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History of Colorado, the first inhabitants of what
was to become the State of
Colorado were the
American Indians. The earliest explorers of
European extraction to visit the area were
Spanish explorers. During the period 1832 to
1856 a number of traders, trappers, and settlers
including the
French and the Americans established
trading posts and small
settlements along the
Arkansas River, and on the
South Platte near
the Front Range.
Prominent trading posts were
Bent's Fort and
Fort Pueblo
on the Arkansas and Fort
St. Vrain on the South Platte. The organization
of the Colorado Territory included land from the
western portion of Kansas, the
eastern portion of Utah
Territory, the southwestern portion of
Nebraska Territory,
and a small portion of northeastern
New Mexico Territory
on February 28, 1861.
Territory of Colorado
The
Territory of Colorado
was a historic, organized
territory of the United States
that existed between 1861 and
1876. Its boundaries were identical to
the current State of Colorado. The
territory ceased to exist when Colorado was admitted to the
Union as a state on August 1,
1876. The territory was organized in the
wake of the 1859
Pike's Peak Gold Rush,
which had brought the first large concentration of white
settlement to the region. The organic
act creating the territory was passed by
Congress and signed by
President James Buchanan on
February 28, 1861,
during the secessions by Southern
states that precipitated the
American Civil War. The organization of the territory
helped solidify Union
control over a mineral rich area of the
Rocky Mountains. Statehood
was regarded as fairly imminent, but territorial ambitions
for statehood were thwarted at the end of
1865 by a veto by President
Andrew Johnson. Statehood for
the territory was a recurring issue during the
Ulysses Grant administration,
with Grant advocating statehood against a less willing
Congress during Reconstruction.
Colorado becomes a state
President
Ulysses Grant declared Colorado a state on August 1,
1876. One century after the birth of the nation, Colorado
became known as the "Centennial State." The borders of the
new state coincided with the borders established for the
Colorado Territory. Women won
the right to vote in Colorado in 1893. Colorado was the
first state in the union to grant this right to women
through a popular election. (Wyoming approved the right
of women to vote in 1869 through a vote of the territorial
legislature.) Governor Davis
H. Waite campaigned for the Constitutional amendment
granting women the right to vote in Colorado. Governor Waite
is also noted as one of the few elected officials ever to
call out the national
guard to protect miners from a force raised by mine
owners. Governor Waite belonged to the
Populist Party.
Mining in Colorado
Participants in the Pike's
Peak Gold Rush of 1855 were called
Fifty-Niners, and many of the new
arrivals settled in the Denver
area. Gold in paying quantities was also discovered in the
Central City area, and
by 1860 the population of Central City was 60,000. In 1879,
silver was discovered in
Leadville, resulting in the
Colorado Silver Boom.
Many early
mining efforts were cooperative ventures. However, as
easy-to-reach surface deposits played out, miners
increasingly turned to
hard rock mining.
Such industrial operations required greater capital, and the
economic concept of mineral rights
resulted in periodic conflicts between the mine owners, and
the miners who increasingly sold their labor to work in the
mines.
As the
mines were dug deeper, they became more dangerous, and the
work more arduous. In the 1890s many Colorado miners began
to form unions in order to protect themselves. The mine
operators often formed mine owners' associations in
response, setting up the conditions for a conflict. Notable
labor disputes between hard rock miners and the mine
operators included the
Cripple
Creek strike of 1894 and the
Colorado Labor Wars of
1903-05.
Coal mining in Colorado
began soon after the first settlers arrived. Although the
discovery of coal did not cause boom cycles as did the
precious metals, the early coal mining industry also
established the conditions for violent confrontations
between miners and mine owners. The usual issues were wages,
hours, and working conditions. Early coal mining in Colorado
was extremely dangerous, and the state had one of the
highest death rates in the nation. Coal miners also resented
having to pay for safety work such as timbering the mines,
and they were sometimes paid in scrip that had value only in
the company store.
A strike in
1913 resulted in the 1914 Ludlow
massacre. Another coal strike in 1927 is best known for
the first Columbine
massacre. In 1933, federal legislation for the first
time allowed all Colorado coal miners to join unions without
fear of retaliation.
Like all
resource extraction, mining is a boom
or bust industry, and over the years many small towns were
established, then abandoned when the ore ran out, the market
collapsed, or another resource became available. There were
once more than a hundred coal mines in the area north of
Denver and east of Boulder. They began to close when natural
gas lines arrived. Coal and precious metals are still mined
in Colorado, but the mining industries have changed
dramatically in recent decades.
Old industry gives way to new:
tourism and recreation
Some hard
rock mining communities such as
Aspen, Telluride, and
Cripple Creek have
found new life as ski resorts,
cultural centers, or gambling towns;
others never recovered and became
ghost towns.
Colorado rejects the Olympics
In 1972,
Colorado became the only state to reject the award as the
site of the Olympic Games after
they had been granted. The
International
Olympic Committee relocated the
1976 Winter Olympics to
Innsbruck,
Austria after Colorado voters rejected a bond issue to
raise money for expenses related to hosting the event. No
venue had rejected the award before nor has any venue since.
Historic Native American tribes
-
Apache — Inhabited the
eastern plains in
the 18th century, then migrated southward to
Texas, New
Mexico, and Arizona, leaving
a void on the plains that was filled by the Arapaho and
Cheyenne from the east.
-
Arapaho —
Algonquian-speaking
tribe that migrated westward to the base of the
Rocky Mountains in the
late 19th century and settled on the
piedmont and the
eastern plains.
They were relocated entirely out of Colorado in 1865
following the Colorado War.
-
Cheyenne — Closely related to
the Arapaho, and spoke a similar language. Like the
Arapaho, they migrated westward in the 18th century to
the base of the Rockies. They often lived in bands
interspersed among the Arapaho, and were also relocated
out of Colorado in the 1860s.
-
Shoshoni — they inhabited
intermountain valleys along the north edge of the state,
especially in the Yampa River
valley, up through the late 19th century. Areas included
North Park and
Browns Park.
-
Ute — an established tribe in
the Rocky Mountains for
many centuries. They often clashed with the Arapaho and
Cheyenne, and resisted the encroachment of these tribes
into the mountains. Until the 1880s, the Ute controlled
nearly all of Colorado west of the
continental divide, a
situation that eroded after the silver boom of 1879.
After clashing with white settlers in the 1880s in the
Ute War, they were nearly
entirely relocated out of the state into
Utah, except for a small reservation in southwestern
Colorado.
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