COColorado History

Cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde and the nations of the high country

Ancestral Puebloan farmers spent the twelfth and thirteenth centuries building stone villages into the canyon alcoves of the southwest corner, then walked away around 1300, most likely during a long drought. Cliff Palace still had its roofs and beams when the ranchers Richard Wetherill and Charlie Mason rode onto the mesa in December 1888 chasing stray cattle, and Congress protected it in 1906 as the first national park created for human work, not scenery. The mountains belonged to the Ute, who call themselves the Nuche. Cheyenne and Arapaho bands contested the eastern grass with Comanche, Kiowa and Apache. The Southern Ute at Ignacio and the Ute Mountain Ute at Towaoc still hold the only tribal land inside the state line.

Assembled out of three separate transfers

Few states were assembled from so many deals. Everything east of the Rockies and north of the Arkansas River came with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Zebulon Pike went out to survey that new edge, sighted the peak now named for him in November 1806 without climbing it, and spent that winter under Spanish arrest in the San Luis Valley. The south and west were Spanish, then Mexican after 1821, and passed to the United States under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on February 2, 1848. A southern wedge arrived only when Texas sold its northern claims in the Compromise of 1850. Settlers from New Mexico founded San Luis in 1851, still the oldest incorporated town in the state, and its People's Ditch holds an 1852 water right that has never lapsed.

Cherry Creek gold and a territory drawn with a ruler

In July 1858 a party led by Green Russell washed placer gold out of Dry Creek near present Englewood. The find was thin, the newspaper accounts were not, and roughly 100,000 people started west the next spring under the slogan Pikes Peak or Bust. Close to half turned back. Denver City was platted that November and named to flatter James W. Denver, governor of Kansas Territory, who had already resigned. Congress created Colorado Territory on February 28, 1861, weeks before Fort Sumter, carving it out of the Kansas, Nebraska, Utah and New Mexico territories with the four ruler straight borders it still carries.

Glorieta Pass, Sand Creek, and a statehood that decided an election

No Civil War battle was fought on Colorado soil, but Colorado troops settled the war in the Southwest. At Glorieta Pass on March 28, 1862, a detachment of the 1st Colorado Volunteers under Major John Chivington climbed around behind the Confederate line and burned a supply train of about 80 wagons, sending Henry Sibley's brigade back down the Rio Grande. Chivington then commanded the worst atrocity in the state's past. On November 29, 1864 he led some 700 volunteer cavalry against a Cheyenne and Arapaho camp on Sand Creek that was flying a United States flag and a white flag by arrangement with the garrison at Fort Lyon. Around 230 people died, most of them women, children and the elderly. Congress and the army condemned it. Nobody was prosecuted.

Statehood itself took four attempts. Voters rejected it in 1864 and Andrew Johnson vetoed enabling bills in 1865 and 1866. Only after Ulysses Grant signed an enabling act in March 1875 did Colorado enter, on August 1, 1876, in the republic's hundredth summer, which is where the Centennial State nickname comes from. Admission landed so late in the election year that the legislature rather than the voters chose the new state's three presidential electors that November. All three went to Rutherford Hayes, who took the disputed election by a single electoral vote.

Silver, suffrage, and the tents at Ludlow

Leadville silver after 1877 built and broke fortunes. Horace Tabor went from a storekeeper who grubstaked two prospectors to the richest man in Colorado and briefly a United States senator, then lost most of it when Congress repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act in 1893. In the middle of that collapse, on November 7, 1893, Colorado men voted to enfranchise women, making this the first state to adopt women's suffrage by popular referendum. Coal was bloodier. On April 20, 1914 National Guardsmen and Colorado Fuel and Iron guards fired on a strikers' tent colony outside Ludlow and the camp burned. About 21 people died, including eleven children and two women who suffocated in a pit dug under a tent floor.

Weapons plants, chairlifts, and the Games that were sent back

Federal spending remade the state after 1941. From 1942 the Granada Relocation Center, called Amache by the people held inside it, confined more than 7,000 Japanese Americans near the Kansas line, and became a national historic site in 2022. Rocky Flats machined plutonium triggers from 1952 until a joint FBI and EPA raid stopped production in June 1989. The Air Force Academy opened north of Colorado Springs in 1958 and NORAD moved under Cheyenne Mountain in 1966. Aspen's first chairlift ran in January 1947, built partly by veterans of the 10th Mountain Division who had trained at Camp Hale, and Vail followed in 1962. Denver was awarded the 1976 Winter Olympics in 1970, then voters barred state funding in November 1972 and the Games had to be handed back, the only time a host has returned them.

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