History of Colorado

Based on Wikipedia: History of Colorado

In 1858, a man named William Greeneberry Russell—everyone called him Green—led a group of Cherokee gold seekers from Georgia to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. They found about twenty troy ounces of gold near a creek, roughly the weight of four nickels stacked together times a hundred. That discovery would draw a hundred thousand people to the region within three years, transforming a vast wilderness into what we now call Colorado.

But this story really begins much, much earlier.

The First Coloradans

Humans have lived in what is now Colorado for at least thirteen thousand five hundred years. Some evidence suggests the number might be closer to thirty-seven thousand years. To put that in perspective: when the great pyramids of Egypt were built around forty-five hundred years ago, people had already been living in Colorado for at least nine thousand years.

The eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains served as a kind of ancient highway. As early peoples spread throughout the Americas, they followed this natural corridor, protected from harsh weather by the mountains while still having access to the plains for hunting. Archaeologists have found artifacts at the Lindenmeier site in northern Colorado dating to roughly 8720 BCE—tools and weapons left behind by people who were hunting giant bison and mammoths in the waning years of the last Ice Age.

By the time European explorers arrived, the region was home to a remarkable diversity of Native American nations. The Ancestral Puebloans built elaborate cliff dwellings in the mesas of southwestern Colorado, structures so sophisticated that some contained hundreds of rooms. The Ute Nation, whose ancestors had arrived perhaps two thousand years earlier, controlled nearly everything west of the Continental Divide—that invisible line running along the mountain peaks where water either flows toward the Pacific or the Atlantic.

On the eastern plains, the picture was more fluid. The Apache had once dominated this territory, but they migrated southward in the eighteenth century, pulled toward what is now Texas and New Mexico. Into that vacuum moved the Arapaho and Cheyenne, both Algonquian-speaking peoples who had themselves been pushed westward by European expansion along the East Coast. These two nations became so closely intertwined that their bands often lived intermingled, like neighbors sharing the same apartment building.

The Comanche roamed the southeastern plains, a Numic-speaking people closely related to the Shoshone. They had acquired horses from the Spanish and became legendary horsemen, transforming themselves from foot-bound hunters into the dominant military power of the southern Great Plains. The Shoshone meanwhile inhabited the northern valleys, particularly along the Yampa River.

The Spanish Arrive

The first Europeans to enter Colorado were Spanish conquistadors pushing north from Mexico. In 1598, Juan de Oñate established the Spanish province of Santa Fe de Nuevo México among the pueblo communities of the Rio Grande. Colorado became, at least on Spanish maps, part of this northern frontier of New Spain.

But maps and reality were different things entirely.

The Spanish traded with the Native Americans through an arrangement called the Comercio Comanchero—the Comanche Trade—but actual Spanish settlement north of the Arkansas River proved nearly impossible. In 1787, Juan Bautista de Anza tried to establish a settlement called San Carlos near present-day Pueblo. It failed quickly. This single aborted attempt represents the entirety of Spanish settlement efforts in what would become Colorado.

The problem was simple: the territory was vast, remote, and already occupied by peoples who had no particular interest in becoming Spanish subjects.

Three Nations Claiming One Land

In 1803, the United States bought a massive swath of North America from France in the Louisiana Purchase—one of history's great real estate deals, at roughly four cents per acre. The Americans believed this purchase gave them claim to the eastern flank of the Rocky Mountains.

Spain disagreed. They had been there first, they argued, and had never sold that land to France.

Three years later, in 1806, a young Army lieutenant named Zebulon Pike led a reconnaissance expedition into this disputed territory. Pike is now famous for the mountain that bears his name—Pikes Peak—though he never actually climbed it. Instead, his expedition ended in an embarrassing fashion. Spanish cavalry arrested Pike and his men in the San Luis Valley, marched them to Chihuahua in northern Mexico, and then expelled them from the country. It was not America's most glorious moment in westward expansion.

The legal muddle continued. In 1819, the Adams-Onís Treaty resolved some territorial disputes: the United States gave up its claim to land south and west of the Arkansas River, while Spain ceded Florida. Two years later, Mexico won its independence from Spain through the Treaty of Córdoba, and suddenly inherited all of Spain's territorial claims in the region.

For the next few decades, Colorado existed in a kind of geopolitical limbo—claimed by multiple nations, effectively controlled by none of them except the Native Americans who actually lived there.

The Mountain Men

Between 1832 and 1856, a different kind of European presence began to take shape. Traders, trappers, and a handful of settlers established outposts along the Arkansas River and the South Platte near the Front Range—that dramatic wall of mountains rising from the plains.

Bent's Fort and Fort Pueblo sat along the Arkansas. Fort Saint Vrain stood on the South Platte. These weren't military installations in any meaningful sense. They were trading posts, commercial enterprises where Native Americans exchanged buffalo robes for manufactured goods. The relationship was primarily economic, not military.

This era produced the legendary mountain men—figures like Kit Carson, who would later become so famous that his name is attached to a Colorado city, a national forest, and countless streets across the American West. These men learned to survive in the wilderness, often adopting Native American customs, sometimes marrying into tribes. They occupied a liminal space between two worlds that had not yet fully collided.

The War Changes Everything

In 1846, the United States went to war with Mexico. The conflict lasted two years and ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. Mexico, defeated and humiliated, surrendered its entire northern frontier—roughly half its total territory, including what would become California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona, half of New Mexico, and the southern portion of Colorado.

The newly acquired land was carved into territories. The Territory of New Mexico and the Territory of Utah came first in 1850, followed by the Territory of Kansas and the Territory of Nebraska in 1854. What is now Colorado was split among these four jurisdictions, a geographic afterthought.

Most westward migrants avoided the rugged Rockies entirely. They followed the North Platte and Sweetwater rivers to South Pass in Wyoming, heading for Oregon's farmland, the Mormon settlements in Utah, or California's goldfields. Colorado seemed to offer nothing but obstacles.

Then, on April 9, 1851, a group of Hispanic settlers from Taos, New Mexico, established the village of San Luis de la Culebra. It remains Colorado's first permanent European settlement.

Gold in the Streams

The discovery that would transform Colorado into a destination rather than an obstacle came almost accidentally.

On June 22, 1850, a wagon train bound for California crossed the South Platte River. Lewis Ralston dipped his gold pan into a small stream—and pulled up nearly five dollars' worth of gold in a single scoop. That was roughly a quarter of a troy ounce, a significant find. A man named John Lowery Brown, keeping a diary of the journey from Georgia, recorded the moment with characteristic understatement: "Lay bye. Gold found."

Ralston continued to California—the known goldfields beckoned—but he didn't forget that stream. Eight years later, he returned with the Green Russell party. They founded a settlement called Auraria, which would later be absorbed into Denver City. The Colorado gold rush had begun.

In 1858, several parties of prospectors began finding gold throughout the South Platte River Valley. The nuggets were small, but rumors spread like wildfire. That summer, a group of Spanish-speaking prospectors from New Mexico worked a placer deposit—a concentration of gold in stream sediments—about five miles above Cherry Creek.

The next year, Green Russell and Sam Bates found a more substantial deposit near Little Dry Creek in what is now Englewood. Twenty troy ounces. This was the first significant gold discovery in the Rocky Mountain region, and it triggered what became known as the Pike's Peak Gold Rush.

The name was geographically misleading—Pikes Peak is nowhere near the major gold deposits—but it captured the public imagination. An estimated one hundred thousand gold seekers flooded into the region over the following three years. They came with handcarts and wagons, carrying everything they owned, many with "Pikes Peak or Bust" painted on their canvas covers.

From Rush to Territory

The placer deposits along the rivers played out quickly. Easy gold rarely lasts. But miners soon discovered something more valuable: hard rock deposits of gold, silver, and other minerals buried in the mountain flanks. This wasn't gold you could pan from a stream. This was ore that had to be dug from solid rock, crushed, and processed. It required capital, machinery, and organized labor.

The miners who arrived expecting to strike it rich with a pan and a pickaxe found themselves becoming wage laborers instead.

On October 24, 1859, the settlers organized a Provisional Government of the Territory of Jefferson—named, presumably, for Thomas Jefferson. But the federal government never sanctioned it. The territory existed in legal limbo, its citizens collecting taxes and passing laws with no official standing whatsoever.

This informal arrangement lasted until 1861, when Congress organized the official Territory of Colorado. The timing was not coincidental. Southern states were seceding from the Union, and the approaching Civil War made Colorado's mineral wealth strategically important. The organic act creating the territory was signed by President James Buchanan on February 28, 1861—just weeks before the bombardment of Fort Sumter would plunge the nation into four years of bloodshed.

The territory's boundaries were drawn exactly as they remain today: a rectangle roughly three hundred eighty miles wide and two hundred eighty miles tall, geometric precision imposed on a landscape that cares nothing for straight lines.

Statehood Delayed

Colorado seemed destined for rapid statehood. During the 1864 presidential election, the Republican-controlled Congress was eager to add two more Republican senators and three more electoral votes for President Lincoln's reelection. Territorial Governor John Evans lobbied Congress successfully for an enabling act.

But the territory's residents voted it down. In a population of around thirty-five thousand, only six thousand one hundred ninety-two people voted, and a majority rejected the proposed state constitution. They tried again. That attempt also failed. At the end of 1865, President Andrew Johnson vetoed a third attempt.

The issue kept surfacing during the Ulysses Grant administration. Grant supported statehood, but Congress—preoccupied with Reconstruction in the defeated South—proved reluctant to act.

The Colorado War

While politicians in Washington debated statehood, violence erupted on the plains.

The Colorado War lasted from 1863 to 1865, pitting United States forces against a loose alliance of the Kiowa, Comanche, Arapaho, and Cheyenne nations. The Arapaho and Cheyenne were particularly close allies—unusual, because the various tribes of the Great Plains were notorious for fighting among themselves as much as against outsiders.

The war's most infamous episode occurred in November 1864 at a place called Sand Creek.

Colonel John Chivington led a force of Colorado militia against a Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment that had been promised protection. The people there believed they were at peace. Chivington's men killed between seventy and one hundred sixty-three people, most of them women, children, and elderly men. The soldiers mutilated bodies and took scalps as trophies.

The American press initially hailed Sand Creek as a great victory. Then the truth emerged. Congressional hearings exposed the massacre for what it was: genocidal brutality against people who had surrendered and been promised safety. The resulting scandal marked a watershed in white attitudes toward the Indian Wars. It did not stop the wars—in 1868, George Armstrong Custer attacked Arapaho and Cheyenne camps at the Battle of Washita River—but it complicated the narrative of noble civilization triumphing over savagery.

The Colorado War ended with the removal of the Kiowa, Comanche, Arapaho, and Cheyenne from Colorado to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma. The Ute, who had often clashed with these plains nations, remained—but their turn would come.

The Centennial State

On March 3, 1875, Congress finally passed an enabling act specifying the requirements for Colorado statehood. The territory met them, and on August 1, 1876—exactly twenty-eight days after the centennial of American independence—President Grant signed Proclamation 230 admitting Colorado as the thirty-eighth state.

The timing earned Colorado its nickname: the Centennial State.

The new state's borders matched those of the old territory, unchanged to this day. And seventeen years later, Colorado would make more history: on November 7, 1893, Colorado became the first state in the nation to grant women the right to vote through a popular referendum. Wyoming had extended voting rights to women in 1869, but that had been an act of the territorial legislature. Colorado's women won the vote from the men of the state directly.

Governor Davis Waite, a left-wing Populist, had campaigned for the amendment. A year later, he blamed women voters for his defeat at the polls—an irony that suggests perhaps his support for women's suffrage had been more politically calculated than principled.

Silver and Conflict

In 1879, silver was discovered in Leadville, and Colorado entered another boom cycle. The gold rush settlers had called themselves Fifty-Niners. Now a new wave arrived seeking silver.

The economics of mining had changed fundamentally. The early prospectors had worked cooperatively, sharing claims and splitting finds. But hard rock mining required massive investment: tunnels, ventilation, pumps to remove water, hoisting equipment, ore-processing facilities. Individual prospectors couldn't afford these things. They sold their labor instead, working underground for wages in mines owned by distant investors.

The deeper the mines went, the more dangerous they became. And the more profitable they became for owners, the more resentful the workers grew.

In 1880, Governor Frederick Pitkin declared martial law to suppress a violent mining strike in Leadville. The governor was a Republican. The miners were immigrants and working-class men who had come west hoping to make their fortunes and found themselves instead in industrial servitude.

Through the 1890s, Colorado miners formed unions to protect themselves. The mine operators responded with their own associations. The stage was set for decades of violent conflict.

The Cripple Creek strike of 1894 saw Governor Waite—the same man who championed women's suffrage—call out the state militia not to suppress the miners, but to protect them from a private army raised by the mine owners. It was one of the few times in American history that a state governor used military force on behalf of labor rather than capital.

The Colorado Labor Wars of 1903 and 1904 were not so balanced. State troops and private security forces crushed mining unions across the state. The violence would continue into the twentieth century, culminating in the Ludlow Massacre of 1914, when Colorado National Guard troops and company guards attacked a tent colony of striking coal miners and their families, killing approximately two dozen people including women and children.

The Ute Removal

Through all of this, one Native American nation remained in Colorado: the Ute. They had controlled the western mountains for centuries and had often fought against the plains nations that white settlers also opposed. This made them, at times, reluctant allies of convenience with American forces.

But the silver boom of 1879 brought prospectors and settlers flooding into Ute territory. Chief Ouray and his wife Chipeta worked to maintain peace, but the situation deteriorated rapidly.

In 1879, tensions exploded at the White River Agency in what became known as the Meeker Massacre. Nathan Meeker, the Indian agent assigned to the Ute, had tried to force them to abandon hunting and become farmers. He plowed up their horse-racing track—an act of profound cultural insensitivity that seems almost calculated to provoke. When Ute warriors killed Meeker and ten agency employees, the reaction was swift.

By the 1880s, the Ute were almost entirely relocated to reservations in Utah. Only two small reservations remained in southwestern Colorado—the Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute reservations, which exist to this day.

Coal and Blood

While precious metals created boom-and-bust cycles that captured newspaper headlines, coal mining provided a grimmer, steadier industry. Coal powered the trains that connected Colorado to the nation. Coal heated Denver's homes. Coal fueled the smelters that processed silver and gold ore.

Early coal mining in Colorado was extraordinarily deadly. During the three decades from 1884 to 1914, more than seventeen hundred workers died in Colorado's coal mines. The state had one of the highest mining death rates in the nation.

The conditions that killed miners also infuriated them. They resented having to perform unpaid safety work like timbering the mine tunnels. They chafed at being paid in company scrip—essentially corporate IOUs that could only be spent at company stores, where prices were set by the company. They lived in company towns, rented company housing, and found every aspect of their lives controlled by their employers.

The Colorado Coalfield War of 1913-1914 brought these tensions to their breaking point. When the massacre at Ludlow shocked the nation, it forced Americans to confront the human cost of cheap energy and the brutal lengths to which corporations would go to suppress organized labor.

A Pattern Repeating

The history of Colorado follows a pattern that played out across the American West: indigenous peoples living on the land for millennia; European colonial powers drawing lines on maps they couldn't enforce; a young American nation pushing westward with an appetite for resources; treaties made and broken; fortunes created for a few while the many labored in dangerous conditions; violence resolving what negotiation could not.

Today, Colorado is home to nearly six million people. Denver is a major metropolitan area. The ski resorts of Aspen and Vail attract visitors from around the world. Tech companies have established headquarters along the Front Range. Legal marijuana generates hundreds of millions in tax revenue.

But drive west into the mountains, and you can still find the remnants of those silver boom towns—crumbling headframes over abandoned mine shafts, foundations of buildings that once housed thousands. Visit the Southern Ute reservation near Durango, and you'll find a nation that survived removal and still maintains its cultural identity. Walk the streets of Denver, and you're walking over ground where Lewis Ralston first found gold in 1850, where the Arapaho and Cheyenne once hunted buffalo, where Spanish traders passed through on their way to commerce with the Comanche.

All of that history is still there, layered beneath the present, waiting for anyone curious enough to look.