DitchInTime

Once upon a time, the area where Denver now sits was defined by water—in unmanageable and unimaginable abundance. The part of the planet we know as the Front Range of Colorado once sat “600 feet beneath the salty waves of a giant sea.”3

And so can a hundred years, when human ingenuity enters the picture. In the mid-nineteenth century, American settlers took on a place that seemed irreparably short of water and thus nearly uninhabitable and turned much of it green and heavily populated. Americans did this by acquiring and transporting water from distant streambeds and directing it to lawns, gardens, parks, sinks, bathtubs, swimming pools, fountains, farms, and factories. The places where the water arrived were obviously transformed, but so were the places from which it departed.

The perspective offered by geological change over the millennia reminds us that landscapes and ecosystems are undergoing constant change; the idea of the balance and stability of nature is more romance than reality. Meanwhile, the perspective offered by historical change over a century reminds us that human beings have extraordinary powers to accelerate the pace of change and that their successes and achievements face a big challenge in maintenance and duration. Both the flow of water and the flow of time can mock human enterprise and intention in very dynamic ways.

Historical perspective also reminds us that there has been enormous variation in the assumptions that human beings have made about how much water they need. Two hundred years ago, with bison herds providing crucial subsistence for Indian people, following the herds put a premium on knowledge of the area’s rivers and springs. As they traveled through the plains and foothills, Cheyenne and Arapaho people needed to know where to find drinking water for themselves and their horses. While access to water was the key aspect of choosing a campsite, modest demands for water made it unnecessary to store or divert it from its original channels. Moreover, before American farmers, ranchers, and urbanites lowered the water table by pumping groundwater and capturing much of the surface runoff, pockets of surface water, in the form of prairie lakes and perennial springs, were common, so water could be found in shorter spans of travel. The banks of streams and rivers also supplied wood for the building of lodges and for fires for cooking and warmth, while river valleys, with their bluffs, banks, and canyons, provided refuge from the worst of winter storms.

Indian people thus had few reasons to think of their home as too dry and therefore unfit for human habitation. Still, as historian Elliott West put it, “Hunters had to fashion their living in the great spaces away from dependable rivers,” and part of that adaptation was knowing the routes to find water quickly before hardship took hold. A satisfactory arrangement with water was not always in the picture for Native people. A period of drought and the resulting decline of grass could mean very tough times for bison and horses, and, therefore, for human beings. In the mid-nineteenth century, dry spells occurred several times, adding to the troubles of Indian people as they were confronting American invaders. Altogether, the contrasts between Indian customs and American customs are important reminders that variations in culture and economy produce very different definitions of how much water humans need and how much the world must be reworked to provide it.4

In 1806, on a journey of exploration that delivered more frustration than satisfaction, American explorer Zebulon Pike found unexpected promise in what he saw of western aridity. Traveling over the plains to the Colorado Front Range, Pike noted the absence of trees and the sparse flow of the streams and rivers. What he saw did not hold hope for American settlement. And yet, despite our images of nineteenth-century Euro-Americans as instinctual expansionists, in a memorable passage that reminds us of the difficulty humans face when they strain to see the future, Pike described this limitation as good news:

From these immense prairies may arise one great advantage to the United States, viz: The restriction on our population to some certain limits, and thereby a continuation of the Union. Our citizens being so prone to rambling and extending themselves on the frontier will, through necessity, be constrained to limit their extent on the West to the borders of the Missouri and Mississippi, while they leave the prairies incapable of cultivation to the wandering and uncivilized aborigines of the country.5

Fearing that a republic would be overstretched if it went past a certain size in territory and population, Pike saw in the limited water supply of the interior West one of the few forces strong enough to restrict a people who were certifiably “so prone to rambling and extending themselves on the frontier.” Along with keeping the nation at a size that would be compatible with its system of governance, aridity also seemed to offer a solution to the dilemma of Indian-white conflict. If the plains proved unworkable for white settlement, then, by that very quality, they could provide a refuge for Indian people who would find no permanent place in better-watered parts of North America. As historian William Goetzmann observed, Pike’s “view of the West set the popular pattern for many years to come.” The interior West “was no place for the extension of civilization with farms and towns and mechanical pursuits. Rather the West . . . was a barrier which would contain the population and save the Union.” This was not necessarily a misperception, Goetzmann explained further; in the early nineteenth century, the plains “were unfit for widespread settlement, given the level of American technology at the time.”6

Thirteen years later, the Stephen Long expedition reached very similar conclusions. After a crossing of the plains in 1819, the chronicler of the expedition, Edwin James, concluded that the area would “prove of infinite importance to the United States inasmuch as it is calculated to serve as a barrier to prevent too great an extension of our population westward.”7

An anachronism that would have wandered without a home in the nineteenth century, the term growth control policy did not appear in the vocabulary of these explorers. What Pike and Long saw in the limitations of the West’s water supply was indeed something very much like a national growth control policy. In their judgment, the dryness of the West relieved Americans of the burdens of tough decisions. Using a constrained supply of water to carry its message, nature would act as legislator and decision maker and call a beneficial halt to westward expansion.

While not every observer joined Pike and Long in finding national benefit in the power of aridity to obstruct expansion, many matched their impression of the sparse natural assets of the plains landscape. In 1846, Boston Brahmin Francis Parkman traveled through the West, accumulating experiences that would shape his later prominent career as a historian. Just as much as trappers extracted beaver pelts and miners would extract minerals, East Coast writers like Parkman extracted literary nuggets from their travels and delivered them to markets back home. The West’s mountains gave Parkman all the right opportunities to celebrate the romantic appeal of the landscape, but the plains made a writer’s job harder. Taking in the country he saw as he traveled from Fort Laramie to Bent’s Fort, Parkman was pushed past the borders of that excellent advice: “If you can’t say something nice, then don’t say anything at all.” The best that Parkman could do with the discouraging landscape was to describe it, in his influential book of 1849, The Oregon Trail, as an “arid desert” where “the only vegetation was a few tufts of short grass, dried and shriveled by the heat.”8

Far more preoccupied with a search for water than a search for profit-delivering resources, people in Parkman’s situation urgently inspected the landscape for signs of moisture. The West had water, he and many of his contemporaries knew, but it was often the wrong kind of water (mineral laden and undrinkable) or sometimes the right kind of water but located in the wrong place, not at hand when people most needed it. It was a happy, and rare, circumstance when the water presented itself in a manner that matched and suited the human desire for it. On one occasion in his journey, Parkman and his thirsty companions thought they were approaching a large stream. To their mortification, they found it to be completely dry. Parkman described the dismal scene: “The old cotton-wood trees that grew along the bank, lamentably abused by lightning and tempest, were withering with the drought, and on the dead limbs, at the summit of the tallest, half a dozen crows were harshly cawing, like birds of evil omen.” The group went on to find enough water in the South Platte to make it hard to ford, and then they came upon Cherry Creek near the spot that would later come to be called Denver. “The stream, however, like most of the others which we passed,” Parkman observed, “was dried up with the heat, and we had to dig holes in the sand to find water for ourselves and for our horses.” Soon after, excess replaced scarcity, and the group was drenched by a tumultuous rainstorm. In the proportions of water present at the eastern base of the Rockies, too much could replace too little in the course of a few hours.9

Americans arriving in the interior West from eastern points of origin traveled heavily laden with cultural baggage. A common element in that baggage was a preference for landscapes shaped by the humid climates they had left behind. By this preference, the western landscape, without lush vegetation, was disappointing and deficient. Thus, for four decades, as maps labeled the plains as the Great American Desert and overland travelers echoed the explorers’ opinions of the unappealing strangeness of the arid lands, Pike and Long seemed to be pretty capable practitioners of foresight. But then a factor that had never entered into their minds lowered their performance as prophets.

The discovery of gold in the Rockies unleashed a rush into the region. Even though American settlement remained precarious in the first years after the rush, Pike and Long’s prediction was soon looking shaky and unconvincing. In hindsight, it is clear to us that seasonal constraints on exploration and travel had led to a misappraisal of the water resources of the West. Waiting for the growth of grass for their livestock before leaving the Mississippi and Missouri Valleys, nineteenth-century travelers rarely reached the foothills of the Rockies in time to see the heavy spring runoff, produced by the melting of the snowpack, which in many years filled streambeds and sometimes overflowed banks. By the time the explorers and travelers arrived on the scene in the summer, the runoff was far downstream, headed to the oceans, and many of the so-called rivers and streams of the plains, even close to the foothills, seemed shrunken and paltry. The enormous expanses of plains between the rivers, combined with their diminished state in summer, had fostered the impression that the region was irreparably short on water.

The founding and growth of the city of Denver seemed to invalidate these earlier predictions of intrinsic limits to the settlement of the region. Pike and Long, after all, had understood American settlement to mean “farms,” and a future role for cities had not been on their minds. And, just as they had not anticipated a mineral rush that would lead to a concentration of settlers in towns, they also had underestimated the extraordinary force of human ingenuity and enterprise.

On July 7, 1858, a prospecting expedition led by William Green Russell of Georgia, working along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, discovered placer gold near the mouth of Dry Creek as it empties into the South Platte River in present-day Englewood.10

This was not the first discovery of gold in this area, at the time part of Kansas Territory, but it proved to be the best publicized and therefore the most consequential. On August 26, 1858, the Kansas City Journal of Commerce announced the news: “THE NEW ELDORADO!!! GOLD IN KANSAS!!”11

The word spread, and in the spring of 1859, close to one hundred thousand people headed for the part of Kansas that would be organized as Colorado Territory two years later.

In the American West and many other parts of the world, mineral rushes dramatically accelerated the pace of migration into areas that had previously been judged unsuitable for settlement. The discovery and extraction of minerals led to the immediate founding of towns. As merchants realized the opportunities presented by mining the miners, what historian Gunther Barth called “instant cities” came into being by trade and commerce.12

Where the plains met the Rockies, new arrivals seized the opportunities that might converge for a town placed at the base of the mountains. The creation of the town was far from a thought-out and organized project. Entrepreneurs founded the towns of Auraria and Denver on opposite banks of Cherry Creek in 1858. These two communities competed with each for a spell, until Denver gained the upper hand and engineered a merger in April 1860. In a fine example of the long-lasting consequences of decisions made in the early days of a community, the streets and lots of the towns had been laid out with grids set at different angles, and the split origins of the city of Denver have sent numerous visitors off on indirect and unintended journeys as they tried to navigate their way through those two misaligned grids.

Like many residents of western towns, early Denverites found themselves in precarious and tenuous living conditions. In April 1863, fire destroyed most of the business district. This was a very common pattern of western towns, to the point that extraterrestrial observers would have puzzled over the motivation and strategy of the peculiar species that bustled around piling up wood in a central location, igniting those piles, and then experiencing apparent regret and distress when the wood burned. Efforts to avoid such misadventures led to both city regulations requiring the replacement of wood with brick in business districts and to the recognition that, when fire threatened, a reliable water supply could prove to be an essential element of the safety of the community.

If Denverites had unintentionally but very effectively put themselves in the line of fire, they had intentionally placed themselves equally in the line of water. Settlers lined the banks of the South Platte and Cherry Creek, near the point where the two rivers converge, with homes, churches, and businesses. To claim and hold a central place in the community, the Rocky Mountain News went so far as to build its offices in the sandy bottom of Cherry Creek’s dry bed. In May 1864, heavy rains caused the creek to rise. With astonishing speed, the deluge destroyed the News offices and sent machinery, including a three-thousand-pound iron press, downstream. Five newspapermen sleeping in the building’s second story awoke to a terrific “roaring noise” and saw the flash flood charging down the creek bed. As the building washed away, onlookers threw the trapped men some rope. The five barely escaped with their lives. Others were not so fortunate. Twelve people drowned as Cherry Creek and the South Platte River submerged neighborhoods, toppled buildings, and did its best to wash away the fledgling settlement.13

Soon after the flood, an observer found a warning in and drew a lesson in restraint from the flood. “Men are mere ciphers in creation,” reflected Professor O. J. Goldrick in the Daily Commonwealth and Republican. “Had we continued thickly settling Cherry Creek as we commenced, and thoughtless of our future, see what terrible destruction would have been our doom, in a few years more, when the water of heaven, obeying the fixed laws, would rush down upon us, and slay thousands instead of tens!” Rhetorically awash, Goldrick was nonetheless engaged in the important project of drawing a practical lesson from calamity. To at least a limited degree, newcomers were trying to understand and deal with their changeable relationship to water. After the 1864 flood, the Denver City Council asked the legislature for power to regulate building in Cherry Creek. The legislature granted the power the following year, and the city outlawed the construction of houses or businesses in the creek bed.14

In 1860, the Rocky Mountain News briefly let honesty compromise its usual unrelenting boosterism by describing Denver’s landscape as “treeless, grassless, bushless.” As this photograph of the paper’s office in the early 1860s shows, the writer was not exaggerating.

In May 1864, a flash flood roared down Cherry Creek and inundated Denver, killing twelve people and washing away numerous buildings, including the Rocky Mountain News office.

Despite the occasional flood, scarcity of water posed a more-persistent challenge. Visitors often noted the town’s lack of trees and other greenery. Stopping in Denver in the summer of 1859, journalist Albert Richardson dismissed the aspiring city as “a most forlorn and desolate-looking metropolis” situated upon a bleak setting of “low sandy hills entirely destitute of trees and with thin ashen grass dreary enough to eyes familiar with the rich green prairies of Kansas and Missouri.”15

Even the Rocky Mountain News briefly let honesty compromise its usual unrelenting boosterism by describing the landscape in 1860 as “treeless, grassless, bushless.”16

And yet, to Colorado’s early leaders, the landscape was charged with promise. Colorado’s first territorial governor, William Gilpin, led the pack of optimists. Where others saw only arid deserts, Gilpin saw a pastoral paradise waiting to happen. In his writing, Gilpin’s verb tenses broke the speed limit, casting a possible future as an actual present: “These PLAINS are not deserts, but the opposite. . . . They form the PASTORAL GARDEN of the world.” Few have matched the confidence of nineteenth-century boosters, and Gilpin thus saw, taking shape in the “treeless, grassless, bushless” terrain around him, “the auspicious cosmopolitan site of DENVER.” Unlike the early explorers, Gilpin noted the seasonal shifts in the rivers and streams: “During the melting of the snows in the immense mountain masses on the western frontier of the Great Plains, the rivers swell like the Nile.” He did not, however, propose the damming and storage of the spring runoff; on the contrary, frequently mystical in his interpretations, he saw the heavier flows of the spring as “yield[ing] a copious evaporation,” which in turn produced “storm clouds” and thus “vernal showers.” And, like many who would follow him, Gilpin found much to celebrate in the charms of a semiarid climate: “The atmosphere of the Great Plains is perpetually brilliant with sunshine, tonic, healthy and inspiring to the temper.”17

As “a focal point of impregnable power in the topographical configuration of the continent,” Gilpin’s Denver was going to become the capital of commerce of the United States and, given its fortunate location as the midpoint between Europe and Asia, of the entire world. Doubt rolled off Gilpin’s mind like water off the rocks above tree line:

The scientific writers of our country adhere with unanimity to the dogmatic location somewhere of “a great North American desert.”. . . Yet there is none, either in North or South America; nor is the existence of one possible. On the contrary, the least fertile portion of our continent is the siliceous slope of the Atlantic States, whose climate is also the most inhospitable.18

Having drawn a satisfactorily invidious comparison pointing out the crummy soil and discouraging climate of the East Coast, the territorial governor and booster of the first order returned to making his case for the glorious future of Denver and Colorado.

In hindsight, Gilpin’s optimism might strike readers as comical in its wild ambition. And yet hindsight mockery runs aground on the fact that Gilpin, in a number of ways, turned out to be right. Thanks to astonishing exercises of human ingenuity, Denver—and many other communities in the arid West—turned into green, tree-filled places that millions now call home. It would be easier to enjoy a good laugh at Gilpin’s expense if westerners did not see the realization of his vision wherever we look.

Colorado’s first territorial governor and booster-in-chief William Gilpin looked out at Denver’s dusty setting and envisioned a pastoral paradise waiting to happen. His ambitious prophecies might sound laughable today if they had not been so fully realized.

Just as William Gilpin was whipping up a global destiny for Denver in which water supply would pose no hindrance, promoters of expansion on the plains were arguing that settlement would in itself produce a happy change in the climate. Rain, they predicted, would follow the plow. The act of breaking and tilling the soil of the arid plains would coax rain to leave the heavens for the earth. The rain would then evaporate and return to the ground in later showers, in a pleasant cycle operated and maintained by the laws of nature. One of the theory’s greatest supporters, Charles Dana Wilber, mobilized his training as a geologist to promote settlement in railroad land holdings. Wilbur saw no limit on the power of human will:

Rain follows the plow. . . [I]n reality, there is no desert anywhere except by man’s permission or neglect. . . . The Creator never imposed a perpetual desert upon the earth, but, on the contrary, has so endowed it that man, by the plow, can transform it, in any country, into farm areas . . . the power [is] in our hands to make the wilderness and waste places glad, and to make even a desert blossom as a garden with roses.19

If rain would be cooperative and follow the plow, then the demands on muscle and ingenuity would shrink wonderfully, making dams, reservoirs, ditches, canals, and headgates superfluous and unnecessary. And, for a while, a series of wet years seemed to validate this cheerful theory.

Denverites did not, however, sit waiting for precipitation to deliver the water they wanted to the sites where prospective users awaited it. If the city was going to grow to meet the founders’ ambitions, they knew they needed a system to transport water from the sites where nature had apparently misplaced it.

The riddle posed by tracking the headwaters of a river and locating its point of origin tested the wits of any number of explorers of the American West. Following the instructions given to them by Thomas Jefferson, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark took on this conundrum with the Missouri River. As they slowly made their way upstream, the proliferation of converging branches of the river made it difficult, even impossible, to identify the main stem that they were supposed to ascend. Water from springs, rainfall, and snowmelt comes together in trickles; trickles carve out channels and merge with other small tributaries; and finally a sufficient number of these sites of confluence add up to an unmistakable river. Rather than one clearly marked point of origin, a river literally descends from many sources.

Tracking the convergence of the enterprises that finally came together under the name Denver Water presents a similar challenge to the explorer of history. A bewildering array of competitors emerged to supply the growing town with water. In just a few decades, the city and its water companies grew exponentially, rushing into the future with a momentum that could match the flow of fast-moving Rocky Mountain streams in spring.

Between 1859 and 1918, at least a dozen water companies came into being in Denver and its immediate surrounding area. They competed and sometimes consolidated with each other, following the preferences of businessmen, politicians, and the local citizenry. The complexity of the story requires a direct and reassuring address to the reader: do not panic. You are about to encounter a flurry of names. Do not burden yourself by trying to commit to memory each one of these; there will be no test. But come to attention when you see the words Citizens’ Water Company and Denver Union Water Company.

In 1859, just months after the founding of Auraria and Denver, local citizens incorporated the first water company. Calling itself the Auraria and Cherry Creek Water Company, this organization raised hopes that a serviceable ditch would soon be carrying water to the town. But the plan, and the company, delivered no results. In the meantime, following the almost universal pattern of new American settlements, residents took advantage of underground water and relied on private wells.20

In 1860, a second company came into being. The Kansas Legislature (Colorado would not gain its own territorial status until 1861) granted the Capitol Hydraulic Company a “perpetual charter” to build a ditch from the South Platte, conducting (the theory went) clean and abundant water to the east side of Denver. The Capitol Hydraulic Company began construction in the summer of 1860. Though tiny in scale compared to many later water projects, the ditch represented an important milestone in the transformation of Denver.21

The company was, to put it mildly, well-connected, indicating the importance of water in the plans of Denver’s leaders. A. C. Hunt, who later became territorial governor, served as the company’s first president. William Byers, the very influential publisher and editor of the Rocky Mountain News, used his publishing platform to promote the project aggressively, asserting that “no work has ever before been undertaken of such vast importance to Denver. . . . Gardens and farms can be irrigated along its course in all the space between it and the river, and an unfailing source of water for all emergencies will be furnished to the whole city.” As an artifact steeped in confidence and cheer, Byers’s declaration set the terms for many such declarations in the future development of Denver and the West; an “unfailing source of water” was an ambitious phrase to use in a region already so well known for its uneven precipitation and stream flow. It was also illuminating and illustrative to see the way in which Byers had blended urban uses and agricultural uses; “gardens and farms” were presented as congenial elements in “the whole city.”22

Applauded, celebrated, and much anticipated, the Capitol Hydraulic Company’s construction of the Big Ditch (as Denverites took to calling it) was, in practice, more plodding than triumphal. Faulty calculations of the canal’s gradient delayed the project in early 1861. Later that summer, the economic disruptions and political tensions of the Civil War put brakes on the already slow process. Between national disunion and the exhaustion of the supply of easy placer gold, immigration into the territory ground to a halt and even pulled some back East. Discouragement and trouble came in multiple forms: the fire that destroyed the city’s business district in 1863; a massive infestation of grasshoppers that same year; and the devastating Cherry Creek flood of 1864.23

Concerns about fire and drought prompted the people who stayed to push for a more reliable water supply to fight fires and irrigate lands, and the Rocky Mountain News, now out of its precarious creek-bed locale, took up the cause. John W. Smith, a wealthy Denver businessman and entrepreneur, responded in 1865 by buying out the Capitol Hydraulic Company and reviving the construction of the Big Ditch under the auspices of his Platte Water Company. Smith moved the ditch’s headgate upstream to secure the necessary slope for water to flow by gravity and used steam plows to speed up the work. Finally completed in 1867, the Big Ditch stretched twenty-four miles from Platte Canyon to Brown’s Bluff (now known as Capitol Hill) in Denver, creating Smith Lake as a repository out of an old buffalo wallow (where both old and young buffalo once wallowed) in what is today Washington Park. Diversion ditches fed from the main channel, irrigating farms on the town’s outskirts and running through small, uncovered canals alongside city streets in a distribution system that permitted city residents to water their yards and gardens.24

Reasoning that a resource so crucial to the public good required the exercise of public authority, the editors of the Rocky Mountain News and Denver Tribune urged city government to purchase the water system for fighting fires, beautifying the city, and supplying domestic water. In 1866, the territorial legislature formally authorized Denver “to provide for and regulate the manner of introducing water into the city for irrigating and other purposes.” Coordinating those two roles—“providing for” water and “regulating” its introduction—would, over the next century and a half, provide strenuous exercise for the officials thus obligated to get the residents the water they believed they needed, while also trying to regulate the urgency and scale of that need.25

The city granted its first irrigation franchise to John Smith’s Platte Water Company in April 1869.†

† As Earl Mosley describes the franchise, “It granted to the Platte River Company the privilege and right of way in all the streets in the City of Denver, to build ditches, flumes, and viaducts for the purposes of conveying water from the said company’s main ditch, through the City of Denver for irrigating and other purposes. . . . All persons were given the right to contract with the company for the use of water, and a sliding scale of fines was set up for use against any person for turning water out of ditches, without first having obtained permission to do so from the Company.” Mosley, History of the Denver Water System, 98.

By the following spring, the company was providing water throughout Denver. Initially, the city paid the Platte Water Company $7,000 per year for “a daily supply of 400 square inches of water for six months.” But after a series of disagreements between company officers and city administrators, Denver’s leaders concluded that it made more sense to purchase the ditch outright. Empowered by the territorial government in 1874 to own its own municipal water system, Denver negotiated to buy the Big Ditch from the Platte Water Company for $60,000. In 1882, the city made the last payment on the buyout agreement, and Smith’s ditch was rechristened City Ditch (although a generation of Denverites stuck with habit and continued to call it the Big Ditch).26

The completion of the Big Ditch had an instant and lasting impact on Denver’s appearance. The Rocky Mountain News called the ditch “the turning point in our city’s history.” Suddenly the visions of the boosters seemed possible, even probable. The secretary of the Denver Board of Trade, Henry Leach, was a man overcome with cheer: “Denver will rival the great manufacturing cities of the East; conduct a portion of [the water] through the streets and into our houses, and Denver will become the most beautiful city on the continent.” In short order, such predictions began to gain substance as the city’s suntanned landscapes gave way during the late 1860s and the early 1870s to green lawns and ornamental flora that remained lush all summer long. By 1889, a visitor, Rezin Constant, could report that “there are the most exquisitely beautiful lawns in Denver I ever saw; great varieties of Roses . . . in full bloom; Fuschias, in short, every desirable flower.” Back in 1863, Presbyterian minister William Crawford, encapsulating the dismay Americans felt when they contemplated Denver’s setting, “was overcome” at a church service “by the urge to have the congregation sing a hymn entitled, ‘Lord what a wretched land is this!’” Just a few years later, the tune had changed dramatically.27

Agricultural irrigation systems began to transform the land around the fledgling city from dry prairie into productive farmland, providing fresh food for residents of the Front Range and resolutely challenging the image of the region as a desert. When Albert Richardson, who in 1859 had described Denver’s setting as desolate and dreary, made a return visit in 1865, he found that “Colorado agriculture was already successful,” supplying “the population of the territory with every farm product except corn.” A reporter for the New York Tribune was similarly impressed by the area’s transformation: “I verily think that if those who six years ago saw nothing but arid hills and fields of cactus, forbidding cultivation, could behold some parts of Colorado at present, they would open their eyes in astonishment. . . . I am fast inclining toward the opinion that there is no American Desert on this side of the Rocky Mountains.” The writer William Makepeace Thayer reveled in before-and-after contrasts, comparing his visit in 1859 to his return in the mid-1880s. “The most marvelous growth of modern times,” he declared, “is the city of Denver, Colorado.” The grim landscape where pioneers had once lived in humble tents and cabins now held “the largest, richest, and most beautiful city of its age on earth—a sparkling, costly jewel on the bosom of the ‘desert.’” Thayer continued:

The city is handsomely laid out, with wide avenues lined with shade-trees and beautified with irrigating rivulets; large and costly warehouses and public buildings, street-cars; the electric light; water-works; elegant churches; newspapers, and schools unsurpassed by those of Boston; telegraph, telephone, and railway facilities; in short, everything necessary to promote the growth of a marvelous city, which may contain, in twenty years, a population of two hundred thousand.

Thayer’s readers could easily understand that the enhanced supply of water had made possible every dimension of this urban achievement, especially in the opportunities presented for an expanding population.28

As quickly as they reconfigured their landscapes, the residents of Denver were equally quick to take their new circumstances for granted. The availability of more water brought into being, almost instantly, many new “needs” for it. It suddenly became possible to plant and maintain a host of nonnative grasses and plants for lawns and gardens. “Sprinkling wagons” materialized on the streets, offering to dampen “the dusty roads in front of [business and residential] properties at 25 cents a week for a 250-foot front.” As local historian Louisa Ward Arps wrote, with ditches to drink from, “thirsty dogs and horses were delighted. Trees grew, gardens flourished, and lawns were praised for their greenness all summer long.”29

A wildly transformed landscape soon began to look normal, and a desire for a conventionally pretty landscape quickly got reclassified as a need.

“Water for irrigation is abundant and good, but it is not fit for household use,” the Rocky Mountain News complained in 1870. Even after the completion of the Big Ditch, many of Denver’s residents still hauled their drinking water home in buckets or barrels directly from the Platte River or obtained it from private artesian wells. And, according to William Byers at the News, they were hoping for better arrangements: “The people are getting interested and importunate, because all are satisfied that an ample supply of water must be secured.” Not enough water was flowing through the Big Ditch and into the street-side canal network. Quality and quantity were proving to be connected: the quality worsened when the quantity diminished.30

Satisfaction with the water supply rarely achieved much in the way of duration. Two years after the city had granted a franchise to the Platte Water Company to provide water to every street in Denver, newspaper editorials had returned to expressions of concern and discontent about the city’s water supply. This time, the concern shifted toward problems of quality, with one newspaper declaring that a system capable of providing reliable water quality, not just quantity, was the “most important improvement now required for Denver.” In a June 1871 editorial carrying the archetypal western declaration “We Want More Water,” the Rocky Mountain News complained that “the ditch company are [sic] not furnishing what water they agreed to and confidently assured the Council they would be able to supply. If they knew their ditch was unequal to the job they should have said so.”31

Byers felt that the Platte Water Company should be held to its promises for water delivery, regardless of variations in precipitation. While the company promised in 1870 to provide 400 inches of water per day, the actual daily average in June 1871 was 275 inches. “Possibly the Platte is low,” the 1871 News editorial continued. “Indeed, it is notable that it is so; but this ought not to prevent the ditch company from perfecting some arrangements for forcing some water through their ditch and into the city.” Denverites had become tough and demanding customers, exhorting the city’s major water supplier to “do something . . . and give us more water during the hot weather.”32

A local entrepreneur saw opportunity in these concerns. Railroad promoter and businessman James Archer had already founded the city’s first gas company in January 1870 when, ten months later, he started the Denver City Water Company. While the Platte Water Company delivered water that traveled through a series of open street-side canals and was only of sufficient quality for irrigation, the Denver City Water Company became the first water supplier in Denver to deliver water via pressurized underground plumbing for domestic use and firefighting.

As president of the Denver City Water Company, Archer recruited other important citizens into his organization. These strategically selected backers held positions at banking institutions: David Moffat, Walter Cheesman, Jerome Chaffee, and Edward M. McCook. The financial and political connections of these men secured a respectable initial capitalization of $250,000 for the ambitious Denver City Water Company. At the time, McCook was particularly prominent and well-connected, serving as territorial governor. Typically for their times, the careers of these men did not permit a clear drawing of lines of specialization. They took up a range of industries and enterprises—banking, railroads, real estate, municipal utilities—sometimes sequentially and sometimes simultaneously.33

The city council granted the company express permission to build a pumping station and to take water from the South Platte. With construction of the water works beginning in 1871, the Denver City Water Company installed a pair of the admired Holly pumps in a station, linked to “a system of pipes laid to supply the central part of town.” Digging a well into underground gravel beds in the South Platte, just below the mouth of Cherry Creek, Denver City Water Company crews connected the phases of Denver’s rough-and-tumble water history by finding remnants of the Rocky Mountain News presses that had been swept away from the paper’s creek-bed office during the flood of 1864. By 1872, the Holly pumps distributed water from this newly excavated well to taps all around the city.34

The pressurized system of underground pipes represented a significant advance over the paltry and often dirty summer flows delivered by open, street-side canals. The Denver City Water Company quickly surpassed the Platte Water Company as the city’s major water supplier. As well as providing purer drinking water, called Holly water by Denverites, directly to household taps, the system also supplied water for fire hydrants. Between the hydrants and the city’s Brick Ordinance outlawing wooden buildings downtown, no fire ever again equaled the devastation of the 1863 business-district fire.

Like the Platte Water Company before it, the Denver City Water Company did not get to bask in the accolades of a grateful citizenry for long. Concern over sanitation soon refocused attention on water quality. Less than two decades after Denver came into being near the South Platte River, the city’s principal source of water had become contaminated as the growing population overburdened the river’s ability to carry away unpleasant substances. By the later half of the 1870s, Denverites frequently complained about the “foul appearance, taste, and odor” of their drinking water. With no sewer system, human waste from privies seeped into the surrounding groundwater and eventually into the South Platte River. Household and commercial trash, including discarded meats and vegetables, floated in the city’s uncovered ditches into the river, just upstream from the Denver City Water Company’s pumping plant. With that plant located in the middle of the city, the water pumped from the river had abundant opportunities to pick up sewage and waste from drainage ditches, as well as seepage from privies into shallow groundwater.35

Attempting to explain “the occasional appearance of dirty water in our pipes” in 1879, the Denver City Water Company blamed unusually heavy water flow that “stirred up a sediment that had occurred months past, and which so soon as it appears in the service pipes is washed out by flushing our mains.” Nothing was wrong, the company’s officials maintained. They “did not consider it worthwhile to reply to the various newspaper articles that have appeared within the past two weeks on the ‘sickening impurities of the Holly water.’” They did, however, eventually acknowledge the mounting complaints by dispatching Professor Richard Pearce, a chemist, to test the water. Pearce backed his employers’ position, stating that although the water “showed a slight turbidity, due to the presence of fine, flaculent vegetable matter in suspension. . . , [it is] among the first quality waters for drinking purposes.” Despite Pearce’s conclusion (itself filtered through the headline writers of the Rocky Mountain News) that “We Have the Best Drinking Water in the World,” the report did not quiet public concern. Numerous citizens fell ill with typhoid, a fearsome illness spread through water contaminated by sewage, while Pearce worked away at his unconvincing report. Data disputes between experts had made an early entry into the Denver water scene.36

In a pattern shared with many other American cities, Denver residents suffered through at least six major typhoid epidemics between 1879 and 1896. During the 1879 outbreak, during which the fever afflicted more than six hundred people and killed at least forty, one local doctor surreptitiously gained access to one of the Denver City Water Company’s reservoirs. The scathing description he wrote for the Rocky Mountain News about the facility’s unsanitary conditions further undermined the company’s protestations of purity:

To this little reservoir . . . the necessarily foul water . . . flows into a small ditch from the mill run stream. In the little ditch I saw broken slop buckets, etc., detained by the shallowness of the water there. That water was perceptibly not wholesome as drinking water, yet it flowed under the edge of the [sluice] box and [into the river].

In the absence of antibiotics, the responsibility for the prevention of typhoid outbreaks fell largely upon the private companies providing water. Not all of these companies were up to the challenge, and the impact of sensational reports about unhealthy conditions of the water-supply system galvanized demands from citizens, physicians, and local newspapers for a proper sewer system and for governmental regulation to see that water was pumped from sources free from pollution.37

As early as 1867, Denver’s water suppliers had already begun to change their practices to address issues of water quality. The earliest methods involved little more than trying to isolate the city’s water supplies from the effluence of privies and farm animals. The companies built protective wooden coverings over reservoirs, and the city banned hogs within city limits. When the typhoid outbreaks exposed the ineffectiveness of these simple methods and citizen anger threatened revenues, companies began exploring the emerging technology of filtration as a more scientific remedy for contamination. In 1884, the first of many different filtration techniques went into practice in Denver; by 1889, the Platte Canyon Filtration Plant (later renamed the Kassler Water Treatment Plant) was removing impurities from water by sluicing it through beds of sand. Sand filters required a large tract of land, as well as a substantial labor force to clean the filters continually. But the effort paid off in lower rates of disease. The benefits of filtering were complemented by the advent of a typhoid vaccine in 1897 and by the widespread chlorination of water supplies roughly a decade later. Typhoid outbreaks grew blessedly rare in Denver and in most other American cities during the early twentieth century.38

The sorrows of disease also galvanized the city’s water providers into seeking better sources of supply. Even as Denver City Water Company president James Archer defended the purity of his company’s water against the attacks printed in the Rocky Mountain News, he was already working to secure a cleaner and more abundant water supply. Archer and his company pioneered a strategy that later generations of city water leaders would follow: seeking a new water supply, they would extend their reach to sources that lay farther away from the pollution of populated areas, and they would capture those sources with bigger, more ambitious structures.39

In 1878, the Denver City Water Company formed a subsidiary, the Denver City Irrigation and Water Company, for the purpose of identifying a “higher source of supply and a more distant and less central location” for new, expanded waterworks. The company quickly constructed a reservoir (really a glorified canal big enough to store water) linked to the South Platte, which they named Lake Archer as a memorial to the now-deceased James Archer. (As Louisa Ward Arps noted, such gestures of commemoration can be uneven in their results: “It was named Lake Archer so that Denver would always remember its water pioneer. But the lake has dried up and who remembers Colonel James Archer?”) Four Holly pumps, with a combined output of 5 million gallons of water a day, siphoned water from the new lake and pumped it to people’s homes. The new West Denver Station (located near the Denver Water Department’s present-day headquarters on 12th Avenue and Shoshone Street) was in operation by May of 1880. The company now held the capacity to deliver 9.5 million gallons of water per day, just as the city completed its modern sewer system and thus resolved some of the problems of water quality that had been plaguing residents. By 1881, the company had added two more pumps to the facility, increasing the station’s pumping ability to more than 14.5 million gallons of water a day from the South Platte.40

“No anticipation then existed here of the astounding growth of the city that set in with a bound very soon” after these improvements, historian Jerome Smiley noted in 1901, “and the location of the new pumping station was thought to be far beyond the possibility of the city’s encroachment.” As Smiley’s comments indicate, the city’s expansion would render the best plans of the 1880s obsolete by the early twentieth century. With an enhanced water supply, the city grew, quickly closing in on the pumping station. Lake Archer, meanwhile, filled in with “silt and decaying vegetable matter” in just a few years. Water quality began another slump.41

With the Denver City Water Company now merged with its subsidiary, the newly named Denver Water Company set out to seek another water source even farther up the South Platte River. The company constructed wooden galleries below the riverbed of the South Platte to collect naturally filtered water as it seeped through layers of gravel and sand. Forty-eight-inch wooden conduits transported the clean water from the galleries to a new reservoir near the “West Denver” pumping station, which then, in turn, distributed it to at least marginally more healthful residents.42

Since the troubled times during the Civil War, Denver’s leaders had aspired to and reached a series of goals. The city had linked itself to the transcontinental railroad in 1870, and after statehood in 1876, Denver officially secured its status as the state capital in 1881. The city’s growth made its boosters look more like solid prophets than men whose judgment had been weakened by unreasonable optimism. The population swelled from around 4,800 in 1870 to more than 35,000 in 1880, and continued to increase to nearly 107,000 in 1890. As the Denver Water Company struggled to keep pace with this growth, a number of ambitious entrepreneurs saw opportunity in the company’s difficulties.43

Competition among companies took place in an uncertain and changeable relationship with city government. The experience of the somewhat ephemeral Denver Aqueduct Company offered one example. Founded in 1871, the Denver Aqueduct Company requested a right-of-way from the city in order to build a second ditch (the Big Ditch was the first) to the city. The Rocky Mountain News enthusiastically endorsed the proposal: “The construction and completion of this ditch will ensure one thing greatly needed, and what we have often urged, to wit: competition. With two ditches, our supply of water can hardly ever fail.” The News may have been excited by the prospect of competition among water suppliers, but the city council’s Water Committee was not similarly swept away. The committee postponed any decision on the right-of-way request for six months. When the time for decision came, the city council decided that, since precipitation was above average that year, the securing of a larger water supply could be put off again.44

This stuttering pattern of unreliable encouragement stymied the efforts of local entrepreneurs to challenge the dominance of the Platte Water Company and the Denver City Water Company. The Denver Aqueduct Company was not the only victim of the city council’s changeable moods. The council initially provided financial support for the Denver Artesian Company’s efforts to drill a municipal well, and drilling began in 1870. But drilling stopped in 1871 with an interruption of funding, and it was two more years before the promised money materialized and drilling resumed. When the company asked for more money, the city council balked, and the project finally failed. In the 1870s, the proposition that competition among water companies would work to the public’s benefit received much lip service but produced little solid evidence of its accuracy.45

From 1870 to 1890, Denver’s population mushroomed from 4,800 to 107,000. Water providers struggled to keep pace with the rapidly growing city, shown here in the early 1880s.

In the absence of a thriving and benefit-delivering competition among private companies, many Denverites recorded on the editorial pages of local newspapers their conviction that municipal ownership was the better alternative. In 1874, the Colorado territorial government endorsed this line of reasoning. Alarmed by the wave of business failures, including more than a quarter of the nation’s railroads, during the severe economic recession that Americans called the Panic of 1873, the territorial legislature wanted to ensure that an essential public service—supplying water to the territory’s chief city—would not stumble during economic hard times. In 1874, the legislature amended the Denver City Charter to allow the city to “own water works of any description.”46

The option of municipal ownership was a significant step up from the city’s previous authority to grant franchises and regulate the city’s water supply. Denver was now positioned in a productively adversarial role. It could grant a water franchise, but if the results were unsatisfactory, the city could build its own system. In response, the Denver City Water Company lobbied aggressively to be the city’s water provider (“wining and feasting” the city council, according to one account) and succeeded in winning a seventeen-year franchise. While this was far from a municipally owned water system, the territorial legislature had provided Denver with a clearer and more powerful role in managing its water.47

The Denver Water Company (having dropped the word City in 1882) maintained its dominant position, but not without challenges. Denver’s population grew through the 1880s, bringing new variations on the familiar problems of quality and quantity. After the death of president James Archer in 1882, the pace of company improvements slowed. Financial strain and internal disagreements over the direction of the company provoked squabbling among the remaining shareholders. A particular division of opinion centered on the question of whether the company should build larger storage facilities high up in the mountains.48

In 1889, Walter Cheesman and David Moffat, two of the original founders of the Denver City Water Company, stepped away from the internal feuding, sold their shares in the existing company, and formed the rival Citizens’ Water Company. Gaining its own franchise in November 1889, their new enterprise competed directly with the Denver Water Company, bypassing local rivers and streams and heading straight for the mountains. The new company’s managers wanted cleaner water and much more of it. They expected, as well, that the natural gravity flow offered by the drop in elevation would cut the expense of pumping. The founders of the Citizens’ Water Company declared that they would “go direct to the mountains for a water supply that would permanently meet the city’s increasing demands for quantity and quality.” An enormous difference in the scale of this enterprise would put Moffat and Cheesman’s company in an entirely distinct category.49

The first order of business for the Citizens’ Water Company was to secure water rights for the South Platte River as it left the Platte Canyon. Purchasing agricultural land, with water rights attached, achieved this goal. Within a few months, the company completed a system of underground galleries in the mouth of the South Platte Canyon and finished the long pipeline that carried water to the city. An extensive network of pipes then distributed more than 8.4 million gallons of water a day to residents around the city. A belief in the superior quality of water acquired at a higher, more-isolated location was one of the key issues distinguishing Moffat and Cheesman from their former colleagues at the Denver Water Company and the primary reason they left the company. Happily for the two men and the people who drank their water, Citizens’ product proved the validity of this belief: the water was remarkably clean and contaminant free. Denverites signed up for Citizens’ services in droves, and by the end of 1890, the upstart company had captured one-third of the city’s water market.50

In 1890, a drought descended on Colorado’s Front Range. The Citizens’ Water Company responded by expanding its system over the next two years, acquiring more water and building reservoirs. To bring more water into its system, the company added a second conduit from the South Platte, taking water from farther upstream and piping it to Denver. To enhance its storage abilities, Citizens’ built the Ashland Avenue Reservoir and the Alameda Avenue Tank and purchased a large natural reservoir near Fort Logan, which it transformed into a storage reservoir called Marston Lake.51

Although it could not match the quality of water delivered by the Citizens’ Water Company, the Denver Water Company ferociously defended its territory. The company swallowed its subsidiaries and merged with out-of-state interests, reincorporating itself as the Denver City Water Works along the way. Raising capital from East Coast investors and lowering its prices in an effort to persuade its customers to stay, the company fought its rival in any way it could. But Citizens’ Water Company called its bluff and then went one step further, giving away water for free at various times in the early 1890s. The longed-for competition between Denver water providers was finally in play, but the contest was so fierce that it could not last long. Trying to match Citizens’ provision of free water, the Denver City Water Works dropped all fees and thereby landed itself in receivership in February 1892.52

Triumphing in the water wars of the early 1890s, Citizens’ Water Company purchased its rival’s assets. With the two companies merged under a new name in 1894, the Denver Union Water Company was now the sole provider of water in the city of Denver.53

The story of the companies that preceded the creation of the Denver Water Department, readers will have noticed, is a tangled tale. Its complications add up to vexation, and the storyteller tears her hair, seeking principles of selectivity that will allow her to omit tedious details without compromising the accuracy of the narrative. Readers, meanwhile, have reciprocal and proportionate reasons for tearing their hair, as they wonder how it is that western American history ever acquired a reputation as a lively, entertaining, and escapist subject.

Imagine if the planners of Disneyland and Disney World ever attempted to construct a theme park experience comparable to Frontierland but based on the romantic history of western urban water development. Increasingly desperate visitors would wander through a labyrinth in which they would encounter elite captains of competing and consolidating companies, complaining consumers disputing rates and service quality, city officials bending under these various inharmonic forces, occasional sufferers from typhoid, newspaper editors and reporters stirring up alarm over every new and old arrangement of authority, and an army of overactive attorneys. On the hour, all these parties would converge on the theme park’s Main Street, wielding lawsuits, ballot initiatives, editorials, and company promotional material, for a picturesque struggle over the awarding of the next franchise, while tourists prepared the tales they would tell for decades about the worst vacation they ever took.

Would attention to corruption add sizzle and interest to this history and alleviate some of our storytelling woes? The Denver Union Water Company had its origins in the Gilded Age, an era in which businessmen’s conduct dipped well below the ethical. Both David Moffat and Walter Cheesman, who would become the two most-significant figures in the early history of Denver’s water supply, have been critiqued for their less-than-sterling performance in business ethics. Having thoroughly researched Moffat’s career, historian Steven Mehls portrays Moffat as very much a participant in the customs of his times: “He often had a secondary regard for the safety of bank customers’ money,” Mehls observes. “He watered railroad stock, which was not unusual in that day, manipulated mining stock sales, was not always forthright with investors, and did all he could to advance his personal wealth.” Mehls focuses his attention on Moffat’s enterprises in railroads and mining, with only brief attention to the emergence of the Denver Union Water Company. But he gives no indication that the moral qualities of Moffat’s operations in the world of water differed in any manner from his operations in railroads and mining.54

But was there anything particularly distinctive about the manipulations and exertions of power practiced by Denver’s elite in the last half of the nineteenth century? All over the United States, variations on Denver’s story unrolled in every major city. Citizens wanted new services, from water delivery to streetcar transport. The infrastructure required to provide those services could not be built without vast initial investments. The rationales and justifications for public ownership of this infrastructure, and for government spending of revenue raised through taxes or bonds to build it, were half-formed and far from robust. And so private enterprise found a great opportunity. It was hardly surprising that men who created these service-providing utilities expected a hearty return on their investments, and also expected to retain control of and authority over the systems they brought into operation. “To put it more clearly,” a biographer of Walter Cheesman wrote, “Denver, during the first fifty years of its life, was a corporation built and controlled town and could not have advanced so rapidly because of its isolation had not this been the case.”55

The boundary between public and private became most confounded by the practice of awarding franchises. City government granted franchises, giving individual companies exclusive claims on the provision of essential urban services. It would have been very remarkable indeed if franchises had been awarded purely on the basis of merit, experience, capability, and wisdom. On the contrary, the granting of franchises involved a great deal of behind-the-scenes jockeying, positioning, pressuring, and persuading. Once this process was under way, two boundaries often presented in public rhetoric as if they were stark and clear became notable for their fuzziness: the boundary between public institutions and private enterprise, and the boundary between honest effort and corruption. As Jane Haigh writes, “In Denver, as was typical in all US cities at the time, the City Council granted the opportunity to provide gas, electric, water, and transportation services to private utility companies . . . With so much to be gained from monopoly franchises for city utilities and transportation, the potential for corruption was enormous.”56

Writing about the financing of the transcontinental railroads, historian Richard White has offered useful reflections on the topic of corruption. “Corruption is a species of fraud that involves violation of public or private trust,” White declares. “Corruption involves betrayal, often of a third party. The corrupt buy or sell what was not supposed to be for sale—a vote, for example, or public property.”57

The key phrase in White’s analysis is what was not supposed to be for sale. In the last half of the nineteenth century, the definition of what was and was not for sale was dynamic and changeable. Americans in the late nineteenth century were, with variable success, trying to map out a boundary between what was for sale (the domain of the private) and what was not for sale (the domain of the public). The greatest riddle presenting itself was this: When the construction of an infrastructure served the needs of the general public, where was the line defining the level of legitimate profit for those who built that infrastructure and a scale of profit that crossed over the line into predation and even theft?

The most prominent builders of business empires in the Gilded Age, White notes, “reconciled morality and actions by embracing a morality of consequences.” The distinction between bad and good was very clear in their minds: “Bad men lied and manipulated information to drive down values” while “good men lied and manipulated information to maintain or increase values.” Using the methods they found necessary, good men helped investors and also helped cities and communities grow and develop, and thereby they displayed and affirmed their virtue. Rather than living with a sense of acknowledged, if also concealed, wrongdoing, “men of character,” White concludes, “considered themselves the final judges of their own rectitude.” Haigh applies the same insight to the principal figures of the Denver Union Water Company: “Moffat and Cheesman undoubtedly saw themselves as saviors and protectors of a locally run water system.”58

In the move toward monopoly, the pattern of Denver’s water development was also the national pattern in many enterprises: periods of fierce competition were followed by episodes of consolidation. Centralized power over essential services then inspired, in turn, the reform efforts of a wide range of activists who all fit in the category of antimonopolists. Alarmed by concentrated power in transportation, mining, manufacturing, food processing, finance, banking, and utilities, antimonopolists, in the manner of fighting fire with fire, found a new enthusiasm for the centralized power of government. It is, after all, one of the striking aspects of this tangled tale, even in an era with a great commitment to privatization, that the idea of government ownership was in play so early in the game. The purchase of the Big Ditch and its rechristening as City Ditch provided one example, as did the early pleas from citizens and newspaper editors to rescue residents from dependence on powerful companies with municipal ownership.

“Western promoters,” historian David Wrobel wrote in his study of boosters, “hurriedly raced toward the future, often announcing its presence before it had actually arrived.” Boosters were “optimistic fortune-tellers who told present and prospective residents what they wanted and needed to hear about western places. They placed the clear, bright future in the cloudier, less certain present.”59

From left to right, Denver Union Water Company officials David Moffat, William Robinson, and Walter Cheesman pose for a picture in January 1905. Moffat and Cheesman were successful, civic-minded businessmen who founded the Denver City Water Company in 1870 and subsequently the Citizen’s Water Company in 1899, forerunners of the Denver Union Water Company and ultimately today’s Denver Water. All three men served as president of Denver Union, a position to which Robinson succeeded them in 1914.

Denver’s boosters exemplified this mind-set, but they were also, in comparison to a more flighty and aerial variety of booster, intensely practical and down-to-earth in making investments and taking action to bring their vision of the future into existence. One writer aptly described Walter Cheesman and his associates as a “small but extraordinary group of strong men” who “envisioned Denver” as one of the “great metropolitan centers of America” and “as the focal point of a western empire.” “No doubt, we would consider these dreams extravagant today,” wrote Edgar C. McMechan in the 1930s, “but the leaders of that day backed their belief with indomitable wills.”60

Similarly, Jane Haigh characterizes the small group centered on Moffat and Cheesman as “elite businessmen who believed that what was good for them and their businesses was good for Denver and for Colorado.” The scale of profit they expected as a return on their efforts, as well as the methods they sometimes used to press their own interests and squash opposition, can certainly be subjected to a hindsight critique, particularly in a latter-day era when population growth has become, for many, a subject of lament. And yet the assumption—that progress for the utility entrepreneurs also meant progress for many others—carried unmistakable dimensions of accuracy: many people found homes and opportunities in Denver because Moffat and Cheesman had pursued their goals without restraint. As Steven Mehls puts it, Moffat stayed “busy with projects designed to convert the rough frontier town of Denver into a true urban environment” and “enticed millions of dollars of outside capital into Colorado and in so doing helped the state’s rapid economic growth from 1860 to 1911.” In a recent poll, Coloradans reported a striking, even flabbergasting level of happiness. As political scientist Thomas E. Cronin summarized their cheer, “A whopping 97 percent of adult Coloradans polled say they are ‘generally a happy person.’” Should these folks try to live in the conditions described by the Pike and Long expeditions, the percentage of the happy would certainly shrink. Directly and indirectly, the undertakings of Moffat, Cheesman, and their associates add up to a significant force in laying the material foundation for widespread well-being.61

Though “situated in what is not improperly termed an arid region,” Denver “has become the financial, commercial, and manufacturing metropolis of the vast empire of arid country,” Jerome Smiley wrote in 1901. “It could not have become such nor could it continue greater with a water supply insufficient for the daily needs of the people and industry within its limits.”62

With 106,713 residents in 1890, two telephone companies, streetcars running to suburbs, and daily rail shipments of goods produced in remote locales, Denver differed dramatically from the mining town founded barely thirty years earlier. Far from the “treeless, grassless, bushless” settlement with seemingly improbable ambitions that it had been, Denver in 1890 resembled its urban counterparts in the eastern United States. In a remarkably successful defiance of the climate, the irrigated Eden prophesied by early boosters had moved from imagination to reality.

“No other community so large as Denver is so peculiarly circumstanced with relation to its water supply,” Smiley wrote in a statement that did not exactly pay due respect to Los Angeles or San Francisco. “In other cities the great problem is to efficiently distribute to consumers water readily accessible and practically unlimited in quantity,” he explained; “here the problem is—or was—to secure water for distribution.”63

More than a century later, Smiley’s statement is a valuable reminder of just how improbable the development of Denver was. The engineering achievements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries transformed American life so completely that they erased from view the limitations that natural conditions once exerted over settlement.

Equally important was Smiley’s shiftiness in verbs: Denver’s “problem is—or was—to secure water.” Is or was? Did the problem still exist, or had it been resolved with the vigor of the Denver Union Water Company? Or had the problem of water’s scarcity simply been postponed and handed off to the next generation? Jerome Smiley was writing in eager anticipation of the Denver Union Water Company’s Cheesman Dam. Even before the dam was completed, in what would become a long-lasting pattern of expression, its supporters had already taken to declaring that the completion of the next big project was going to solve the region’s water problems. The engineers, meanwhile, would put their ingenuity to work on providing the supply that would support the next big population surge and thereby bring on the next confrontation with overstretched resources. Over the next century, prophecy and ingenuity would hand the city’s destiny back and forth—the baton in a dramatic and often nerve-racking relay race.