COLORADO was a sluggish community in December 1941, when Pearl Harbor was attacked and the United States declared war on Japan. The citizens had survived the depression, but their future looked unpromising and they had no particular incentive to improve matters. The state’s population had been stalled at a million or so for a decade. The assessed valuation of its private property was a third less than it had been in 1930. Many of its young people had gone away to make careers elsewhere. No investment capital appeared to be coming in from the East.
But there were some hopeful signs before Pearl Harbor—if improvement induced by war can be called “hopeful.” A federal arms factory was under construction in Denver. Plans had been approved to build a chemical-warfare plant called the Rocky Mountain Arsenal north of Aurora. A trio of Colorado Springs businessmen, Russell Law, Douglas Jardine, and H. Chase Stone, had collected a pot of $28,000 from the city’s chamber of commerce to finance a desperate assault on congressmen and army officials in Washington. The Pikes Peak group was lobbying for a modest training camp costing a million or two on a five-thousand-acre tract of prairie land south of town, which the city was willing to give to the army free.
The assault was desperate because the tourist and health business of Colorado Springs (population, 30,000) had dwindled disastrously and might vanish entirely under gas rationing and other wartime restrictions. The lobbyists roamed Washington loaded down with charts and studies to show how cheap it would be to train a GI in the bracing climate of Pikes Peak and how easy it would be for the army to find housing in a resort with fifteen hundred homes empty and for rent. When Washington officials displayed interest in the possibilities at Pikes Peak, they were sent to the city’s official host, Charles L. Tutt, president of the Broadmoor, who gave them tender care in the hotel. After their working hours of inspection, those weary officials who needed refreshment were introduced to the pre-Volstead Act treasures of the Broadmoor’s creator, the late Spencer Penrose, who had had the wisdom to lay away a few carloads of French wines and Scotch whiskey before Prohibition became law in 1919. Much of this stock was still in storage at the hotel when the onset of World War II began to prevent such delectable imports from reaching the United States.
On December 29, 1941, Colorado Springs was awarded its army installation, to be called Camp Carson in honor of the old trapper and trader Kit Carson who had guided John Charles Fremont around the Front Range region in the 1840s. But Camp Carson was nothing like the modest post that the chamber of commerce men had visualized. Congress appropriated thirty million dollars just to start off. (The assessed valuation of Colorado Springs in 1941 was twenty-eight million.) The camp would extend far south of the gift tract to cover some sixty thousand acres. It was to be populated by thirty-seven thousand soldiers, three thousand mules and horses, platoons of police dogs, and a few thousand prisoners of war. It would have a 6,500-acre subsidiary called Camp Hale for training the proposed Tenth Mountain Infantry Division, a pioneer unit in cold-weather survival and military skiing. Camp Hale would be built at an old sawmill site called Pando on a bulge of Eagle River (pando means “bulge” in Spanish) just over the Continental Divide north of Leadville.
The reactivated 89th Infantry Division moved into Camp Carson in midsummer of 1942. Thereafter, the nation’s military leaders seemed determined to overwhelm the Pikes Peak region with federal largesse. Ent Air Force Base was established that year in Colorado Springs, and the municipal airport became Peterson Field, where bombing squadrons were trained. (The name was in memory of Lt. Edward J. Peterson, who died at the field in a crash of a P-38.) Ent evolved into CONAD (Continental Air Defense Command), and in 1957 CONAD became NORAD (North American Air Defense Command), a command post of indescribable complexity for the joint defense against air attack of the United States and Canada. NORAD was the nerve center where commanding generals received reports from three hundred and fifty aircraft-detection points scattered throughout the northern hemisphere. In 1966 it was moved for safety’s sake into a vast hole bored into the south end of Cheyenne Mountain at a cost of $150 million. This Combat Operations Center—nicknamed “the Cave”—consists today of three three-story buildings sitting on vibration-proof springs, eight smaller structures, a power plant, and a big water-storage area. Here two thousand specialists in communications manage a vast array of electronic brains, sensors, and tracking systems to guard the air space of two nations.
Long before NORAD arrived, Colorado Springs had lost its forlorn, empty-bed look and was drowning in prosperity brought by Camp Carson. The rattlesnakes and jackrabbits that had inhabited the prairie bordering the town had fled. The land was covered with housing developments, built or frantically abuilding. The undermanned Colorado Springs police department tried hard to maintain a semblance of law and order among the frolicsome young GIs from Carson and their girls out for a good time on Saturday nights. And even as residents wondered what had happened to the place they had known a decade earlier as Little London—signifying refinement and repose—the city’s boosters were at it again. This time they aimed to convince the U. S. Air Force that Colorado Springs was the best place for its proposed Air Force Academy, which Congress had authorized early in 1954.
It seemed to be the most impossible of dreams. Colorado Springs could hardly expect to win this plum of military plums on top of the two huge institutions—$400 million worth of them—that it had received already. Four hundred other cities had squads of buttonholers in Washington equally loaded down with bales of convincing charts. And still the Pikes Peakers lobbied away. Perhaps they hoped that President Dwight Eisenhower would endorse their petition. The president’s wife had grown up in Denver, and he had spent much time fly-fishing on the trout streams of the state. One of his golf partners, Governor Dan Thornton, had induced the Colorado legislature to budget a million dollars with which to buy land for the academy.
In the late spring of 1954, Colonel Charles Lindbergh and the rest of the Air Force Academy selection committee reduced its list of possible sites to three—Alton, Illinois; Lake Geneva, Wisconsin; and Colorado Springs. And then the impossible came to pass. On June 15, 1954, a 17,500-acre site north of Colorado Springs was designated for the new service institution. Four years later the first cadets moved into that shining center of steel, aluminum, glass, and marble poised on a buttresslike mesa spreading away from the Rampart Range. Four-lane highways curved through the pines of the area, tying the campus and football stadium to communities for faculty and service personnel. Today the $200 million academy draws more visitors than any other single attraction in the Rocky Mountains.
While Colorado Springs struggled to adjust to the academy, to a permanent Fort Carson (1954) in place of Camp Carson, and to a civilian population that would increase from 30,000 to more than 200,000, the rest of Colorado was growing also with the benign aid of federal money. Water began flowing to farms of the South Platte valley through the Alva B. Adams Tunnel of the Big T in 1946. Agriculture flourished generally as dry-land farmers, remembering the dust bowl, took better care of their topsoil. The navy established Buckley Field in Denver in 1942. Lowry Field for training aerial photographers was enlarged, along with the Denver Mint, U. S. Customs House, and Fitzsimons Hospital. In the late 1940s the Denver Arms Plant was converted into Denver Federal Center, an immense grouping of bureaucracies where workers in a thousand offices handled a staggering variety of government services. Meanwhile, the nearby city of Boulder prospered with the arrival of a branch of the National Bureau of Standards, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and the increase of student enrollment at the University of Colorado by 1950 to ten thousand students, more than the total college enrollment in Colorado a decade earlier.
The propinquity of training camps, airfields, and intelligence units like The Cave at Pikes Peak attracted to the Front Range cities a host of ultramodern enterprises such as Martin Marietta Corporation and Sunstrand Corporation (aerospace plants) in Denver; Ball Brothers Research Corporation (orbiting solar observatories) in Boulder; and Hewlett Packard Company (electronic measuring equipment) and Kaman Sciences Corporation (nuclear physics research), both in Colorado Springs. The Federal Railroad Administration established a High Speed Ground Test Center near Pueblo. At Rocky Flats between Denver and Boulder, a plant was built for the Atomic Energy Commission to treat plutonium for use in devices designed to blow up the world if necessary. Assurances by the AEC that nothing radioactively or explosively dangerous was going on at Rocky Flats did not dispel the anxiety of residents in the area.
World War II produced one mining triumph with so little fanfare that few Coloradans were impressed by it. Back in 1879 when Horace Tabor was riding high, a promoter named Charles Senter staked a presumed gold-ore claim near Leadville on Fremont Pass (11,318 feet) adjoining Bartlett Mountain. The ore was identified later as molybdenum, and the Climax Molybdenum Company (American Metal Climax Incorporated, today) was formed to meet a modest demand for the metal in light-bulb filaments. In the 1920s, steel makers back East tried it to harden their product with excellent results. During World War II, huge amounts of such hardened steel were needed for many kinds of armament. Molybdenum production from Bartlett Mountain leaped to twenty-eight million pounds in a single war year. Today half the world’s molybdenum comes from this extraordinary rock pile two and a half miles above sea level. The mountain appears to be composed of solid molybdenum ore. The value of its recent output—averaging $120 million annually—far exceeds the total value of all the gold and silver mined in Colorado during peak years of the nineteenth century.
The rise of molybdenum was a one-company, one bonanza affair. It was attended in the 1940s and 1950s by the uranium craze, described by Al Look in his book U-Boom as “the most fabulous mineral hunt and stock-selling spree in all history.”1 Since the start, in 1941, of the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb, army engineers had been buying ore from the old carnotite dumps of Paradox Valley. The concentrate of the dumps had been used in Paris by Pierre and Marie Curie in their research on radioactivity at the turn of the century. But the big uranium-buying program did not begin until 1948, when the Atomic Energy Commission enlarged the wartime mill at Grand Junction and issued an appeal for uranium ore at high prices with which to build a stockpile of atomic bombs. The rush started almost overnight, resembling in its intensity the gold rush of 1859—thousands upon thousands of greenhorn prospectors from every walk of life and from every part of the nation hurrying to the Colorado Plateau region of the western slope, eyes shining with visions of enormous wealth. But their equipment was not the pick, burro, and frying pan combination of yesteryear. The modern miners traveled in jeeps and trucks, prop planes and helicopters, and they carried Geiger counters, which clicked in response to gamma rays given off by radioactive uranium under their feet as they scrambled about the lonely, arid canyons of the Dolores and San Miguel river country. At night, many of them lodged in frenzied settlements like Uravan and Naturita, Paradox and Bedrock, jamming the restaurants and bars and sleeping five in a bed if they could find one.
A few of them did find fortunes during those years before the federal purchase program was reduced in 1958. But the majority emerged with nothing to show for their toil except memories of the strange, wild beauty of the uranium region with its weird rock formations in rainbow colors and its gorgeous sunrises and sunsets. The uranium of Colorado is still very much in demand, but the mining of it has settled down to the unadventurous routine of corporate enterprise. The state’s annual production in the $16 million range is used mainly in the nuclear reactors of utility companies.
As we have seen, the destinies of Colorado were often shaped by happy accidents. One of these occurred late in 1941 when the army picked Pando north of Leadville as the site for Camp Hale, where the Tenth Mountain Division would be trained. The idea of the Tenth Mountain had originated soon after the cold-weather invasion of Finland by the Russians and the German invasion of Norway in the early stages of World War II. These ominous events had caused General George Marshall to listen seriously to officials of the civilian National Ski Patrol who argued that military use should be made of the skills of American skiers to counteract the growing numbers of combat skiers in enemy armies abroad.
Members of the 87th Mountain Infantry, core regiment of the projected new division, began arriving at Camp Hale in the fall of 1942. At an altitude of 9,480 feet above sea level, Camp Hale was a rough place for many of the recruits who were unused to high altitudes, deep snow, and bitter winter weather. To recover from frostbite and a coughing affliction called “Pando hack,” some of the trainees would repair, on weekends, to the lower altitude and milder temperatures of a quaint Victorian village of a few hundred residents, the once-booming silver town of Aspen. Here they found comfort in the Jerome Hotel, which Jerome Wheeler had built in 1889. Wheeler had sold it to a Syrian bartender Mansor Elisha, whose son Laurence was managing the hotel in the 1940s. The bar of the Jerome had a soda fountain which the hard-liquor skiers from Camp Hale scorned until they discovered the magic that accrued to a chocolate milkshake if it were spiced with one or two or perhaps three jiggers of Kentucky bourbon. This unique health drink became standard thereafter under the name “Aspen crud.” Those who imbibed a few felt fortified for the scary trip in a boat-and-rope conveyance to the top of Corkscrew ski run on the lower slopes of Ajax Mountain. The boat crept jerkily upward under the power of an ancient gasoline engine. Sometimes it reached the top of the run and sometimes the rope broke or the engine died or the boat rolled over. In such cases the passengers jumped for their lives.
The Tenth Mountain finished training and left Camp Hale to fight the Germans in Italy, but the boat was still at Aspen on a bright morning in May 1945, when Mr. and Mrs. Walter Paepcke of Chicago arrived at the Jerome, partly out of curiosity to see the Elk Mountains and partly because they had saved up enough gasoline-ration coupons for the trip through Leadville from their eastern-slope ranch. The town was quiet. During their brief stay, the two visitors looked at the scene from different points of view. Walter Paepcke, the business genius who had founded the hugely successful Container Corporation of America in 1926, wondered what could be done to make a paying proposition out of such an attractive semighost town. Elizabeth Paepcke, an ardent conservationist, fell in love with the forested hills and the crystal beauty of the Roaring Fork River. She had heard of conservation first as a child in her native Baltimore from an old family friend Gifford Pinchot. She had learned more about it during vacations at Longs Peak, where Enos Mills had enthralled her with his talk of birds and flowers, mushrooms and butterflies, and the need to protect Estes by creating Rocky Mountain National Park.
In the golden fall of 1945, the Paepckes drove again to Aspen to set up a small firm, the Aspen Company, involving the restoration of gingerbread homes and a long lease on the Jerome Hotel. Paepcke had been studying the nation’s ski industry—mainly overcrowded resorts in the low mountains of New England where it could snow hard and rain hard on the same midwinter day. Skiing was not unknown in Colorado, but its followers were few. There was a ski jump, vintage 1912, at Steamboat Springs, a practice slope which had been used by the Tenth Mountain near Leadville, a few runs at Pikes Peak, and several around Denver laid out by the Arlberg Ski Club. Many motorists seemed to be afraid of the high country in any season—afraid of the altitude, of avalanches, of shelf roads, of electrical storms.
An expert European skier André Roch had been praising the Aspen terrain long before the Tenth Mountain became fond of the Corkscrew run. On an impulse, Paepcke sent some engineers up Ajax Mountain to see if a modern chair lift would suit it. They reported favorably, so he bought a lift—cost, $250,000. It was opened on January 10, 1947. Since it was the longest—three miles—and fastest lift in the world at the time, it drew lowlanders from all over the West just to look at it—and to launch the great Rocky Mountain ski boom.
The Paepckes did not rouse Aspen from half a century of lethargy all by themselves. As World War II ended, they had the help of the best skiers in the Tenth Mountain—men hurrying back to the powder snow of the Colorado Rockies after dreaming about its ski slopes through the Italian campaign. The former Austrian champion Friedl Pfeifer took over as head of Paepcke’s Aspen Ski School. Steve Knowlton, once a leading collegiate skier, arrived on the Roaring Fork to race downhill by day and run an Aspen night spot after dark. Fritz Benedict settled down as a gifted architect and developer of homes on Red Mountain. Dozens of Tenth Mountain members hung around Ajax Mountain as ski bums, adding color and skiing excellence to the scene before moving on to complete the development of the state as a winter sports region. Gordon Wren returned to his native Steamboat Springs to expand facilities at Howelsen Hill. Larry Jump started the sport at Arapahoe Basin. Paul Duke wound up at Breckenridge. Leon Wilmot became director of Ski Broadmoor in Colorado Springs. Merrill Hastings founded a ski magazine in Denver. Stuart Mace set up a sled-dog farm at Ashcroft near Aspen. Peter Seibert and an ex-uranium prospector Earl Eaton began planning the recreation phenomenon of the 1960s, the town of Vail in the Gore Range.
It was characteristic of Walter Paepcke, who had started it all, to want to expand a project as soon as it had succeeded. A winter sports resort was fine, but there was Aspen’s summer overhead to worry about. In the fall of 1947, Paepcke mentioned his problem to friends at the University of Chicago, Chancellor Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, a professor of humanities who was teaching The Fat Man’s Club of leading Chicago tycoons how to bridge the gap between their world of commerce and the world of the spirit. Hutchins proposed a cultural summer at Aspen, a kind of Salzburg in America with a program spectacular enough to lure people into the hinterlands. Adler, in his turn, suggested an Aspen version of the educational Fat Man’s Club with embellishments to improve the health of the businessmen as well as their minds.
Paepcke leaped to both challenges. He staged his Goethe Festival honoring the 200th anniversary of the birth of the German poet during the summer of 1949. His program in a huge orange tent in Aspen Meadows included lectures by Dr. Albert Schweitzer and Thornton Wilder, concerts by the Minneapolis Symphony, and recitals by platoons of musicians—Gregor Piatigorsky, Artur Rubenstein, Nathan Milstein, Erica Morini and many others. A year later, Paepcke opened the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies—the University of Denver took it over in 1976—as an addition to his music festival. Mortimer Adler conducted the Great Books program for groups of business executives. Between Adler’s lectures on Aristotle and Thoreau, John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, the executives took up body building in Paepcke’s Aspen Health Center.
From 1945 until his death in 1961, Paepcke and his wife contributed a million dollars to their dream of Aspen as an international center of culture and recreation. Thereafter, the Paepcke idea was applied up and down the Roaring Fork. The communities of Aspen Highlands and Snowmass Village were built, offering year-round recreation. Such rapid growth would bring problems to the Elk Mountain environment in time, but the cultural programs of Aspen itself continued with the same flair that the Paepckes had given to them in the beginning.
As the population of Colorado moved steadily upward from 1940 on, some residents found themselves disturbed by a suspicion that the state was heading for trouble in the distribution of its water. How long would there be enough of it to go around at the present rate of growth? The eastern slope, where eighty percent of the people lived, was full of plans for taking water from the western slope—that is, from Colorado River. The eastern slope had no water of its own worth mentioning. The flow of the South Platte was one-tenth the volume of the Colorado; the Arkansas one-fifteenth. The Big T diversion had seemed to help the South Platte. But as the cost of the Big T had skyrocketed, its power production had to be enlarged to produce more revenue. The cheap power that was produced had stimulated the industrial growth—and the water consumption—of metropolitan Denver. To meet this new demand on its limited supply, Denver officials bought water rights on the Blue River branch of the Colorado and planned what would be called Dillon Reservoir and the twenty-three-mile Roberts Tunnel to bring Blue River water to Denver. Meanwhile, Colorado Springs, Aurora, and Pueblo had prepared similar transmountain diversion plans to meet their ever-increasing water needs.
In 1949 the seriousness of the problem was accentuated when the states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico signed the Colorado River Basin Compact, signifying the decision of the four Upper Basin states to make full use of their half of the total flow of the Colorado River system that had been assigned to them in 1922 by the seven-state Colorado River Compact. The other half of the river’s flow of fifteen million acre-feet of water annually had been assigned to the three Lower Basin states, California, Arizona, and Nevada.
Up to that time, the Upper Basin states had developed irrigation and municipal uses for only forty percent of their allotment of seven and a half million acre-feet. The division roughly among themselves was Colorado, fifty-two percent; Utah, twenty-three percent; Wyoming fourteen percent; New Mexico, eleven percent. By contrast to their slow approach, the Lower Basin states had won construction of Hoover Dam in 1936 to irrigate their lands and bring them hydroelectric power—a facility that made it easy for them to use much more than their allotment. The Upper Basin states, therefore, had to increase their needs for water or face a demand from the Lower Basin that they give up their rights to the millions of acre-feet of water that they were not using—a basic rule of water law in the West. To accomplish this end, the Upper Basin group proposed to Congress the Colorado River Storage Project, consisting of ten big dams, most of them in Colorado, to produce irrigation and power, and eleven smaller dams for irrigation alone. Operation of the dams would require use of all the water that had been assigned to the Upper Basin states in 1922.
Out of this proposal a totally unforeseen complication arose. One of the biggest dams was to be built just below a lovely glade of cottonwoods and watercress called Echo Park at the junction of the Green and Yampa rivers. Echo Park was in the remote center of Dinosaur National Monument at the foot of one of the most dramatic and beautiful river gorges in the nation, the seventeen-mile Lodore Canyon which one of Major Powell’s explorers had named after reading Robert Southey’s poem, “The Cataract of Lodore.” President Wilson had created the monument around a quarry of dinosaur bones in eastern Utah. In 1938, President Roosevelt increased the original eighty acres to 209,000 acres, mostly in the northwest corner of Colorado. Roosevelt’s proclamation contained the proviso that no dam or reservoir could be built within the body of the park but only near the north border above the Gates of Lodore in Brown’s Park.
The proposed Echo Park dam would be 525 feet high and would flood Lodore Canyon as the water backed up the Green for sixty-three miles and up the canyon of the Yampa for forty-four miles to create a 43,400-acre lake and produce a billion kilowatt hours of electricity annually. To the ranchers and businessmen of the Yampa Valley, the dam would bring cheap power, and they expected it to transform 300,000 acres of desert into farmland. To them, the location seemed ideal for a fluctuating storage reservoir because nobody ever went to what they called “that graveyard of extinct reptiles” except stray artifact hunters. Senator Ed Johnson praised the plan which, he declared, would convert a “menacing and wastrel river” into as great a national resource as Hoover Dam.
With Big Ed behind them, most Coloradans were confident that Congress would approve this dam, and they were surprised that protests arose when the project was announced—protests that grew in volume as the debate went on through the months and then the years of the early 1950s. The protests evolved at last into a national wave of complaint when the Senate passed and sent to the House in the spring of 1955 a bill authorizing Echo Park dam and five others at a cost of $1.1 billion. The ardor of the protests baffled Senator Joseph O’Mahoney of Wyoming, who declared that a new and fearsome element had entered American politics—an element of people calling themselves “environmentalists” who, living far from the cause of their displeasure, based their views not on common sense and practical economics but on “sentimental and aesthetic feelings.”2
The senator was quite right to be concerned. What was happening was a campaign by a lobbying group in Washington called the Council of Conservationists representing some fifty organizations—the Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, National Wildlife Federation, and so on. The head of the lobby was Ulysses S. Grant, III, a retired army general of distinguished forebears, whose hobbies were historic preservation and the beautification of cities. General Grant stressed three points in his lobbying—that the dam builders of the Bureau of Reclamation knew the price of everything and the value of nothing; that the federal power acts of 1921 and 1935 forbade power developments in national parks and monuments; and that Echo Park Dam, if permitted, would go on like the Trojan horse to destroy the character of the national park system. These opinions were circulated and applauded far and wide. And, on June 25, 1955, when the House Interior subcommittee sent a less costly version of the Colorado River Storage Project to the full House for a vote, Echo Park Dam was not recommended.
During the sixties and early seventies, Colorado and its thirsty Front Range cities did get a plethora of federal dams, reservoirs, tunnels, and power plants, though enthusiasm for them lessened as complications emerged because of their soaring costs and the damage that they did to river valleys. Two big dams were completed in 1975 on the Gunnison River—Blue Mesa and Morrow Point. A third Gunnison dam, Crystal, was partly built. The big Navajo Dam on San Juan River in New Mexico created a reservoir some of which was in Colorado. Construction was proceeding on the Frying Pan–Arkansas transmountain diversion to nourish the city of Pueblo and the irrigated farms of the Arkansas.
These big dams and power plants, plus Flaming Gorge and Glen Canyon in Utah and Fontenelle in Wyoming, had been part of the original Upper Colorado River Project of 1949. They brought to the four-state Upper Basin one of the most heavily subsidized water systems in the world.
But in spite of the dams, water continued to be a problem for the state. That problem, however, was overshadowed in the minds of many by another which was just beginning to show above the horizon.
1. Al Look, U-Boom (Denver: Bell Press, 1956), p. iii.
2. Joseph O’Mahoney and Ulysses S. Grant, III, “Are You For or Against the Echo Park Dam?” Collier’s 135:76–82 (18 February 1955).