UNTIL World War II, the men who determined the development of Colorado were residents of the state—with one notable exception.
Theodore Roosevelt was forty-one years old in September 1900, when he visited the state for the first time as Republican nominee for vice-president under William McKinley. Roosevelt combined an objective knowledge of his country and its history with the instincts of a party politician, and he had an extraordinary magnetism. People who looked at that great head and those gleaming teeth above his stocky frame, cheered themselves hoarse whether they believed what he was saying or not.
Roosevelt’s interest in Colorado derived partly from his conviction that the unoccupied public domain of the mountain west—its forests, its wildlife, the headwaters of its rivers—should be conserved for the benefit of all Americans and not just for the benefit of the states enclosing them. His passionate love of the outdoors and its pleasures—especially hunting—derived from the struggle of his youth to overcome the handicap of a frail, asthmatic body. Three years of that successful struggle—1883–1886—were spent on his Elkhorn and Maltese Cross cattle ranches in North Dakota, the problems of which made him a disciple of the famous John Wesley Powell, explorer of the Grand Canyon. Powell had been arguing for years that the West would remain the “great American desert” unless the federal government began a program of reclamation by large-scale irrigation using water from watersheds protected by national forest reserves.
Conservation remained one of Roosevelt’s major interests when he returned from North Dakota to New York to serve his party as a New York City police reformer, as McKinley’s assistant secretary of the navy in 1896, as leader of the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War, and as Republican governor of New York. At Albany, he applied some conservationist principles to the Adirondacks, but his tendencies toward reform did not please Thomas C. Platt, the Republican boss of the state, who put him out of action in 1900 by arranging his nomination as vice-president for McKinley’s second term. The prospect of four years under the thumbs of McKinley and his big-business friends was sickening for Roosevelt. As vice-presidential nominee, however, he found a kindred spirit in a young forest-bureau expert in the Department of Agriculture named Gifford Pinchot who was even more fanatical about conservation than he was.
At that time Pinchot was taking note of what was happening to some forty-two forest reserves, the first of which had been set up by President Benjamin Harrison in 1891. These western reserves totaled forty-five million acres of public domain unclaimed by homesteaders. Four were in Colorado, including the White River Plateau Timber Reserve, a million-acre tract in the beautiful Flattop country around Trappers Lake that had been a favorite hunting ground of the Ute Indians. It was the nation’s second forest reserve, proclaimed on October 16, 1891, by President Harrison soon after he set up the Yellowstone Park Timber Land Reserve in Wyoming.
The reserves were established to control overgrazing by a system of livestock permits and to save snow water needed for irrigation by preventing lumber companies from cutting down trees in the high country. Pinchot told Roosevelt that these aims were being defeated in Colorado because the Silver Republican Senator Henry Teller and the gold-standard Republican Senator Edward O. Wolcott had blocked the appropriation of funds to pay for qualified personnel to enforce the rules of the reserves. The lumbermen and stockmen of Routt County had convinced the senators that the creation of the White River reserve was an invasion of state’s rights, that the reserve was retarding settlement, and that most of it was not forest anyhow, but sage and scrub oak.
When Roosevelt came to Denver in September 1900 to campaign for McKinley, he remembered hearing that some Coloradans favored the White River reserve, including several wealthy sportsmen from Colorado Springs who had been going to White River to hunt ever since the removal of the Utes. One of these hunters, Philip B. Stewart, had attended Yale with Roosevelt’s family physician, Dr. Alexander Lambert, and had written to Lambert that the White River country abounded not only in deer and elk but in “cougars.” To bag a mountain lion was one of Roosevelt’s highest ambitions. He wired Stewart from Chicago, inviting him to join the campaign train in Colorado Springs and tell him about these cougars as they rode along.
Stewart was a liberal Republican with a good knowledge of Colorado’s peculiar gold-versus-silver politics. Roosevelt felt at home with him because of their Ivy League backgrounds—Stewart had been Skull and Bones at Yale and captain of the baseball team that had whipped Harvard in 1886. Stewart told the vice-presidential nominee that the silver issue of William Jennings Bryan was alive in the state but waning. Roosevelt had his doubts about this when his train climbed up to the Cripple Creek mining district. A riot broke out as he and Senator Wolcott tried to address a crowd of Bryan supporters in the town of Victor. While beer bottles and furniture were flying around, somebody banged Roosevelt on the shoulder with a placard reading “Hang T. R.” Roosevelt, who was extremely shortsighted, reached for the placard wielder, failed to locate him, and was heard to mutter, “Any goddamned man born with such eyes as I’ve got ought to have been knocked in the head in his cradle.” As he was hustled out of Victor, Roosevelt was told that the miners were not really mad at him but at Senator Wolcott, who had reneged in 1896 on a promise to join the Silver Republicans.1
Bryan carried Colorado barely when McKinley was re-elected president in November, but the Victor riot won a good deal of sympathy for Roosevelt. He had not campaigned with much fervor, being preoccupied with plans for a Colorado cougar hunt in January with Phil Stewart. From his governor’s desk back in Albany, he deluged Stewart with questions about White River. “Shall I bring my 30–30 Winchester? Will I need my revolver?” He asked Stewart to buy him proper hunting garb—chest 44, hips 42, shoes No. 7, hat size 7⅜. “I have a fur cap which draws down over the ears, just the thing for one of those scampering rides . . . My venerable buckskin shirt does not look well because I have swelled considerably since I used to wear it seventeen years ago.” Late in December his anticipation became unbearable. “Upon my word,” he wrote Stewart, “I feel like a boy again and am just crazy to get out.” 2
The hunt itself exceeded the hopes of the vice-president-elect. It began on January 11, 1901, at John Goff’s ranch in the Danforth Hills north of Meeker and continued out of Keystone Ranch westward on Coyote Basin below an escarpment called Colorow Mountain. (Colorow was one of several Ute subchiefs who claimed to have fired the bullet that killed Major Thornburgh at Milk Creek.) During five weeks of “scampering” after Goff’s hounds on the cold sage flats of Coyote Basin, the hunters bagged fourteen cougars. Roosevelt killed the largest himself—eight feet long to the tip of its tail and weighing a record 227 pounds. He instructed Goff to ship the skin to the Smithsonian in Washington.
As a safety measure, Stewart had brought along on the hunt Dr. Gerald B. Webb, an English physician from Colorado Springs. Webb’s services were not needed, though he stood ready to do repair work on one particular day. When the hunters spotted a cougar in a piñon tree, Stewart and Goff held Roosevelt’s legs and lowered him headfirst from a bank above the tree to get him in a shooting position. Suddenly the animal lunged at him. Providentially, a hound intercepted the cougar, and it was the hound that Webb had to repair.
In the months that followed the hunt, Roosevelt discussed national conservation often with Gifford Pinchot, now chief of forestry in the Department of Agriculture, and fretted because tradition prevented vice-presidents from doing anything useful. During the summer he came to Colorado again and was pleased to find that public opinion was turning in favor of the forest reserves in Colorado because of a campaign conducted by an indefatigable writer of letters to the editor, Edgar T. Ensign, who was president of the Colorado Forest Association.
There was much talk in the state of new needs for irrigation water. The raising of sugar beets, Roosevelt learned, was spreading like wildfire. A sugar refinery costing half a million dollars had opened on the western slope in Grand Junction to serve growers using irrigation ditches along the Colorado River. Two other refineries were operating, at Rocky Ford and at Sugar City on the Arkansas. A shrewd German immigrant Charles Boettcher, who had made a fortune with a chain of Front Range hardware stores, had returned to Germany to retire. He became interested in the sugar-beet industry there and decided it would thrive in Colorado. Instead of retiring, he had come back to build half a dozen German-style refineries along the South Platte Valley. Many of his countrymen had followed him back to direct operation of the Boettcher refineries. Roosevelt observed that the growing of sugar beets was paying the farmers of Colorado so well that they could afford to enlarge their irrigation systems. Since cultivation of the beet required transient labor, thousands of workers and their families from Mexico moved to the South Platte and Arkansas River valleys to be absorbed later by the native Mexican-American ethnic group.
Roosevelt was intrigued by another pioneer development high in the San Juan Mountains near Telluride. This Ames plant, a hydroelectric turbine assembled in 1891 by Lucius Nunn and George Westinghouse, had proved that falling water could generate cheap power that could be delivered long distances by a new electrical system called alternating current. If power could be produced by falling water in the Ames turbine, why not use all those other billions of tons of water falling down from the Continental Divide to create energy for new industries? The thought gave Roosevelt a clear view of what a reclamation enthusiast from Nevada, Congressman Francis G. Newlands, was talking about when he argued that the forces of useful gravity belonged to the nation as a whole, and not just to the state where the gravity happened to be.
On August 9, 1901, the vice-president boarded, in Colorado Springs, the gold-painted club car of the new Short Line railroad to Cripple Creek, which had been built by Winfield Scott Stratton and others to break the ore-hauling monopoly of the Midland Terminal line, owned by Spencer Penrose and A. E. Carlton. It was a hair-raising trip of forty-two miles, winding around the south side of Pikes Peak on narrow shelves cut in the cliffs. (The roadbed is an automobile road today.) This time the miners of Victor greeted Roosevelt cordially. When one of them asked how he liked the Short Line trip, he replied, “Bully! This is the trip that bankrupts the English language!” 3
And then, out of the blue, he found himself no longer the ineffectual vice-president. On September 6, 1901, McKinley was shot in Buffalo, New York, by a Polish anarchist. He died of the wound eight days later.
Within days of his accession, the twenty-sixth and youngest president of the United States began making plans to implement his conviction that much of the mountain west should be held in trust by the government for the benefit of all the people. In April 1902, he withdrew by proclamation the huge San Isabel Timber Reserve in Colorado, which included most of the Sangre de Cristo Range above the San Luis Valley and the eastern slopes of the Saguache Range from Monarch Pass north to Tennessee Pass. Month by month thereafter he gobbled up more of the Colorado Rockies—the Gunnison Reserve, an enlarged Pikes Peak Reserve stretching from Cheyenne Mountain at Colorado Springs to the Continental Divide beyond Kenosha Pass, the Holy Cross Reserve above Colorado River, the Uncompahgre above Ouray, the Medicine Bow north of Denver. There were protests, but they were muted, as a result of widely circulated tales of frauds in which railroads, lumbermen, and ranchers were said to be looting the public domain with the connivance of underlings in the Department of the Interior.
And most Coloradans approved when Roosevelt yanked his reserves out of the tainted jurisdiction of the Interior Department and put them in Agriculture with a new blanket name, National Forests, in a new department—the U. S. Forest Service, headed by Gifford Pinchot. The personnel was increased from a handful to several hundred trained foresters. To educate them, Pinchot persuaded a number of universities to establish schools of forestry including one in Colorado, at Colorado College. Pinchot’s foresters earned their keep by practices that revolutionized forest management in the United States—reseeding of trees, erosion control, rotation grazing, fire protection, wildlife study, and trail systems to encourage outdoor recreation. Sometimes his field employees headed off wars. In his book Where the Old West Stayed Young John Rolfe Burroughs described how one forest supervisor, Harry Ratcliff, kept some peace between sheepmen and cattlemen in Routt National Forest by ruling that the sheep be confined to grasslands at altitudes higher than those preferred by cattle.4
In 1904, Colorado voters helped Roosevelt win the presidential election by giving him a huge majority. Thirty thousand people, the largest crowd in the state’s history, gathered to hear him in Denver during his campaign tour. Everyone applauded when the news got out that he had showed up for a cowboy breakfast at the tailgate of a chuckwagon in Hugo clad in silk hat, frock coat, and winged collar. But the easy progress of his conservation program could not last. By the end of 1906, Roosevelt’s national forests in the West had reached a total area of 107 million acres. Many Coloradans decided that he had to be stopped before the whole state ended up as a Roosevelt reserve.
And they thought that they had stopped him when Congress passed an act providing that no new reserves could be created by simple presidential proclamation after March 4, 1907. An act of Congress would be required from then on. Two days before the act became law, Roosevelt set aside twenty-one new national forests with an area of more than forty million acres. The additions raised the total in Colorado to eighteen forests totaling almost sixteen million acres—close to one quarter of the state’s sixty-six million acres. As one bitter critic pointed out, Coloradans had worked hard to win that amount of land from the Utes in 1881. Now it was taken from them by a fast-talking outlander from faraway Oyster Bay, New York.
In this same period, another kind of reservation—to preserve antiquities—had its origins in Colorado. We have noted that F. V. Hayden’s surveyors toured the mesas of southwestern Colorado in the 1870s and found superb cliff dwellings and artifacts left behind a thousand years and more ago by prehistoric Pueblo Indians. Soon souvenir hunters began swarming through the mesas carrying off ancient pottery, tools, cooking utensils, and even stones and bricks of the dwellings to sell to museums as far away as Sweden. Some promoters in Manitou Springs decided that it was more convenient to see these antiques at Pikes Peak than Mesa Verde, three hundred and fifty miles away. They spent a hundred thousand dollars blasting out a cave near Manitou and filling it with artifacts and cliff dwellings improvised from some forty carloads of stone, which they picked up in the Mesa Verde area. They opened their display to tourists under the same name that it has today, Manitou Springs Cliff Dwellings Museum.
To stop these depredations, a group of Colorado women organized the Cliff Dwellers Association to lobby in Washington for a national park at Mesa Verde. The women were inspired in their drive by many advances in the Colorado feminist movement, which had occurred during the 1890s, starting with the winning of the right to vote in 1893. That victory had made Colorado, as we have noted, the second state in the Union (after Wyoming) to grant that right. A smaller but still important advance happened that same year when a thirty-four-year-old professor of English from Wellesley College, Katherine Lee Bates, was assigned to the normally all-male faculty of Colorado College at Pikes Peak for the summer session. On an outing with the novelist Hamlin Garland and other teachers, Miss Bates rode in a wagon up the new carriage road to the top of Pikes Peak. She wrote of the trip later:
Our sojourn on the peak remains in memory hardly more than one ecstatic gaze. It was then and there, as I was looking out over the sealike expanse of fertile country spreading away so far under these ample skies, that the opening lines of the hymn floated into my mind.5
Miss Bates sold her hymn for a few dollars to The Congregationalist magazine in 1895. Soon thereafter, when it was set to the music of Samuel Ward’s “Materna,” it became—and remains—the nation’s favorite patriotic poem under the title “America the Beautiful.”
Inspired by such samples of feminine achievement in Colorado, the women of the Mesa Verde preservation lobby went to work with confidence. Some of them had the support of influential husbands, Luna Thatcher, for example, was the wife of the Pueblo financial kingpin Mahlon D. Thatcher. Virginia McClurg of Colorado Springs, who headed the Cliff Dwellers Association, was not shy about prodding Philip Stewart to get her demands through to his hunting friend President Roosevelt.
A major problem was that the best dwellings at Mesa Verde—Cliff Palace, Spruce Tree Lodge, Balcony House—were on Ute lands, the owners of which were willing to lease them if Mrs. McClurg could get a quorum of chiefs to agree on terms. “We donned bloomers and hiked our legs off chasing chiefs,” Mrs. McClurg wrote later.
They were out in the wilds most of the time foraging for the scanty subsistence denied them by the government. An Indian is an anomalous landlord. He comes up bright and smiling with every new moon to suggest an entire change in demands. He does not disdain to cement these treaties with Cyrano chains, Waterbury watches, watermelons, and striped candy.6
Mrs. McClurg did get her chiefs together at last and negotiated a ten-year lease with them, but the Department of the Interior refused to approve it on technical grounds. Still, the Colorado women persevered, pushing their cause through Congress after Congress. And on June 26, 1906, they won finally when President Roosevelt signed a bill passed by both houses creating Mesa Verde National Park, with provisions to protect the ruins on Ute lands within five miles of park boundaries. Seven years later Congress ratified a treaty with the Weminuche Utes, bringing the ruins on their land into the park and giving it the present area of 52,036 acres.
The Newlands Reclamation Act, which was designed to create vast areas of cropland out of worthless desert, was signed by Roosevelt on June 7, 1902. Its aims had been foreshadowed thirty years before when President Grant had proposed a federal canal running from Denver to the edge of the Kansas rain belt at the hundredth meridian to transform by irrigation the high, dry plains into gardens. It was known even then that controlled irrigation made lands more productive than uncontrolled rainfall. Though irrigation by local initiative had succeeded in some places like Greeley, private capital was not up to the financing of reservoirs and canals to bring water to all the arid regions that could benefit from it. The Homestead Act of 1862 and its later modifications to get the public domain into private ownership had failed, often because the size of the homestead could not be made to fit the variety of growing conditions west of the hundredth meridian. The Newlands Act was designed to eliminate this problem. Each farmer’s homestead of from forty to one hundred and sixty acres would have the same potential as any other farmer’s irrigated claim, regardless of location. The homesteads would make money and yet be small enough to bring enough farmers to an irrigated area to create a community. Though the homesteader would have to pay the government an annual fee of one dollar an acre for his water, it was presumed that he could afford the fee because of the high yields on his irrigated claim.
The new Reclamation Service planned its first venture in the Sterling area east of the mountains, but that was dropped when farmers on the western slope complained that they had more land needing irrigation and more water flowing by unused. An early and easy project of the Reclamation Service was the building of a dam and a high-line canal, which brought Grand (Colorado) River water to the western-slope fruit and sugar-beet farms along a sixty-two-mile stretch from the village of Palisade through Grand Junction to the Utah border. Another western-slope project turned out to be far from easy. It involved the diversion of water from Gunnison River through a tunnel to the fertile but water-shy valley of the Uncompahgre River around the towns of Montrose and Delta.
Just why Reclamation Service officials should have picked one of the most difficult spots on earth for the east portal of what would be at the time the longest irrigation tunnel in the world—5.8 miles—remains a mystery. The starting point was in the dankest and deepest part of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, that narrow fifty-mile gorge with sheer granite walls rising as high as three thousand feet above the river. It was so shaded down there that the resident rainbow trout acquired a dismal, dark color. Its rushing waters and huge boulders were not fully explored until 1882–1883, when Byron H. Bryant of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad led his engineers through to the junction of the Gunnison and its north fork below Paonia.
Nobody else got through Black Canyon until 1901 when a Montrose utilities man, William W. Torrence, and A. Lincoln Fellows, a hydrographer for the U. S. Geographical Survey, conquered the gorge by swimming and wading, and by tumbling on rubber air mattresses over rapids too swift to be waded. The nature writer Richard Beidleman has told how the two explorers came one day to a place where the river vanished beneath a rock slide. They shook hands in mock farewell and let the torrent carry them on their mattresses wherever it was going. When they emerged safely into daylight below the slide, they climbed to a ledge and danced a jig.7
Many months were spent surveying for the irrigation tunnel to connect the Gunnison with the watershed of the Uncompahgre. Blasting began in January 1905, and the bore was finished in July 1909. The workers had to endure ninety-degree heat, carbonic gas, and subsurface streams bursting through their drill holes. Nine men lost their lives. The tunnel was supposed to cost $1,500,000. The actual cost was $6,715,074. A year later, Gunnison water was reaching the irrigation ditches of the Uncompahgre. As a consequence, some 146,000 acres of reclaimed cropland valued at $30,000,000 was added to the resources of the people of Montrose and Delta counties.
The Uncompahgre Valley Project was the nation’s first large-scale diversion of water for irrigation from the drainage system of one river to another. During the same period, the Denver banker David H. Moffat toiled to achieve a different kind of miracle—the building of a standard-gauge railroad over the highest part of the Continental Divide due west of Denver. Such a railroad was the old impossible dream of W. A. H. Loveland and John Evans to put Denver and Golden on a direct transcontinental route to San Francisco by way of Salt Lake City.
Moffat was in his sixties when he embarked on his great adventure, having concealed until then behind a screen of orthodox behavior the recklessness of his spirit. In the 1870s he had made money with Jerome Chaffee in the First National Bank of Denver and in the Caribou silver mine near Boulder. In the 1880s he had made more money with Chaffee and Horace Tabor in the Little Pittsburg at Leadville. In the 1890s he had struck it rich at Cripple Creek. When his railroad dream seized him in 1902, he was the richest and most powerful man in the Rockies.
The Denver and Rio Grande Railroad had been running to its West-Coast connections at Salt Lake City for many years by dipping from Denver south to Pueblo and then angling westward through the Royal Gorge of the Arkansas. Moffat’s proposed route to Salt Lake City was nearly two hundred miles shorter—550 miles over Rollins Pass (altitude, 11,680 feet). The route would be shorter still when Rollins Pass was eliminated by a six-mile tunnel under James Peak, which Moffat expected to build as soon as his line began to collect revenue from the ranchers of Middle Park and the coal operators of the Yampa Valley.
Moffat was no amateur railroad man. He had served for a time as president of the Denver and Rio Grande, during which he spent a lot of D. and R. G. money investigating the James Peak tunnel matter. In 1894 he had won a race with the Colorado Midland people by getting his narrow-gauge Florence and Cripple Creek Railroad to the gold camp ahead of their line. He knew the risks that he was taking, even though he had a personal fortune of nine million dollars behind him—a huge sum in those days. He had seen how the high cost of mountain railroading had brought bankruptcy to the three little cliff-hanging lines that Otto Mears had built in the San Juans, and to the Colorado Midland out of Colorado Springs which had crossed Hagerman Pass above Leadville at first by a tunnel at 11,528 feet and then by a lower tunnel at 10,944 feet. Heavy snows had closed these lines for months at a stretch. He knew also that he would be opposed in a variety of ways by those greedy and unprincipled Eastern tycoons Edward H. Harriman of the Union Pacific and George Gould of the Missouri Pacific. But he had observed their skulduggery in Colorado for a decade, and he believed that he could match wits with them.
However, his first challenge came not from them but from the U. S. Reclamation Service, the officials of which were planning to use Gore Canyon as a site for a hydroelectric power and storage dam. This canyon was a deep trench through which the Grand (Colorado) River ran west of Kremmling. Moffat considered it to be the only practical way to get his road out of Middle Park and into the Yampa valley. His suits to win a right-of-way and to block the dam project dragged on and on while his crews were laying his tracks over Rollins Pass and across Middle Park. By 1905, his case seemed so hopeless that he sent his surveyors looking for another route. But suddenly word came that his application had been granted. The grantor was President Roosevelt, who told the press that the Moffat road would open northwest Colorado to settlement and improve communications between the western and eastern slopes, which gave it priority over the power project.
In his book Rails That Climb Edward T. Bollinger has described how Moffat’s construction crews endured unbelievable hardships and tragedy in their efforts to build the line across the divide and on toward Craig. Meanwhile, Moffat sold his personal properties one by one to pay soaring construction costs—his gold and silver mines, his Denver Tramway stock, his major interest in the First National Bank. There were milestone dates to keep up his hopes—trains to the top of Rollins Pass on September 2, 1904, beyond Gore Canyon to McCoy on May 15, 1908, through the Oak Creek coalfields to Steamboat Springs on February 13, 1909. But Moffat’s costs—ranging from $78,000 to $200,000 a mile—were many times higher than his original estimates. They brought him to the end of his millions in 1911, and to the end of his hopes and strength as well. As a last desperate measure, he swallowed his pride and went to New York to ask Harriman for help. Harriman was agreeable—in exchange for control of the railroad. Moffat refused, and died penniless in New York soon after, on May 20, 1911, at the age of seventy-one. His place as president of the Moffat Road was filled by John Evans’s son William G., who rallied friends to save the line. With their support Evans was able to build on from Steamboat Springs forty-one miles farther to Craig by November 1913. Craig was where Moffat’s dream ended.8
While Roosevelt’s conservation policies were putting much of Colorado under federal control, another development, the deflation of mining, was bringing changes to the conduct of industry in the state. The totally unexpected discovery of gold at Cripple Creek offset to a degree the decline of silver mining in 1893, but the Cripple Creek boom tapered off after 1900 when gold production reached a peak value of $18,200,000 from 475 shipping mines. By the end of World War I, production had declined to $5,867,511 from forty-one shipping mines.
A major effect of this deflation was the merging of companies in Colorado into large corporations to increase efficiency, to reduce competition, and to gain power by combination. The Swiss-born Jew Meyer Guggenheim and his son Simon, who got their start mining silver in Leadville, absorbed the state’s leading smelters under the name of the American Smelting and Refining Company. Simon became a U. S. senator from Colorado in 1907. Charles Boettcher bunched his sugar refineries into the Great Western Sugar Company. John C. Osgood, who reorganized the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company at Pueblo out of the original Colorado Coal and Iron Company of General Palmer, was forced to turn over control of his firm to the Rockefeller interests.
Deflation and mergers had an effect on Colorado politics too. The mine owners used the power of their combinations to buy the election of James H. Peabody as Republican governor in 1902. Reaction set in two years later when the Democrat Alva Adams polled more votes than Peabody for the governorship. So much fraud was practiced in the contest that both Republicans and Democrats demanded a new election. In a weird attempt to save the honor of the state from the corruption of its parties, the general assembly named Peabody as governor, replacing Adams who had already held the office for two months. By agreement, Peabody resigned the same day in favor of the lieutenant governor, Jesse F. McDonald. Three governors in twenty-four hours!
It was inevitable that the mine workers of the state should band together to protect themselves against the combinations of the mine owners. They had at their disposal the most aggressive and successful union in the nation, the Western Federation of Miners, which was formed in Butte, Montana, in 1893, and which had won a great victory at Cripple Creek a year later when it forced the mine owners to meet its demands for an eight-hour day and a three-dollar-a-day wage. The WFM increased its power steadily, but its objectives shifted, meanwhile, from mere unionism to world revolution in an unofficial partnership with the International Workers of the World. In 1904 the WFM struck three gold reduction mills in Colorado City near Colorado Springs. The mill workers were joined seven months later by several hundred Cripple Creek miners—an early example of the sympathy strike.
James Peabody, the creature of the mine owners, was governor at the time. The state militia, which he sent to Cripple Creek, had orders to defend the mines, not the miners. The public generally took a neutral view of the conflict until June 6, 1904, when the WFM made a ghastly error. Two of its terrorists blew up a depot in the gold camp, covering part of Battle Mountain with the dismembered bodies of thirteen miners and wounding a dozen more. The union had supposed that the mine owners would be blamed for the blast, but the evidence showed clearly that the WFM was behind it. As public opinion turned against the union, the mine owners won the strike by the blatant suspension of all civil rights. The union was outlawed in Colorado. Seventy-three of its alleged ringleaders were loaded on flatcars by armed militiamen, hauled to the Kansas border, and dumped out on the prairie. That was the end of the Western Federation of Miners as a labor union in Colorado.
For nearly a decade thereafter, workers and owners lived in peace, until the United Mine Workers demanded to be recognized in the coal mines of the state. A showdown strike on the issue was called in September 1913 north of Trinidad at the Ludlow mine of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, which was still a Rockefeller subsidiary. The company reacted in the usual way. Strikebreakers were imported, and the governor was asked to send in militiamen to protect them.
The striking miners and their families withdrew to tent colonies near the mine. After a bitter winter, the climax came on April 20, 1914, when militiamen and strikers began shooting at one another. Five miners and one soldier died. The militia set fire to the tents which brought death by burning or suffocation to two women and eleven children. President Woodrow Wilson sent the regular army to restore order and arrange housing for the burned-out families. Peace talks dragged on until December 1914, when the United Mine Workers agreed to withdraw from Colorado, and state legislature passed measures to improve conditions in the mines.
John D. Rockefeller, Jr., had never seen any of his Colorado mines and knew nothing about their operation. Appalled by the tragedy at Ludlow, he went there in September 1915, and spent a fortnight discussing grievances with the miners. The result was “the Rockefeller Plan,” an extensive program for higher wages, shorter hours, freedom to deal or not to deal at company stores, and no discrimination against workers who joined a union. The coal miners of the state approved the plan overwhelmingly, and it was adopted later by many American companies until its inherent paternalism was outdated by the Wagner Act of 1935.
A good many Coloradans actually had no particular interest in these issues that were troubling the state up to the beginning of World War I. They were absorbed in the growth of an industry based on nothing more tangible than the longing people had to enjoy themselves.
1. Theodore Roosevelt letters to Philip B. Stewart, December 1900. Western Collection, Tutt Library, Colorado College, Colorado Springs, Colorado. Quoted by permission of John Wolcott Stewart.
2. Roosevelt letters. Colorado College.
3. Marshall Sprague, Money Mountain (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1953), p. 245.
4. John Rolfe Burroughs, Where the Old West Stayed Young (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1962), pp. 280–291.
5. Dorothy Burgess, Dream and Deed (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952), p. 102.
6. Edmund B. Rogers, “Notes on the Establishment of Mesa Verde National Park,” Colorado Magazine 29:13–14 (January 1952).
7. Richard G. Beidleman, “The Gunnison River Diversion Project,” The Colorado Magazine 36:187–201 ( July 1959).
8. Edward T. Bollinger, Rails That Climb (Santa Fe: Rydal Press, 1950), pp. 267–268.