COLORADANS read the headlines in their newspapers—
STOCK EXCHANGE HAS WILDEST DAY IN HISTORY
—and the soothing remarks of President Hoover about the crash, and passed on to stories that intrigued them more, such as the trial of the Fleagle gang of Kansas bank robbers who had murdered four prominent citizens of Lamar. A majority of citizens remained calm for months as the financial crisis deepened nationally and the paper value of American industry was cut in half. The effects of the depression spread to Colorado slowly. Automobile tourism held up through 1930 because of low prices for gasoline and for lodging in the new cottage camps. Thousands from out of state came to see the lower stretches of the Trail Ridge Road which was being built from Estes Park across the Continental Divide to Grand Lake, reaching 12,183 feet above sea level at its highest point near Milner Pass. And there was a small boom in rich Indian tourists from Oklahoma riding in their new Cadillacs and Pierce Arrows driven by black chauffeurs.
This initial apathy was almost a neurosis—a disinclination of the average Coloradan to face up to any problems just then. He was tired of problems, having endured mining deflation for forty years to say nothing of confusing politics—populism, the silver issue, Roosevelt’s theft of his forests, Bull Moose progressivism, Wilsonian democracy, the “normalcy” of Harding and Coolidge, and the nightmare regime of Grand Dragon Locke. His disenchantment with these matters made him anxious to have a little peace under the leadership of William H. “Billy” Adams, who was elected governor in 1927.
Billy Adams—the boyish nickname used by everybody was significant—was sixty-six years old when he became governor. He had arrived at that age as trim and spry as any cowboy of half his years, and that was what he was—a cheerful, outgoing, bowlegged cowboy, trained to keep the fences tight and not wear out the horses. He was also an able rancher with a large cattle spread in San Luis Valley, where he had lived since 1878. His constituents loved him because he believed in what they believed in—the old pioneer spirit, self-reliance, hard work, getting the job done. He was nominally a Democrat like his much older brother Alva, three times a governor of Colorado, but his views were those of a conservative Republican, and he applied them to the conduct of his office when the depression began. His program called for rigid economy, balancing the state budget, resisting federal encroachment on Colorado’s affairs, and trusting the common sense of his people to cope with the depression through private charities and relief measures at the county level. But Adams did not choose to run for a third term in 1932. He retired to his ranch and helped his protege Edwin Carl Johnson, aged forty-eight, win the governorship in the election that fall.
“Big Ed” Johnson, born a Kansan of Swedish Lutheran parentage, had settled in northwest Colorado in 1909 and had worked as homesteader, railroad hand, telegrapher, and schoolteacher before becoming manager of a farmer’s co-operative at the far end of the Moffat Road in Craig. He was a strapping politician with a stubborn streak tempered by a jovial manner. He seemed to be Billy Adams all over again in his homespun conservatism and confidence that Colorado’s current population of one million could handle its own problems. He was skeptical of the new president in Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal program to alleviate the depression, but as the breadlines in Denver lengthened and a third of the state’s banks closed their doors, Johnson realized that this crisis could not be met by conservative methods, such as balancing the budget at the expense of the needy. All the volunteer relief agencies were running out of funds, including Denver’s Unemployed Citizens League, which had been handing out a variety of part-time jobs from the old winter quarters of the Sells-Floto Circus. Reluctantly Johnson turned to the New Deal for help and he asked the general assembly—nicknamed “the Twiddling Twenty-Ninth”—to assume some responsibility for the destitute by raising taxes so that Colorado could qualify for federal relief funds. His request for taxes resulted eventually in the state’s first Department of Public Welfare and a system of old-age pensions.
The federal funds that the governor needed were controlled unofficially by Colorado’s Democratic senator in Washington, Edward P. Costigan, whom Roosevelt selected to guide him on New Deal programs and their personnel in Colorado. (The other senator, Billy Adams’s nephew Alva B., kept himself pretty much in the background.) To men like Johnson, Costigan was a dangerous radical who praised labor unions and the League of Nations, and who argued that Colorado had obligations beyond its borders because other states used the waters of its rivers and because a third of it was federal land owned by all Americans.
Costigan, a small, frail man who suffered from asthma, was born in Virginia and educated at Harvard. He had held unpopular views since the turn of the century when, as a young Denver lawyer, he had accepted Theodore Roosevelt’s thesis that the public domain of the West was a national trust. He ran twice for governor unsuccessfully as a Bull Moose progressive, turned Democrat to support Woodrow Wilson, and spent ten years in Washington as a Wilson appointee on the U. S. Tariff Commission. He thought that low tariffs would increase international trade and discourage wars, and he enraged the Colorado beet-sugar people by proposing to reduce the duty on cane sugar imported from Cuba. The ranchers detested him because he favored grazing fees on public land and because he had backed Enos Mills in the Rocky Mountain National Park fight. Nobody was surprised when he returned to Denver in 1928 to become general counsel for that other dangerous radical Josephine Roche and her Rocky Mountain Fuel Company. Miss Roche had horrified the business community by coming to terms with the United Mine Workers.
When Costigan ran for the U. S. Senate in 1930, his program for federal aid brought him a landslide victory. He won the solid support of debt-ridden farmers and unemployed workers, and of the state’s Spanish-Americans, who found him attractive partly because he was only half Anglo. (His mother was Spanish.) Through the worst years of the depression—1932 to 1936—he worked hard to keep things moving smoothly. Among his problems were Johnson’s jealousy of his authority and the running feud which the governor carried on with Roosevelt’s relief administrator in Washington, Harry Hopkins. But Costigan’s health broke down completely in 1936. This misfortune forced his retirement and his replacement in the Senate by Johnson. Thus ended the career of a courageous and farsighted man who devoted a great deal of his time to defending the public domain in Colorado against those who urged its unrestricted exploitation however destructive of the land.
The Colorado programs of the New Deal unfolded rapidly under Franklin D. Roosevelt, accompanied by heated debates as to whether they were accomplishing anything. The debates were mostly politics. Progress was being made. The Silver Purchase Act of 1934 and the rise in the price paid by the government for gold from twenty to thirty-five dollars an ounce revived mining in Cripple Creek and other ghost camps. Swarms of unemployed young men found instructive work in the Civilian Conservation Corps under the direction of army officers. This remarkable program was perfectly adapted to the state with its vast forest reserves. The workers, enrolled for six months in batches of one hundred and seventy-five members, built roads and trails, fought forest fires, and contoured the hillsides to stop erosion.
The federal programs could not avert tragedies that came to the dry-land farmers of the eastern plains who had been exposing their fields to the winds by excessive plowing ever since the boom days of World War I. The soil stayed put when crops were coming up during wet years, but four years of drouth began in 1931. With nothing growing, “black blizzards”—seven or eight of these spells of high wind might descend on a farm in one summer—could pick up the exposed topsoil and carry it as far away as Denver and Pueblo, where it would darken the skies as it drifted down on those cities. Countless families, particularly in the counties of Baca, Las Animas, and Prowers in southeastern Colorado, raised nothing at all during the four-year drouth. Many of them found it hard to bear the weird, swirling dust, which blotted out the sun, killed their livestock and poultry, seeped into their homes and made breathing difficult. Instances of insanity and suicide were not uncommon. Before the drouth ended, half of these farmers abandoned their ruined property and fled to California or to the pinto-bean country of the western slope. Those who stayed on were supported by funds paid to them by the Agricultural Adjustment Administration for not planting wheat or for practicing soil conservation.
Of all Colorado programs, by far the most successful were those financed after 1935 by the Works Progress Administration, usually under the sponsorship of local agencies. Tens of thousands of Coloradans were put to work in a wide range of WPA projects, nearly a hundred in all. During those years nine thousand miles of state highways were constructed or improved. Sewage plants and waterworks were modernized. Hundreds of schools, gymnasiums, and other public structures were built—a library at Greeley, a swimming pool at Fort Morgan, a town hall at Center, a bridge in Pueblo leading across a lake to the Mineral Palace, stone linings for flood control on Monument Creek at Colorado Springs.
Unemployed Coloradans who practiced the arts for a living were surprised to find that the WPA had use for their crafts. While opponents of the New Deal called such peculiar work “boondoggles,” fine painters like Frank Mechau and Boardman Robinson, Archie Musick and Allen True created murals on regional themes to brighten the state’s post offices, hospitals, and schools. Groups of artists assembled traveling exhibitions, which were displayed at military posts. In the state museum in Denver, dioramas were produced on the history of transportation in Colorado and on its cattle industry. WPA researchers indexed museum papers and photos and made displays of Clovis points and sea shells. Down near Platteville, historians reconstructed Fort Vasquez, the adobe trading post of the 1830s that had stood on the trail between Bent’s Fort and Fort Laramie.
The WPA writers’ project hired talented men like Thomas Hornsby Ferril and George Willison to put together the excellent Colorado guidebook based on materials collected throughout the state by roving reporters.1 Other writers prepared texts for historical plaques and for pamphlets on many subjects—race relations in Denver, how to cook venison, the origin of the oyster bar at Elitch Gardens. But the WPA’s music project had troubles. The federally financed Colorado Symphony Orchestra was opposed bitterly by Denver’s Civic Symphony on the grounds that the seventy-two musicians of the WPA orchestra were paid more than the private group. A compromise was reached, and the federals performed mainly outside of Denver.
Though the thirties were sad years for the eastern dry-landers, Coloradans elsewhere did not fare too badly. The state as a whole was not an industrial society. Most residents were not dependent on factory jobs. In the Front Range towns and westerly—Grand Junction, Montrose, Durango, Alamosa—residents cut expenses and lived comfortably if frugally. Frugal living was not depressing when one could enjoy a stimulating climate and spacious mountains at no expense.
There were helpful private developments. Large endowments for public benefits appeared as wealthy Coloradans set up foundations with self-perpetuating boards of trustees so that their estates would not be reduced by inheritance taxes imposed by the socialistic New Deal regime. The eight-million-dollar Bonfils Foundation began in 1933 with the death of Fred Bonfils, the strange, waspish co-owner of The Denver Post. The family of Charles Boettcher created the Boettcher Foundation, based on beet-sugar refineries, cement factories, and ranches. In Colorado Springs Spencer Penrose, whose fortune embraced major holdings in Kennecott Copper Corporation and a host of Pikes Peak tourist properties, established El Pomar Foundation just before his death in 1939. The income from El Pomar would be devoted mainly to building and aiding hospitals, libraries, schools, and colleges throughout the state.
Hard times inspired the well-to-do with a yearning for culture to cause a revival on a larger scale of cultural interests that had been displayed thirty years earlier by some of the state’s women in promoting Mesa Verde National Park. One of these yearners during the depression was Anne Evans of Denver, the youngest child of Colorado’s second territorial governor. She had been born in England in 1871 while John Evans’s wife, Margaret, was visiting there. Miss Evans had seen a lot of culture in Europe, and it irked her that Denver seemed to be prouder of its National Western Stock Show than of its historical heritage and its achievements in the arts.
One of Anne Evans’s best friends, Ida Kruse McFarlane, taught English at the University of Denver and was part-owner of the Central City Opera House, which had known glory as the loveliest theater west of Chicago in its mountain pocket above Denver. The theater was falling apart from disuse as the two women developed a plot to shake Denver out of its cowtown boorishness while taking the minds of people off the depression. The result of their plotting was the polite extortion by them of money from members of Denver society to refurbish the opera house and to stage the first performance of the Central City Festival on July 16, 1932, starring the ineffable Lillian Gish in Camille. From then on, the summer festival attracted audiences from all over the world to enjoy its operas and plays, to say nothing of the gold camp’s earthier amusements in the way of saloons, music halls, square dances and the famous “Face on the Barroom Floor,” which Herndon Davis painted one convivial evening in the Teller House.
Among Miss Evans’s contributors to the festival were Mrs. Spencer Penrose and Mrs. Meredith Hare of Colorado Springs, both of whom had been encouraging the finer things of life at Pikes Peak for years. Mrs. Penrose had founded the Broadmoor Art Academy in her own home in 1919 with an impressive faculty, including such luminaries as Randall Davey of Santa Fe and George Bellows and Boardman Robinson of New York. While Lillian Gish was packing the opera house at Central City, Mrs. Hare was discussing a new library for Colorado College with Alice Bemis Taylor, whose family had moved to Colorado Springs from Boston in the 1880s and had lavished gifts on the college ever since. It occurred to Mrs. Hare and, through her, to Mrs. Penrose that the Broadmoor Art Academy was a second-rate building for such a first-rate art school, particularly in view of Anne Evans’s spectacular Central City Festival, which indicated that Colorado Springs was not keeping pace with the cultural Joneses to the north.
The two women called on Mrs. Taylor, who came to agree with them that a proper art-school facility was more important to the Pikes Peak region than a library. Boardman Robinson was asked to prepare a list of ideas for an art school. He elaborated his list into a free community center—the second of its kind in the United States—where all the arts could be enjoyed—music, ballet, painting, sculpture, drama. The result was the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center paid for by Mrs. Taylor at a cost of $1,200,000. It was designed by her son-in-law John Gaw Meem of Santa Fe, an innovative architect who gave the center a new kind of monolithic concrete design. It was opened to the public in 1936, and it remains one of the handsomest buildings in the Rockies.
Edward Taylor of Glenwood Springs (no relation to Alice) had served his district in Washington since 1909 and was responsible, in 1921, for persuading Congress to change the name of Grand River to Colorado River. As the venerable chairman of the public-lands committee in the House, Taylor had waited for the right moment to get Congress to do something about some four hundred million acres of federal land in ten western states—land that most people didn’t know existed and which was being used free of charge and supervision by stockmen and by companies looking for oil, gas, coal, uranium, and so on. This forgotten empire, larger than all the Eastern-seaboard states put together, was under the jurisdiction of the General Land Office, a moribund and autonomous division of the Department of the Interior. It was all that remained of the original public domain—unwatered, barren land that nobody had claimed because it appeared to have no economic value to speak of—no value to homesteaders or to the Forest Service, Park Service, Bureau of Reclamation, or any other federal institution.
Seven and a half million acres of the land lay in western Colorado—much of it rolling sage country in Moffat, Rio Blanco, Mesa, and Montrose counties. Other Colorado areas were south of Gunnison, in Middle Park, and around Canon City. Congressman Taylor believed that these wastelands had potential value for which those using them should pay fees. The fees would be used partly to improve the land with wells and stock ponds, to stop overgrazing, and to classify the sections so that they could be managed according to their agricultural and mineral promise. When the New Deal arrived, Taylor felt that the time had come to push his grazing bill. He knew that he would be supported by the Secretary of the Interior, the elderly, pepperish Chicagoan named Harold Ickes, who was grasping for all the power in sight. Taylor’s bill provided that the four hundred million acres would be taken from the jurisdiction of the General Land Office and placed under Ickes’s direct control.
And so it happened. On June 28, 1934, Congress passed the Taylor Grazing Act, in effect ending homesteading forever. Secretary Ickes had gained his empire. All he needed was someone to work out its administration. As it happened, Ed Taylor was lunching now and then with an old friend Farrington Carpenter, a Colorado lawyer who was in Washington lobbying for the cattle industry. In 1907 Carpenter had homesteaded in the Yampa Valley near Hayden and had organized schools there so that bachelor cowboys could find wives among the young girls whom he lured from the East to teach in the schools. (He married one himself.) Through the ensuing years he had spent much of his time as a lawyer setting up grazing areas in Routt National Forest to the satisfaction of rival cattle and sheep outfits with grazing permits.
Though Carpenter was a Republican, Taylor introduced him to Secretary Ickes, who liked his qualifications as a rancher. In a matter of weeks President Roosevelt appointed him to be director of the Interior Department’s new division of grazing as prescribed by the Taylor Grazing Act, with an annual salary of $6,500 and a staff of seventeen men borrowed from the U. S. Geological Survey to determine where the grazing lands were. That was no easy task since the only plats for them were scattered in twenty-four western land offices.
This first grazing director was a tolerant, humorous, forthright man with a passion for cowboy shirts, loud ties, and red galluses. He knew the prejudices and problems of stockmen inside and out. For two years he drove his Model-A Ford all over Colorado and the other western states explaining fees, grazing permits, and classifications to thousands of hostile ranchers. Carpenter refused to follow Ickes’s suggestion that final approval for grazing permits should rest with officials of the Interior Department in Washington, explaining acidly to the secretary, “Those fellows back East don’t know which end of a cow gets up first.”
Carpenter vested all authority for his division in local advisory boards of ten men—five cowmen and five sheepmen. These boards laid out grazing districts (five in Colorado) and set grazing fees (five cents a month for a cow, one cent for a sheep). The local autonomy system allayed suspicion among ranchmen and brought the director majority support for a controversial program.2 But Harold Ickes did not approve of the local boards, which, he said, did not require stockmen to vote the Democratic ticket and which gave them too much power. Eventually Carpenter got tired of Ickes’s complaints and resigned his office. But the division that he pioneered continued until 1946, when it was consolidated with the General Land Office into the Bureau of Land Management.
In pushing his grazing act through Congress, Ed Taylor had the larger future of Colorado in mind—a future to be enriched by applying modern science to the fuller development of the state’s limited resources. At this time Charles Hansen, editor of The Greeley Tribune, was cluttering his ancient rolltop desk with engineering plans for a far more complicated scheme of development that he had been researching for years. Hansen, who looked like a typical preoccupied newsroom man—shirt-sleeves, green eyeshade, black headline crayon behind an ear—had added the duties of New Deal relief chairman for Weld County to his editing and scheming. The depression soup kitchens in Greeley appalled him. So did the reports of despair down the South Platte—despair and bankruptcy caused by the drouth-created shortage of water in the irrigation ditches that nourished the farms all the way east to Julesburg. In June of 1933, an official of the Public Works Administration wrote to him for ideas to put men to work in his relief area. Hansen outlined his development scheme and sent it to Washington by return mail. The scheme would be known later as the Colorado-Big Thompson Project, the largest transmountain diversion of water for irrigation and power ever attempted.
The man who would come to be called “the godfather of the Big T” faced obstacles as formidable as the Continental Divide that blocked him from the western-slope streams that he hoped to exploit. The Colorado traditions of self-reliance and distrust of the federal government were strong in Weld County, which was populated by descendants of Greeley’s Union Colony pioneers and a mixed bag of thrifty Swedes, Russo-Germans, Poles, and Pennsylvania Dutch. Hansen was asked how he had the nerve to offer a plan to grow more irrigated crops when the Agricultural Adjustment Administration was paying farmers to grow less. And what made him think that the people of the western slope could spare any of the water from the Colorado River and its tributaries on which they depended totally? It was pointed out that the Colorado River Compact had gone into effect in 1929, requiring that the seven Colorado River states divide the flow among themselves according to their needs. The needs were enormous, particularly those of the metropolises of Los Angeles and Phoenix, and yet the Colorado was a small river compared to the Missouri and Snake and Columbia. By the terms of the compact, the ranchers and farmers of Colorado’s sparsely populated western slope found themselves reduced to half the volume of irrigation water that they had always regarded as theirs. To cut the volume further to please Charles Hansen and the South Platte valley crowd was unthinkable. The western slopers were not to blame that Weld County had too many farmers or that the South Platte was not really a river but just a creek.
The would-be water robber persevered. He added power plants to his plans—hydroelectric plants that would produce cheap electricity for Greeley and Fort Collins, Loveland and Longmont. Eastern-slope newspapers cheered him on, and so did the railroads and beet-sugar refiners. He was supported in Congress by a lobby of manufacturers of all the machines and materials required to make such a system. He organized the promotional Northern Colorado Water Users Association headed by himself and composed of leaders of the prairie counties of the South Platte—leaders representing some six thousand growers of sugar beets and potatoes, beans, corn, fruit, alfalfa, poultry, eggs, hogs, and cattle. This group became the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District (Charles Hansen, president), which was authorized by the state legislature to sign construction contracts with the U. S. Bureau of Reclamation and to manage the water diversion after it was completed.
The indefatigable editor answered the objections of conservationists by promising that the Big T would evolve in such a way as not to disfigure the scenery or disturb wildlife. His biggest obstacle was the opposition of the Western Slope Protective Association chaired by Congressman Ed Taylor. But Hansen could reason with Taylor, who was a boyhood friend of his. The two had worked together as cub reporters chasing fire engines and ambulances for The Grand Rapids Herald back in Michigan. Taylor and his group decided to drop their opposition when Hansen put into his plans the huge Green Mountain Reservoir near Kremmling on the Blue River branch of the Colorado. Water would pile up in this western-slope reservoir during the heavy spring runoff to more than compensate the farms downstream for the waters upstream that would be diverted eastward.
Many anxious months passed, but the great day for Charles Hansen finally arrived. On December 21, 1937, President Roosevelt signed the bill authorizing an initial appropriation of $900,000 so that the Bureau of Reclamation could start work on the Big T to bring 300,000 extra acre-feet of western-slope water annually—a thirty percent increase—to the existing ditches of the South Platte valley. In essence, this phantasmagoria of a plot to make nature conform to Hansen’s idea of what was best for everybody was based first on building what would be the largest man-made lake in the state, Granby Reservoir in Middle Park, where runoff from branches of the Colorado would be stored. This Granby water would be lifted by pumps into the smaller Shadow Mountain Reservoir. From Shadow Mountain it would flow into the popular yachting center Grand Lake, where a 13.1-mile tunnel would carry it under Rocky Mountain National Park and the Continental Divide to the eastern-slope exit portal and Big Thompson River near Estes Park village. The flow of water from Shadow Mountain would be regulated to keep Grand Lake (and yachts) at a near-constant level regardless of the volume being drawn off in the tunnel. There was an infinitude of ramifications to the original primary purpose of irrigation—power plants, transmission lines, conduits, syphons. Dams and reservoirs and tunnels on the eastern slope would serve to bring the water to the irrigation ditches of South Platte tributaries. The projected main tunnel was named in honor of Senator Alva B. Adams, who had pushed the first appropriation bill through Congress. The naming was deplored by many people who thought that it should be called the Charles Hansen Tunnel.
The Big T was supposed to cost $44,000,000 and to be completed in five years. The total bill was $169,000,000 and its maze of facilities was not operating fully until the mid-1950s. The long delay was caused by an event that occurred on December 7, 1941. It constituted an international catastrophe that would bring changes to the state at least as profound as those which came with the gold rush of 1859, the railroads in 1870, and the automobile at the turn of the century.
1. Colorado: A Guide to the Highest State (New York: Hastings House, 1941).
2. Farrington R. Carpenter, “Range Stockmen Meet the Government,” Denver Westerners Brand Book, 1967 (Denver: Denver Westerners, 1968), pp. 329–353.