Isolation was the greatest problem confronting Denver City in 1860. Horace Greeley, visiting in 1859, noted Colorado goods selling “at far more than California prices.” He recommended “a railroad from the Missouri to the heads of the Platte or Arkansas.” The locals certainly agreed, but Colorado’s first railroad wasn’t even intended for the territory. The Union Pacific crossed nine miles of northeastern Colorado in June 1867 on its way to Promontory Point, but the company’s decision that same summer to build north of Colorado was received with much dissatisfaction in Denver.¹

To understand Denver’s enthusiasm for railroads, consider the alternatives....

In its infant stages, Denver had to develop a system of medical care even as it created a legal system, schools, and the other amenities of civilization. Many doctors came west, attracted by the same dreams as other pioneers. Some were well trained and competent; others moved from town to town as their mistakes and lack of training threatened to catch up with them. Some physicians, like Dr. John Evans, became early Denver leaders and politicians, not practicing medicine once they arrived. Others immediately established practices, setting up offices and even hospitals in the young town.

InRocky Mountain Medicine:...

When Denver was founded in 1858, the area seemed a “howling wilderness” to its new residents. Development came in many slow steps, the greatest of which was perhaps the city’s effort to educate its youngest citizens. Owen J. Goldrick started the first school on October 3, 1859,¹ but it would not be until 1873, with the opening of the Arapahoe School, that Denver would get its first structure built exclusively for education. The following account discusses the struggle to construct this building.

Denver’s public schools as we understand them today originated with School District Number One, officially organized on October...

On the morning of April 3, 1894, nine hundred women dutifully cast their ballots “in their own sweet way” in Highlands, a middle-class suburb of Denver.¹ “The day resembled a holiday,” theRocky Mountain Newsreported, “and the election was original, being the first municipal election since the enactment of the equal suffrage law.”² Colorado women had won full voting rights in November 1893, when a statewide referendum made Colorado the second state (after Wyoming) to embrace universal suffrage. Denver instantly became the largest city in the world where women boasted full voting rights, a distinction that endured into the...

Move Out! Tonight is the Deadline,” Denver Chief of Police Felix O’Neill ordered the women of the red-light district on February 23, 1913.¹ After several months of debate between Mayor Henry J. Arnold, the city’s aldermen, and the Fire and Police Board about what to do with Denver’s social evil, a mandatory mass exodus took place. More than three hundred “thinly clad” women moved away from Market Street and into rooming houses around the city, many of them without a penny to their name. Society’s unfortunate women found cheap housing wherever they could, and some even asked patrolmen for a...

In the 1920s, from Maine to California, in the cities and in rural communities, large numbers of men and women joined the Ku Klux Klan to promote the cause of 100 percent Americanism. They believed the United States needed to be saved from the influences of recent immigrants, African Americans, Catholics, and Jews. In Colorado, Klan membership numbers reached as high as 35,000 men and 11,000 women.¹

Little has been written about the Women of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKK) in Colorado or the organization’s leader, Laurena Senter, who later became a pillar of the Denver community until her death...

Colorado was still an “untamed wilderness” when the discovery of gold near Pikes Peak in 1858 brought the area to the nation’s attention. By the spring of 1859 fortune seekers began to reach the rival infant camps of Denver and Auraria in droves, men and women from a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds. During 1859—the “Big Excitement,” as the year of gold discovery was termed—at least twelve Jews of Central European (primarily German) descent joined the westward migration in the quest for freedom, new opportunities, and wealth. After enduring centuries of discrimination in Europe, Jews who migrated...

Located at the center of states with large reservations, Denver has long been depicted as a “crossroads” for Native Americans.¹ Until the mid-nineteenth century, when pioneers and prospectors occupied the region, the Denver area had been a major hunting ground for the Cheyenne and Arapaho. Once non-Indian settlers moved into the region and encroached on land with support from the federal government, the period of treaty-making and warfare unfolded. The Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 in southeastern Colorado symbolized the end of the negotiation process and physical confrontations between hunting tribes and the U.S. military. White settlers occupied land and...

On a cold February day in 1909, newly elected Denver Mayor Robert W. Speer stood in front of a small crowd at the Denver YMCA and talked of his vision for Denver’s future. He spoke of a city of parks, open vistas of the snowcapped Rocky Mountains, and tree-lined boulevards radiating outward from the center of the city. Looking toward this future, Speer announced his desire for the creation of a mountain park that would lie within twenty-five miles of the city where “[t]he masses could spend happy days and feel that some of the grandeurs of the Rocky Mountains...

The perceptual, physical, and political appropriation of the Colorado Rocky Mountains highlights complex and often contradictory notions of tradition and modernity that characterized the early decades of the twentieth century. This essay raises a question that remains as relevant today as it was then: “What does it mean to be modern?” Or, more directly: “What does it mean to be modern in the American West?” Potential answers can be brought into focus through the Recreation Fan, created by Denver to promote the high country west of the city, and through the many summer homes built there.

As the major gateway...

This is the story of a river that gets little respect. Cherry Creek, one of the two rivers running through the City and County of Denver, is a slight river, shallow and sandy.¹ In its natural, undammed state it contains little water, unless heavy rains swell its current. Yet Cherry Creek has often occupied a place in Denver’s collective mind far larger than its slight demeanor might suggest. Throughout the city’s early history, Denverites minced few words describing what, precisely, was wrong with Cherry Creek.

In July 1876 an unnamed reporter for theRocky Mountain News, describing the damage wrought...