THE boom of the 1870s forced the development of radical new ways of producing food to meet the increased demands of the territory. There had been no such urgency through most of the doldrums of the first decade. As early as 1861 surprising amounts of everything from pork to celery were reaching the gold camps of Gilpin County and South Park from irrigated farms and grist mills in the San Luis Valley and on the Huerfano, Cucharas, and Purgatoire rivers just north of Raton Pass and the trading camp of Trinidad. Water-powered mills popped up all along the Front Range from Pueblo on the Arkansas to the army post and village of Fort Collins on the Cache la Poudre. Many miners gave up scratching for gold to become prosperous truck farmers around Denver and Boulder. Stockmen built the first herds of beef cattle by collecting oxen that had been abandoned by their owners after hauling the wagons across the plains from the Missouri. It had been supposed that these oxen would perish during the Colorado winters. But the same brown, air-cured grasses, buffalo and grama, that had been sustaining millions of buffalo sustained the oxen also. Native hay in the high valleys was harvested to feed dairy cattle. By 1867 alfalfa from Mexican seed was being raised on Clear Creek, and steam machines were used to thresh homegrown wheat eastward along the South Platte to Fort Morgan and beyond.
John Evans and William Byers were the champions of Colorado farming in the 1860s. Byers, who had grown up on a farm in Ohio, filled The Rocky Mountain News with advice about raising crops in a mile-high land of scant rainfall and a short season. He argued that the South Platte and Arkansas valleys would grow anything that grew in the midwest, but that farming in Colorado was quite different, requiring co-operative study and irrigation. He stressed the prime fact of life in Colorado, the scarcity of water, and strongly supported the doctrine of prior appropriation, which had been legalized in 1866 by the territorial legislature and Congress. This “Colorado doctrine,” adopted later throughout the Rockies, was based on the principle that the first person to file a claim to a farm along a stream had priority over later claimants to the beneficial use of that water during times of low flow when there was not enough water in the stream for everybody.
In 1863, Byers put together the Colorado Agricultural Society to promote methods adapted to the environment. Three years later he organized an agricultural fair where fifteen-pound turnips and fifty-bushel-an acre wheat were displayed. Neither the society nor the fair was a roaring success. The men who had rushed to Pikes Peak during the gold rush for adventure and freedom were suspicious of anything as socialistic as co-operation and were uninclined to give up practices that their fathers had taught them back in the humid East.
It took another journalist—and in the nick of time—to bring changes to keep pace with the expanding demand of the 1870s. His name was Nathan Cook Meeker, and he was an original like Frémont, Gilpin, and Palmer, but of a wilder cast than any of these. Many influences had shaped him. His career had ranged from farm boy to Greenwich Village poet, to reporter on the New Orleans Picayune, to traveling salesman, to novelist writing of supermen resembling himself who led barbarians out of savagery, to Civil War correspondent for Horace Greeley and his New York Tribune. Meanwhile, Meeker trained himself to become a professional idealist by studying the Utopian communes of the day—those of the Brook Farm transcendentalists, the Mormons, the Fourierites, and Campbellites, all of whom planned to eliminate vice and violence, suppress idlers, replace government by group effort, and combine the joy of sex with practical eugenics to improve the breed.
After the war, the tall and handsome Meeker came to New York as agricultural columnist for the Tribune. Horace Greeley shared Meeker’s interest in Utopia and encouraged him to use the Tribune to promote an agrarian community of “temperance, monogamy, and religious tolerance”1 where each member worked for the common good at the task he enjoyed doing most. Late in 1869, Greeley sent his idealist west by the Kansas Pacific, which ended near the eastern border of Colorado, to prepare articles about the territory and to look around for a farm tract on which to place what Socialist Meeker called Union Colony. William J. Palmer happened to be on the same K. P. train. He filled Meeker with his euphoria about Pikes Peak—the outpouring of a young man in love—as the two men rode in a spring wagon from the K. P. railhead near the Colorado–Kansas line across the rolling prairie to the general’s site for Colorado Springs at the Front Range. Moving on from there past Castle Rock to Denver, Meeker ran into more euphoria, supplied this time by William Byers, who was marketing lands for John Evans fifty miles out on the flats east of Longs Peak near the junction of the South Platte and Cache la Poudre river—lands owned by the Denver Pacific Railroad. Byers lectured Meeker on the importance of irrigation and advised him to reject Palmer’s valley at Pikes Peak as a location for Union Colony because it was too small and too short of water for large-scale farming, though he conceded that it would do for idlers who loved scenery and did not have to work for a living. Byers added that he had for sale a twelve-thousand-acre tract on the Cache la Poudre at five dollars an acre that would be just right for a colony.
Meeker was the most widely read farm columnist in the nation. When, on December 14, 1869, he issued in the New York Tribune his famous “call” for subscribers to join Union Colony at one hundred and fifty-five dollars a head, more than two hundred Easterners signed up. That was twice the number needed to buy the Denver Pacific tract. By spring many of them had arrived on the Cache prepared to turn the barren prairie into the Garden of Eden that Meeker had depicted in his “call.” He named the place Greeley in honor of his patron. Each colonist received a town lot for his paid-up membership and one hundred and sixty acres of bottom land near town.
Most of the members were people of means and education, with skills representing every craft. Among them was a town planner General Robert A. Cameron, Brooklyn-born and bibulous, and a thoroughly trained water expert E. S. Nettleton, who had invented a device for measuring stream flow. Nettleton had studied the development of irrigation from its legendary beginnings under Adam and Eve through its use milleniums ago along the Nile and Euphrates and in India, China, Italy, and Spain. He had learned that similar methods, crude but workable, were used by the Pueblo Indians on the Rio Grande and by the Mexican-Americans of southern Colorado.
But he recognized in the rich, flat land around Greeley a new and exciting farming potential. The Cache la Poudre had its origin high in the Continental Divide only one hundred miles from Greeley—far too short a distance for that stream to collect enough irrigation water by rainfall in the way that the interminable Nile collected it. However, the combination of a remarkably porous granite soil, held in place by heavy forestation, and the tendency of rain and snow clouds blown east from the Pacific to dump their moisture when they struck the divide created a unique storage basin in the timberline area of the high country. The snow melted slowly in the cool temperatures of timberline and was held back also by the spongelike soil from which it filtered down to the plains around Greeley at a regular rate during most of the year. Nettleton believed that such irrigation, derived from the even flow of snow water through the growing season, would spare farmers of Union Colony many of the problems of erratic rainfall that plagued agriculture back East.
He observed further that truck farmers around Denver and Golden raised their crops only in the narrow bottomlands of streams, using irrigation from short ditches of a few hundred yards. The greater part of the snow water in those streams was not put to use. It flowed on to benefit the farmers of Kansas, and that, Nettleton felt, was a crime. He proposed to make fuller use of the Cache la Poudre as it flowed through Greeley by bringing some of its water to the semiarid benchlands, that is, to the level plain proper stretching back from and above the narrow bottomlands. He argued that Meeker’s colonists could achieve this by building elaborate ditches—canals actually—running parallel to the river but falling at a more gradual rate than the ten-foot-per-mile fall of the river.
The principle was simple—the same that would be adopted thirty years later by the U. S. Bureau of Reclamation for all the mountain states. As Nettleton explained it to Meeker, the colony’s irrigation ditches would start at points far up the Cache that were at higher altitudes above sea level than the altitude of the Greeley benchlands. As a result, the water diverted by the canals from the river would flow down to irrigate many thousands of acres of barren bench.
Nathan Meeker, like William Gilpin, had no love for manual labor. He preferred to talk about it—to instill in others the spirit of co-operation to get community projects done. His disciples responded well in the fall of 1870. Nettleton’s Canal Number Two was thirty-six miles long and thirty-two inches wide on the bottom when they completed digging it two years later. Two more “high line” canals were dug by these charter members of Union Colony. Though the grasshopper plague of 1873 blurred the success of the Greeley experiment, the canal plan revolutionized high-altitude agriculture in time, raising Colorado farm production in a few years to an equal footing with mining and manufacture. Through the 1870s, similar long canals were built by other co-operative groups along the Front Range, including the Chicago-Colorado Colony, founders of Longmont (1870) on the Middle St. Vrain, and a group at Fort Collins (The fort there was abandoned in 1871.) on the Cache above Greeley. Soon it was hard to tell what was canal and what was river in that part of Weld County, a condition that prevails today.
Nettleton’s advanced hydrology was practiced as far away as San Luis Valley, where colonies of Mormons set up the towns of Manassa and Sanford in the late 1870s. Developers from the East and from Europe began investing money in ditch companies to sell water to farmers far down the South Platte and the Arkansas—water that would bring about during the 1880s the creation of prosperous farm communities like Sterling and Rocky Ford. Some men foresaw that more water than the mountains of the eastern slope could provide would be needed to nourish all the prairie lands that incoming homesteaders hoped to reclaim. This sent them scurrying along the Continental Divide as nimbly as the gold seekers of 1859 in search of low places where Pacific slope water might be persuaded to flow to the Atlantic side in ditches or tunnels. A low point in the divide that held special promise was where the source of the Colorado approached, at Milner Pass, the source of the Cache and also of the Big Thompson, a branch of the Cache, in present Rocky Mountain National Park. This dream of transmountain water diversion in that vicinity would reach its fantastic fulfillment with the federal Colorado–Big Thompson project of the 1930s.
Not even Nettleton or William Byers visualized the wider significance of the Greeley irrigation program. It took the president of the United States to spell it out. In his annual message to Congress on January 1, 1873, Ulysses S. Grant said:
Between the Missouri River and Rocky Mountains there is an arid belt of public land from 300 to 500 miles in width, perfectly valueless for occupancy of man for want of sufficient rain to secure the growth of any agricultural products. The irrigating canal would make productive a belt of country as wide as the supply of water could be made to spread over, and would secure a cordon of settlements connecting the present population of the mountain regions with that of the older states.2
President Grant could have put it another way. The canals on the Greeley pattern, reaching farther and farther eastward, marked the beginning of the end of the “great American desert,” the answer to Major Long’s insulting phrase, which had curbed interest in the plains of Colorado for half a century. It took many more years for people generally to believe that much of that wasteland could be brought to bloom. Birds from the woodland east were more perceptive. As early as the summer of 1886, a cardinal from Missouri was spotted looking over Fort Morgan on the South Platte, and a pair of mocking birds came to Rocky Ford to nest in a cottonwood on the Arkansas.
As the rugged individualists on farms along the rivers below the Front Range buckled down to co-operative irrigation, other entrepreneurs developed the exact opposite of co-operation to build a grasslands industry as feudal as the princedoms of the Middle Ages.
The princes of the open-range cattle business of the 1870s and 1880s worked by divine right, made their own laws, and asked permission of nobody to hold absolute sway over the public domain of the high plains from West Texas and New Mexico to Canada. This neo-feudalism, American style, came about by accident—a unique regional sideshow of the national circus. Two ephemeral conditions created it. There on the plains were half a million square miles of short grass free for the eating. Most people thought of the area as a lonesome, worthless, arid vastness to be crossed and forgotten with all possible speed. Condition two was the presence, down in the West Texas brush, of an Anglo-Spanish blend of cattle called longhorns, descended from those the conquistadores had brought from Andalusia to the New World in the sixteenth century. The techniques of the Texas cowboys to manage the modern longhorns were as Spanish as the cattle. Even the language was Iberian—words like bronco—Spanish for “rough” or “crabbed”; sombrero, from “sombra” (“shade”); remuda, meaning “change” or “replacement.”
They were bovine terrors, these longhorns—temperish, ugly, and with horns spreading five feet across. They were as erratic as heat lightning, and they carried disease with no noticeable ill effects. Their hides were so tough that snakes and insects and thorns and buckshot bothered them not at all. Before the Civil War, Texas stockmen had shipped them to cities up the Mississippi to be sold as beef—not tasty but at least edible. That market ended when Union forces won control of the river.
With nowhere to go, the longhorns multiplied, and the grass of Texas on which they fed began to give out. At war’s end, a few drovers discovered that the starving animals gained weight on the prairie grasses even while they were being driven a thousand miles north to be sold at the railheads of the Kansas Pacific and other lines advancing into Colorado. They cost the drovers very little. Colorado stockmen paid well for them, planning to upgrade them with Eastern bulls and sell the progeny to hungry miners, to railroad construction crews, and to army garrisons guarding the Union Pacific in present Wyoming.
John Wesley Iliff, who would rule briefly as king of the Colorado plains, was twenty-eight years old when he reached Denver in 1859 with wagonloads of food to sell to the swarm of gold seekers. He had no beef at first but got some soon from those discarded oxen of the Argonauts. Iliff arranged to look like General Grant, as many admirers of the little hero tried to do, and he possessed the trademark of the Colorado pioneer—the ability to invent ways to make money out of the disadvantages of the environment.
He was Scotch, monosyllabic, shrewd, pious enough to live up to the name of the founder of Methodism, and so reserved as to be the least known of Colorado’s innovators. He had no revealing idiosyncrasies, though he had a passion for eating chestnuts, and he smoked cigars incessantly. He did commit one surprisingly unreserved act. While riding in his buggy from his ranch to Denver, he picked up a hitchhiker from Pueblo named Lizzie Frazier, who was handling a line of Singer sewing machines. Against his Scotch instincts he bought a Singer, which he didn’t need, from this fascinating salesperson and consummated the purchase later by marrying Lizzie.
As his breeding herd increased, Iliff grazed the cattle farther and farther east on the unfenced, free grass of the South Platte River valley from which, providentially for him, the hostile Cheyennes and the buffalo were withdrawing. But he could not raise beef fast enough to meet the terms of his beef contracts. In 1866, longhorn cattle began to be heard and seen bawling and brawling around Denver. Iliff bought some cows from a drover named Goodnight, and found that the quality of their calves improved when he bred them to his shorthorn bulls imported from Illinois.
Charles Goodnight, an enormous, Kentucky-born centaur of a stockman, had been in Texas since 1845 and had fought Indians and Union soldiers as a Confederate Texas Ranger. He was renowned for honesty and he knew as much about handling wild longhorns and wild cowboys on those cattle drives north on the Chisholm Trail to Abilene, Kansas, as any man alive. In 1866 Goodnight and Oliver Loving, who was briefly his partner, had decided to veer west into New Mexico to avoid the Comanche and Kiowa Indians who were harassing the cattle drives on the Chisholm Trail. From the Staked Plains of Texas, they put some two thousand longhorns into Colorado by way of the Pecos River and Raton Pass instead of driving them up the Arkansas from Abilene.
The tough old mountain man Dick Wootton, who had a dubious claim to Raton Pass, charged toll to cross it, with six-gun in hand as proof of the legality of his claim. Next year, Goodnight avoided Wootton’s toll by blazing what came to be called the Loving-Goodnight Trail past the beautiful volcanic cone Mount Capulin and over Trinchera Pass, some thirty-five miles east of Trinidad and Raton Pass (Ste. Rte. 389 today). He hoped that John Wesley Iliff would buy this big herd of longhorns, which he wintered on a ranch below the Spanish Peaks on Apishapa River. The cattle had cost Goodnight little more than the dollar-a-day wage for the dozen cowboys and the chuck-wagon cook that he had hired for the two-month drive from Texas. Iliff did want the two thousand cattle and paid Goodnight $20,000 for them, delivered at the Union Pacific corral in Wyoming.
That year, 1868, when the Hill smelter at Blackhawk was putting the gold camps of Colorado Territory on their primrose path to growth and prosperity, Iliff began expanding his lordly cattle kingdom right next door to Meeker’s plebeian Union Colony of farmers at Greeley. From near Denver, Iliff’s domain would extend two hundred miles down the left, the north, bank of the South Platte almost to Julesburg and northward ninety miles across the dry, treeless prairie to the Union Pacific tracks in present southern Wyoming—most of Weld County as it was bounded then. His practice was to buy some twelve thousand longhorns annually from Goodnight or any other drover who could deliver them to what came to total 650,000 acres of U. S. property in Colorado under his rule. The average weight of each ten-dollar steer was six hundred pounds. After feeding for two years on the government’s grass, the steer weighed a thousand pounds and sold for thirty-five dollars—a total profit to Iliff for the year’s sales, after negligible expenses, of as much as one hundred twenty thousand dollars—enough to make him a millionaire before he died in his prime, aged forty-six years, in 1878. Long after his death, in 1903, his widow Lizzie and his children founded and endowed the Iliff School of Theology, which thrives in Denver still.
Through the 1870s, Iliff bred his best longhorn cows to Eastern bulls until his upgraded breeding herd numbered twenty-five thousand head. He maintained military control over his empire by setting up nine ranches as headquarters for his armed foremen. His main headquarters were at the present town of Iliff. The ranches amounted to fifteen thousand acres—sites selected because they locked in the northside streams emptying into the South Platte. The stretches of grassland between streams were of no value unless the cattle grazing on them had access to the water of the streams, an access which Iliff’s cowboy knights were careful to discourage by force. To acquire the strategic ranches, Iliff paid his employees to pre-empt the land in 160-acre parcels or to homestead it as stipulated in the Homestead Act of 1862. When the employees received patents for the parcels after five years of alleged residency, they signed them over to Iliff. This was not the way the Homestead Act was supposed to work. But, it was almost routine in the nineteenth-century West—the illegal means by which most of the public domain of Colorado Territory found its way into private ownership.
The success of Iliff’s South Platte empire inspired a flock of imitators. Another shrewd Methodist John Wesley Prowers began freighting as a teenager in 1856 for William Bent at his second fort on the Arkansas. Prowers married a Cheyenne Indian girl, raised a family, and started a herd based on Herefords shipped to him on the Santa Fe Railroad, which was headed for California in the 1870s by way of the Arkansas and Raton Pass. Within five years Prowers was grazing ten thousand cattle on a forty-mile stretch of the public domain along the Arkansas east of the present railroad division town of La Junta. Meanwhile, the thought of being a cattle king enchanted many Europeans. The same sort of Scots and English who had invested in General Palmer’s railroad and in the Mexican land grants of Governor Armijo began setting up open-range empires which came in time to occupy most of the high plains. By 1875, foreign investors in Colorado alone had half a million beef cattle fattening on federal land. One of these empires, the Prairie Land Company established by Scotsmen, owned 150,000 head grazing on five million acres that did not belong to it in southern Colorado, New Mexico, and the Oklahoma Panhandle.
It was a strange development—this cattle autocracy. It could not last, though nobody foresaw the rapidity of its demise in less than two decades. To protect it a powerful lobby was formed in Denver inspired by the Colorado Stock Growers Association, which began in 1867. The association was not at all a co-operative in the sense of Meeker’s Union Colony, but more of a baronial league on the order of those in fifteenth-century England during the Wars of the Roses. It accomplished little. Equally futile was the support of the president of the United States Rutherford B. Hayes, who had no success in 1877 when he asked Congress to reserve all the high plains west of the 100th meridian exclusively for stockmen.
Lobbies and presidents could not stop the course of adverse events. The price of longhorns rose as the oversupply in the Texas brush disappeared. The prejudice against longhorns as bearers of disease resulted eventually in their legal banishment from Colorado. Higher grades of stock imported from the British Isles to improve profits—Galloways, Devons, Ayrshires—did not do well in the high altitude and rough winters of the Colorado plains. And it became clear that sheep were as fond of free public-domain grass as cattle. Though the wars between sheep men and cattlemen did not break out fully until 1880, the contention for use of the open range began years earlier. Cattlemen developed a pathological hatred of sheep people; they claimed that sheep killed the grass by cropping it too closely—a self-serving argument that was true only if their cattle had overgrazed the range in the first place. The conflict had racist overtones because the first sheep attempting to invade the cattle kingdoms on the South Platte were brought in by Captain J. S. Maynard for his ranch north of Greeley. Though Maynard had bought his sheep back East, some cattlemen assumed that they came from those native Mexican-Americans of Southern Colorado who had been raising them in San Luis Valley and north of Raton Pass since the 1840s. That is one reason why today’s Mexican-Americans in the counties south of the Arkansas still vote solidly Democratic, as they did a century ago in reaction to the Republicanism of the Anglo stockmen in the Front Range cities to the north.
The crowning blow to the open-range industry was foreshadowed not by Coloradans but by that voluble, if absentee, member of Union Colony Horace Greeley, who sent a carload of fruit trees to Greeley from Virginia which, he hoped, would give his prairie town out West the soft and fragrant look of the Old South. When the cattle of the colonists devoured the young trees, Greeley advanced twenty-five thousand dollars to buy fifty miles of smooth-wire fence to hold the cattle in their common pasture.
The smooth wire was a failure, but a few years later, in 1874, Joseph Glidden, an Illinois farmer, got a federal patent on a new kind of fence wire carrying sharp barbs, which he had invented to keep his dogs out of Mrs. Glidden’s flower beds. When Texans found that the barbs would hold even their intractable longhorns, its use spread over the high plains. Homesteading farmers enclosed their tracts with it to keep the open-range cattle from invading their fields. But the cattle kings had to have a fenceless terrain for successful trail drives. They began cutting the fences and ordering the “nesters” away at gunpoint, declaring that the range belonged to them. Their claims did not hold up in court, and the farmers with their fences and irrigation ditches were numerous enough soon to match force with force. The free range was reduced further when the railroads began fencing their rights of way—a policy adopted because the open-range stockmen lobbied through a law making the railroads liable for cattle struck by their trains. The fencing was cheaper than paying damages for the stricken cattle, which always turned out to be the most valuable that the complaining owner possessed.
The sick industry stumbled along through the early 1880s, during which the larger cattle companies learned how to balance their books by enlarging their inventory—counting each of their cattle twice or thrice. That dodge could not be used after the tragic winter of 1886–1887 when half of all the open-range stock perished in blizzards and deep snow throughout the plains. Only a few outfits survived to continue business on fenced ranches, raising hay to feed a better grade of cattle in winter and providing shelters for their survival.
Some open range remained after 1887, but the magic chain was broken—the chain of longhorns, limitless grass, advancing railroads, a surplus of investment capital, fewer hostile Indians. Only the legends survived—tales of cowboys and their wonderful world of space and self-reliance, brave cowboys surviving stampedes and floods, carefree cowboys at the spring and fall roundups, reverent cowboys stammering with shyness in the presence of pure women, imperturbable cowboys chasing rustlers with six-guns smoking, handsome cowboys living it up in the dance halls and gambling dens of the railroad towns.
The mining revival, the coming of railroads, expanded irrigation, the open-range industry, the population surge—all these things made statehood inevitable during the 1870s, though there were zigs and zags to confuse the issue. Opponents of the territorial system called it “carpet-bag government”—meaning rule by those they called “wind-broken blatherskites” sent west by President Grant to pay off political debts. Some of the antistatehood people feared that higher taxes would result. Some of them were unreconstructed Southern Democrats who objected to the congressional requirement that the new Colorado state constitution must give Negroes the right to vote, which had not been stipulated in the earlier constitutions. But the new state would gain enormous riches. Two sections (six hundred and forty acres each) of the federal domain in each of the thousands of Colorado townships could be sold to pay for public schools, fifty sections of land would provide for administrative buildings, and fifty sections for a state penitentiary. Seventy-two sections more would be given on which to build the University of Colorado at Boulder—the institution which had existed only on paper since its creation by the territorial legislature in 1861.
Jerome Chaffee, a polished multimillionaire now, who bought his clothes and had his beard trimmed in New York, was still promoting statehood and dreaming of really being the U. S. senator that he had pretended to be in the 1860s. He had become an astute wheelhorse politician both in Denver and in Washington as territorial delegate to Congress. He controlled all the Colorado Republicans except the Gilpin County crowd at Central City who followed Henry Teller, a man to be feared because of his unblemished character and skill as an orator. Chaffee enjoyed prestige as one of President Grant’s companions at White House poker games where national policy was said to be decided between deals. All the while, John Evans gave Chaffee powerful support, though discreetly, realizing at last that the taint of the Sand Creek affair had ruined his own ambitions to be a senator. In 1873 Chaffee persuaded Grant to name Evans’s faithful son-in-law Sam Elbert as territorial governor, replacing Grant’s corrupt comrade-at-arms at Shiloh, General Edward McCook. Ten months later, or so the story goes, Chaffee angered the president by filling an inside straight over Grant’s three-of-a-kind. The pot was large, and the alleged outcome was that poor Elbert, an honest, well-meaning man, found himself out of office and McCook back in just as Sam was beginning to enjoy the governorship.
Coloradans regarded the reinstatement of McCook as carpet-baggery at its worst. They had had quite enough of the plausible McCook during his first governorship, disliking his elegance, his waxed handlebar moustache, even his beautiful bride, Mary Thompson, whom he imported from Peoria, Illinois. Mary was criticized because she wore low-necked gowns and too many jewels at parties. Gossips declared—out of jealousy, no doubt—that she fainted prettily at Denver’s American House ball in 1872 honoring Grand Duke Alexis, brother of the Czar of Russia, only so that the glamorous Romanoff would come to her rescue by taking her in his arms.
McCook’s brand of corruption was galling because it was hard to expose. His first act as governor in 1868 was merely an exercise of the usual nepotism. He put Mary’s brother James Thompson, a playboy type, in charge of the Colorado Utes and made him his private secretary. Thompson delivered to the Utes as their annuity allotment a herd of scrawny longhorns which McCook bought at low prices. People said, but could not prove, that the governor billed the Indian Office in Washington for the longhorns at current high prices for “good Eastern cattle,” which was the kind that the Utes were supposed to receive. Later, Mary’s widowed sister Margaret came to Denver. To escape the expense of supporting Margaret, McCook found a husband for her—a big, muscular German who had changed his name from Carl Schwanbeck to Charles Adams. The governor got Adams the necessary salary by making him a general of militia, Indian agent for the White River Utes, and bodyguard to protect him from irate Utes who called at his office occasionally to complain about the scrawny longhorns.
The widespread protest over Sam Elbert’s removal and McCook’s reinstatement could not have pleased Jerome Chaffee more. It strengthened his statehood cause and brought a split between his Denver Republicans and those Republicans of Gilpin County under Teller, who was supporting McCook as a favor to President Grant. The split allowed the Democrats to elect in 1874 their first territorial delegate to Congress, a newcomer from Ireland named Thomas M. Patterson. That looked like a Republican defeat, but it was really another Chaffee victory. It frightened the Republicans in Washington into passing an enabling act for Colorado statehood on March 3, 1875, on Chaffee’s assurance that the new state’s three electoral votes would go to the Republican candidate for president, Rutherford B. Hayes, who might need them to win. President Grant had already partially healed the Republican split in Colorado by removing McCook a second time as governor and sending in his place, pending statehood, a tactful and forthright Kentuckian by way of Illinois John L. Routt. Chaffee completed party unity by agreeing that Henry Teller would be one of the new U.S. senators and himself the other.
It was pure accident that Colorado came into the Union while the nation was celebrating its one-hundredth year, a coincidence which prompted general use of the nickname “the Centennial State.” The proposed constitution gave male Negroes the right to vote, but the constitutional convention denied suffrage (24 to 8) to women of any color. The denial occurred even though the newly formed Colorado Women’s Suffrage Association bombarded the convention with petitions from all sections of the territory “signed by ten thousand citizens.”3 Colorado women had come a long way toward independence since Julia Holmes’s trek up Pikes Peak, and they urged the men to give Colorado the honor of being the first state in the Union to do what had to be done in all fairness. They pointed out that women in Wyoming Territory had had full voting rights since 1869 and would continue voting when that territory became a state. (In 1890 Wyoming did become the first state with full woman suffrage.) But Colorado’s women lost their battle this time, partly because the convention was loaded with miners who believed that the hills were still man’s preserve, and partly for fear that such an innovation would wreck the drive for statehood.
The males-only constitution was ratified by the people on July 1, 1876—15,443 for and 4,062 against. President Grant declared Colorado to be the thirty-eighth state on August 1. The national Republicans got their three electoral votes in the fall—votes which did give Hayes the presidency by a one-vote margin over the Democrat Samuel J. Tilden. Chaffee and Teller were admitted to the U. S. Senate, and Thomas Patterson to the House. John L. Routt won the governorship.
Routt designated July 4 as Colorado’s festival day—“joy unrestrained” as The Rocky Mountain News put it, with bonfires and bands and exuberant drunks and meetings with long florid speeches. Down in Pueblo on the Arkansas, Charles Goodnight, a temporary resident, listened impassively to the oratory. With him were the men who financed his cattle drives, two young brothers from Pennsylvania, John A. and Mahlon D. Thatcher, who had begun selling ribbons and bows in the 1860s and then started the First National Bank of Pueblo because they owned the only safe on the Arkansas. At Colorado Springs, General Palmer watched the evening’s fireworks on Pikes Peak from the Garden of the Gods. (His silken wife, Queen, had retired to Long Island, having failed to find the poetry in pioneering that Palmer had found.) Oro City below Mosquito Pass was in decline and had little to celebrate. Horace Tabor was fortyish now, and his face had the sag of a man who knew that wealth and romance had passed him by. He closed his store and spent the day keeping out of Augusta’s way and speculating on where all the silver might be that people said was the coming thing.
Denver was the gay spot, with thousands lining the streets for the grand parade, including a band of Ute Indians, the men in stovepipe hats and frock coats, the women gowned in flour sacks. From the American House, the parade moved slowly to the picnic grove across the South Platte. Everybody had a band—the Pioneers, the Scandinavians, the German turners, the Masons, the Governor’s Guards. The members of Colorado Commandery No. One were splendid on jet-black horses. The Odd Fellows (purple uniforms) rode milk-white horses. The firemen, in patriotic red-white-and-blue uniforms, marched smartly. One great canopied float carried thirteen beautiful girls with flowers in their hair, representing the original thirteen states of 1776. Behind them came a float of thirty-eight girls—the thirty-eight states of 1876. They were posed gracefully around a fifteen-year-old Queen of Colorado, May Butler. May wore a robe of bunting with a high crown of gold on her head. She carried a golden wand.
It was all very thrilling, this statehood, and yet unsettling to some. How could all these things have happened in seventeen years—barely enough time to raise a child? Here was a vast and unknown wilderness transformed into a civilized land known the world over for its wealth and promise. Here was this site of Denver, once a barren plain for jackrabbits and yucca, magically become a city of 35,000 people bolstered by fast-growing satellites from Fort Collins and Longmont in the north to Pueblo, Walsenburg, and Trinidad in the south. Good and bad things had occurred—John Gregory’s gold strike, the devastating Denver fire of 1863, the Cherry Creek flood a year later, the Sand Creek tragedy on the eastern plains, the financial crisis before Hill built his Gilpin County smelter, the success of the railroads and of Nathan Meeker’s irrigation ditches.
Some of the leaders watching the July 4 parade had had their own good and bad times. John Evans had wanted to be a senator, but the voters had ruled against him. William Loveland had dreamed of winning fame and fortune as a railroad magnate until he and his Colorado Central became embroiled in the machinations of Jay Gould to control all the railroads in sight. The model husband William Byers found his career as Colorado’s leading promoter threatened when a seductive milliner named Hattie Sancomb announced publicly (in revenge for his cooling ardor) that the two of them had been having an affair for years. And William Gilpin over there—as trim and oracular as ever, but betraying the frayed nerves of a henpecked husband.
The ex-governor had been a tranquil bachelor for fifty-nine years until 1874 when he succumbed to the charms of a widow from St. Louis, Julia Pratte Dickerson, who turned out to have a gift for creating domestic uproar.
After the statehood parade a depressing question occurred to some Coloradans as they strolled home. Where do we go from here? Was it a question of too much too soon?
1. This phrase appeared in Meeker’s famous “call,” published in the New York Tribune, 14 December 1869.
2. Fritz, Colorado, p. 330.
3. “Sorrows of the Suffragettes—1876,” Mountain and Plain History Notes 13:1 (January 1976).