native son, the 39-year-old Convery holds two history degrees from the University of Colorado and a doctorate from the University of New Mexico. He is writing a biography of Col. John Chivington, villain of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, to be published next year.

Otherwise, these vignettes reflect a consensus of five historical narratives published between 1901 and 1989.

1858: Larimer jumps a claim

Denver's founding moment actually came by default. The most attractive building site along Cherry Creek, at Auraria, already had been snatched up by gold prospectors from Georgia, who were happy to defend their claim with six-shooters blazing.

So William Larimer, a hard-nosed real estate speculator who'd developed a series of frontier settlements, instead put the heat on a fellow named Charlie Nichols. The unfortunate Nichols was the lone remnant of a group of Kansas gold-seekers who'd laid out a second town, St. Charles, around what is now 15th and Larimer streets, and then gone home.

"The folklore," historian Bill Convery said, "tells us that Larimer made Nichols an offer he couldn't refuse: 'Join us, or we'll take you down to the river and string you up.'"

He joined.

Thus, the birth of "Denver City," named for territorial governor James W. Denver because the opportunistic Larimer believed it would gain him political favor. Little did he know that Denver recently had resigned from office.

Nonetheless, Larimer made a fortune "mining the miners" — building stores, selling tools and taking the occasional shot of whiskey with his grizzled customers in the fledgling town's rough grog shops.

1870: The Iron Horse

Living in the middle of the continent and the middle of nowhere, pioneer Denverites were desperately aware that the railroad would be their only lifeline. But when Union Pacific surveyors searched for a route through the daunting Rocky Mountains in the 1860s, they got caught in a killing blizzard on Berthoud Pass and retreated.

Better to skirt the mountains and run the transcontinental tracks through Cheyenne, railroad men concluded. Before long, scores of key Denver businessmen migrated north. After all, Cheyenne would now be the capital of the Rocky Mountain West.

But Denver stalwarts such as John Evans and Rocky Mountain News founder William Byers persisted. They got a 100-mile Denver Pacific spur line built between the two cities and put Denver on life support. And when the Kansas Pacific Railroad arrived, almost simultaneously, from the eastern plains, the die was cast: Enabled by rail, Denver's access to water supplies and to gold and silver in the hinterlands and its milder farming climate combined to establish its regional dominance.

In 1870, Denver had 4,720 residents. By the time Union Station opened in 1880, there were 35,000. By 1890, 107,000.

But history begets irony: Only last month, The New York Times reported on mixed reactions in sleepy Cheyenne (population 55,000) to the specter of "Denver-like growth" as our city's burgeoning suburbs creep ever northward toward the Wyoming border.

1902-1912: Paris on the Platte

Long a plaything of Eastern banks, Denver in the 1890s was also subject to the whims of Colorado itself, which "chipped away at its sovereignty," in Convery's phrase, by setting up state-run public service commissions in the city. This greed and Gilded Age patronage vastly increased the political tension between Denver and surrounding communities.

Then in 1902, Colorado voters awarded Denver home rule through the Rush Amendment, the germ of a new city and county's emerging identity. Two years later, a powerful political boss named Robert Speer was elected mayor. He relished Election Day chicanery and had long-standing alliances with the underworld and industrial monopolies.

But Speer also harbored a soaring vision of Denver as "Paris on the Platte." As America's "City Beautiful" movement came into flower, "Speer saw an oasis in the Great American Desert," Convery said. A century ago, he saw a green city.

"His is the story of corruption in the name of public good," Convery said. "Many people got rich through graft under Speer, but he was not one of them because that was not his interest: He held onto power (for 10 years) to fulfill his dream of a beautiful 20th century city."

1937 forward: Water, water, over there

In the arid American West, an old bromide proclaims, "Water flows uphill toward money."

So it has been with Denver, always wetter than Cheyenne and Phoenix and, as the population grew, single-minded in its mission to quench the burgeoning local thirst. The defining moment for a city on the make came in 1937 when the new, 6.2-mile transmountain Moffat Tunnel in north-central Colorado began to divert the flow of water eastward from the Western Slope.

As the unscrupulous oilman did in the movie There Will Be Blood, the powerful Denver Water Department stuck a huge straw into what was essentially someone else's liquid property.

"Eighty percent of Colorado's water is on the Western Slope," Convery said. "But 80 percent of the population lives along the Front Range. That is possible only because we sip water from the other side of the Continental Divide."

In 1964, the creation of Dillon Reservoir and the Roberts Tunnel doubled Denver's water supply, and the city began selling the surplus to the suburbs. But urban sprawl had its limits — especially when it came to watering the lawn. The 1989 rejection by voters of the controversial Two Forks Dam project turned down the spigot, and the growing political clout of Western Slope communities such as Vail and Grand Junction means that the drinks in Denver are no longer on the house.

1980: 'Imagine a Great City'

Pioneer Denverites once slaughtered American Indians with no thought for their humanity. In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan enjoyed a brief but potent reign. But amid the postwar population boom of the late 1940s (when the U.S. government moved many federal agency branch headquarters here), Denver began reinventing itself as a tolerant, forward-looking city at least partly dedicated to the ideal of equal opportunity.

Mayor Quigg Newton, a young war veteran elected in 1948, signaled reformist trends. Hispanic political activism in the 1960s and the rejection by Colorado voters of the 1976 Winter Olympic Games, largely on environmental grounds, advanced a new agenda.

But the watershed moment probably was the 1983 election of Federico Peña, a Hispanic from Brownsville, Texas, as Denver's 37th mayor. Almost 40 percent of all Denver residents have Hispanic ties, from great-grandfathers in the beet fields to newly arrived immigrants from Sinaloa.

Often compared to Speer, Peña undertook ambitious projects of his own — not the least of which was Denver International Airport. His refrain: "Imagine a Great City."

Then, in 1991, black candidates Norm Early and Wellington Webb duked it out for the mayoralty, despite the fact that only 11 percent of Denverites were black.

The fact did not go unnoticed during this summer's Democratic National Convention, held right here — the event that set into motion the election of the nation's first black president.

1990s: We are the champions

Denver's cultural assets — a good symphony orchestra, enriching museums, galleries and theaters, a 31-year-old film festival, terrific jazz and rock clubs — have long been overshadowed by the swagger of sport.

Since 1996 the Mile High City has been one of the few U.S. cities to boast big-league teams in all five major sports (yes, soccer counts, too). Among local spectacles, there's never been anything quite like the thunder of 78,000 Broncos fans bellowing for the Oakland Raiders' blood late in the fourth quarter.

Like religion and common crisis, sport brings people together. But Denver's teams — first and still foremost the Broncos, founded in 1960 — have played an especially powerful role in the shared identity of the city. Consider John Elway, as close to a living god as this place has ever known, hoisting the Lombardi Trophy after winning that first Super Bowl.

"No more were they the lovable losers with the brown and yellow socks," Convery said. "They were for real."

The Colorado Avalanche has won a pair of Stanley Cups, and last fall the Colorado Rockies unexpectedly reached the World Series, worshipped by crazed fans during a magical month dubbed "Rocktober."

Crucial moments in the history of a city?

Absolutely. Just ask longtime Broncos season-ticket-holder Jim Morales.

"I live and die with them," he said. "And so does this whole town."

Comments

  • November 21, 2008

    11:29 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    Liamstuart writes:

    Former Gov. Richard Lamm's book of several years ago was--and remains--timely, i.e., Colorado continues to be a boom or bust economy but seldom resides in between the two extremes. When I moved here in the mid-'60's the independent oil men were either buying Lear jets (plural, not singular) or filing bankruptcy, nothing in between. Supposedly, it's an ancient Chinese curse that says, "May you live in interesting times" and, boy, do we ever continue to do that!

  • November 21, 2008

    12:18 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    davehughes writes:

    Well, if the 'spin' both Bill Gallo, who wrote the above, and your 'collaborator', Bill Convery, puts what the above implies, I am afraid those of us south of that overgrown cow town of Denver, in 'Old Colorado City' (currently the westside of Colorado Springs) won't bother to read your RMN version of Colorado's early history.

    First of all, the assertion by Gallo that Colorado Territorial "Pioneer Denverites once slaughtered American Indians with no thought for their humanity" utterly ignores the reality that both the Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians managed to 'slaughter' hundreds of settlers who came west. And even sealed off Denver from the east by their continual attacks on travellers. Which even Col Chivington following the clear orders of General Curtis to 'punish' both tribes at Sand Creek, did not stop their depredations. In fact right on our family ranch on Comanche Creek east of Kiowa the Arapahoe killed and mutilated Henrietta Dietemann and her 5 year old son. And killed and mutilated three young boys right here where Colorado Springs now stands. Both after Sand Creek. So some of us who are also 3 and 4 generation Coloradoan's don't buy into the 'politically correct' version of history that makes all the settlers bad and all the Indians good.

    Revisionist history is the fad these days. Sorry to see the Rocky Mountain News be a party to it.

  • November 21, 2008

    1:32 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    The_Punnisher writes:

    Your own archives carry much more than brief comment about Denver and the KKK......

    Tolstoy was right. And it looks like the RMN will try to bury the past again...

    " Those that do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it "

    -Santayana

    And the DPD keeps repeating theirs...

    " We just have to teach those ______ who's the boss in this town "

  • November 23, 2008

    10:39 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    denverrma writes:

    RMN....still cant get any of the 'Denver at 150' slide shows to open in Firefox or Internet Explorer.

  • November 25, 2008

    7:54 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    VaughnKentRoper writes:

    Thank you for the article on Denver at 150. It would have been good also to see
    Maxine Kurtz included in your list of 150 prominent Denverites.

    To quote the Wikipedia entry:
    Maxine Kurtz (born 1921) is an American city planner. She became head of the Denver
    Planning Office in 1947 and was the first woman to organize and direct the planning
    department of a major American city. She is also known for persuading the government
    of Denver and its neighboring suburbs to enter a historic water sharing agreement
    in return for concessions in sanitation, zoning and building.[1]

    Kurtz is the author of two books about her experiences in city planning and human
    rights:

    Invisible Cage, A Memoir (2005)
    City of Destiny: Denver in the Making, with Ralph Conant

    Thank you,
    Vaughn Kent Roper,
    Denver