A Colorado History, 10th Edition

Carl Ubbelohde, Duane A. Smith, Maxine Benson

Description

For fifty years, A Colorado History has provided a comprehensive and accessible panoramic history of the Centennial State. From the arrival of the Paleo-Indians to contemporary times, this enlarged edition leads readers on an extraordinary exploration of a remarkable place.

"A Colorado History has been, since its first appearance in 1965, widely recognized as an exemplary work of its kind."
--The Colorado Magazine

Experience Colorado with this new, enlarged edition of A Colorado History. For fifty years, the authors of this preeminent resource have led readers on an extraordinary exploration of how the state has changed—and how it has stayed the same.

From the arrival of Paleo-Indians in the Mesa Verde region to the fast pace of the twenty-first century, A Colorado History covers the political, economic, cultural, and environmental issues, along with the fascinating events and characters, that have shaped this dynamic state.

In print for fifty years, this distinctive examination of the Centennial State is a must-read for history buffs, students, researchers—or anyone—interested in the remarkable place called Colorado.

Contents
Preface
Prologue: The Land
1. A Prehistoric Prelude: The Dwellers in the Cliffs
2. A Spanish Borderland
3. Exploring Louisiana
4. The Fur Frontier
5. The Frontier in Transition
6. Gold Rush
7. Miners and Merchants
8. Culture Comes to the Gold Towns
9. Legal Beginnings
10. Battlegrounds
11. Smelters and Railroads
12. Utopias in the Desert
13. Carpetbagger’s Kingdom
14. The Centennial State
15. Carbonate Camps
16. Open Range Days
17. Beyond the Continental Divide
18. Ditchdiggers and Sodbusters
19. New Frontiers
20. Politics and Populists
21. The Silver Crusade
22. The Good Old Days
23. The Era of Industrial Warfare
24. Water and Sugar
25. The Progressive Era
26. State and Nation
27. The Twenties
28. Depression Decade
29. Life in Colorado Between Two Wars
30. Decades of Boom, Years of Bust
31. Colorado and the Nation
32. Urban Colorado
33. The Old and the New
34. “We Can’t Remember Who We Were Tomorrow”
35. Colorado in the New Millennium
36. Fire and Water
37. “Today Is Going To Be Long Long Ago”
Suggested Reading
Colorado’s Governors, Senators, and Congressional
Representatives (Chronological List)
Picture Credits
Index

Sujets

• Histoire
• Reference
• History of Colorado
• Mesa Verde National Park
• History of the United States
• History
• Parc national de Mesa Verde
• Colorado

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 04 décembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780871083234
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

A COLORADO HISTORY
A COLORADO HISTORY
UBBELOHDE BENSON SMITH
TENTH EDITION
2006, 2015 by Carl Ubbelohde, Maxine Benson, and Duane A. Smith

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher.

First edition published in 1965.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Ubbelohde, Carl.
A Colorado history / Carl Ubbelohde, Maxine Benson, Duane A. Smith. - Tenth edition.
pages cm. - (The Pruett series)
Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-87108-319-7 (paperback) ISBN 978-0-87108-324-1 (hardbound) ISBN 978-0-87108-323-4 (e-book)

1. Colorado-History. I. Benson, Maxine. II. Smith, Duane A. III. Title. F776.U195 2015 978.8-dc23
2015007904

Designed by Vicki Knapton

Cover photo (bottom): Train coming up the valley on a narrow gauge track, Ouray County, Colorado. Courtesy of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives, Prints Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USF33-012910-M1.

WestWinds Press An imprint of P.O. Box 56118 Portland, OR 97238-6118 [phone] www.graphicartsbooks.com
Contents

Preface
Prologue: The Land

1. A Prehistoric Prelude: The Dwellers in the Cliffs
2. A Spanish Borderland
3. Exploring Louisiana
4. The Fur Frontier
5. The Frontier in Transition
6. Gold Rush
7. Miners and Merchants
8. Culture Comes to the Gold Towns
9. Legal Beginnings
10. Battlegrounds
11. Smelters and Railroads
12. Utopias in the Desert
13. Carpetbagger s Kingdom
14. The Centennial State
15. Carbonate Camps
16. Open Range Days
17. Beyond the Continental Divide
18. Ditchdiggers and Sodbusters
19. New Frontiers
20. Politics and Populists
21. The Silver Crusade
22. The Good Old Days
23. The Era of Industrial Warfare
24. Water and Sugar
25. The Progressive Era
26. State and Nation
27. The Twenties
28. Depression Decade
29. Life in Colorado Between Two Wars
30. Decades of Boom, Years of Bust
31. Colorado and the Nation
32. Urban Colorado
33. The Old and the New
34. We Can t Remember Who We Were Tomorrow
35. Colorado in the New Millennium
36. Fire and Water
37. Today Is Going to Be Long Long Ago

Suggested Reading
Colorado s Governors, Senators, and Congressional Representatives (Chronological List)
Picture Credits
Index
PREFACE
The origins of this book can be traced to the mid-1950s, when Carl Ubbelohde was designated to teach Colorado history at the University of Colorado in Boulder. For the young instructor, fresh from doctoral studies at the University of Wisconsin, the assignment was far removed from colonial and revolutionary history, his primary area of expertise. It had not been Ubbelohde s intention to convert writing interests from Early America to western topics, he recalled in the Preface to the 1982 edition of A Colorado History , but not unfriendly colleagues warned of linkages between academic survival and the course in Colorado history.
Taking this advice to heart, Ubbelohde quickly began delving into Colorado history research. In 1959, he and fellow faculty member Robert G. Athearn coauthored Centennial Colorado: Its Exciting Story , issued to commemorate the Rush to the Rockies celebration. He also edited a collection of essays and documents entitled A Colorado Reader , published in 1962 by Pruett Publishing Company in Boulder. The next year he contributed an article on the state s labor movement to the Denver Westerners Brand Book and brought Colorado history to the airwaves with an eighteen-week course over KOA radio.
All the while, Ubbelohde was working on a one-volume history to use in the classroom. Early on he had discovered, as he phrased it, the hazards and frustrations of attempting to teach collegiate-level history without a textbook, for Percy S. Fritz s 1941 Colorado: The Centennial State was long out of print and unavailable. So, after a trial run on the extension circuit, with particularly memorable early Saturday sessions in Sterling, he continued, the decision seemed obvious: preparation of a textbook was requisite to future happiness.
Thus in 1965 Pruett published the first edition of A Colorado History . It was, Ubbelohde wrote, a book designed for reading, not reference, one that was intended to provide a modern introduction to the general history of Colorado for students and other readers.
Just as the book was coming off the press, however, Ubbelohde left Boulder for a new teaching post in Cleveland, Ohio. He spent nearly three decades on the history faculty of Case Western Reserve University, retiring in 1994 as Henry Eldridge Bourne Professor Emeritus. Always a gifted and charismatic teacher, he twice received the Carl F. Wittke Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching, first in 1967 and again in 1973.
In the meantime, A Colorado History continued to grow in popularity with both students and the general public, making it necessary to update the work to keep abreast of developments. Although Ubbelohde had prepared a slightly revised edition in 1967, by the early 1970s it was apparent that a more substantial revision was in order. With Ubbelohde now in Ohio, Maxine Benson and Duane A. Smith, both University of Colorado graduates who had served as research assistants for the first edition, came on board to coauthor the third edition, published in 1972.
Over the years, the three coauthors produced six more editions between 1976 and 2006. Although the basic text has remained the same, several changes have reshaped the book as we have moved through the various versions. For example, a bibliographical essay entitled Suggested Reading has replaced the footnotes of the first edition; a Prologue entitled The Land was incorporated in 1988; and chapters on recent events have been added. Unchanged is the emphasis on the political developments of the Centennial State, augmented by explanations of the social, cultural, and environmental contexts of those developments.
In the first edition, Ubbelohde thanked Maurice Frink, former director of the Colorado Historical Society, for reading and editing the manuscript; Harry Kelsey, then state historian and editor of The Colorado Magazine , for permission to quote materials; the University of Colorado Press, for similar privileges; and Fred Pruett, an understanding publisher.
In subsequent editions, we acknowledged our indebtedness to the following additional persons: James G. Allen, Robert G. Athearn, Robert P. Browder, Robert W. Delaney, Matthew Downey, Michael Hooks, Mrs. L. Robert Hughes, James Kedro, Jerry Keenan, Cathryne Johnson, Tona Johnston, Alice Levine, Peter M. Mitchell, David Murrah, Elizabeth Opal, Jim Pruett, Lee Scamehorn, Ted Shields, John Richard Snyder, and Ronald R. Switzer. Joyce Wilson assisted with the production of this edition. We remember Thomas Hornsby Ferril with appreciation for kindly giving us permission to quote from his poems. We also recognize the generous contributions of the many librarians and archivists who have aided our work through the years, especially the exemplary staff members of the Western History/Genealogy Department of the Denver Public Library, the Stephen H. Hart Library of History Colorado, and the Center of Southwest Studies, Fort Lewis College, Durango.
In 2012 Pruett became part of Graphic Arts Books of Portland, Oregon, and the present edition appears as part of The Pruett Series under the West-Winds Press imprint. We thank Douglas A. Pfeiffer and Kathy Howard of Graphic Arts for their help during this transition.
Lastly, the two of us wish to express our gratitude to Carl Ubbelohde, who passed away in 2004, for the opportunity to participate in the life of this book over the past five decades. Carl wrote in 1982 that our partnership had been remarkably tension-free, and so it remained. We hope that he would be pleased with this latest incarnation of A Colorado History .



M AXINE B ENSON Boulder, Colorado
D UANE A. S MITH Fort Lewis College Durango, Colorado
PROLOGUE
THE LAND
In 1893 young Wellesley College English professor Katharine Lee Bates was one of the tourists who reached the 14,110-foot summit of Pike s Peak. Like others before and since, she was inspired in an entirely unexpected manner by the grandeur surrounding her. I was looking out over the sea-like expanse of fertile country, she wrote later, [when the opening lines] floated into my mind :

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
She impressively put into words what many have felt when viewing the land we know as Colorado.
In Colorado s history, the land weaves a constant theme; for the Anasazi of Mesa Verde to the American of today, the land has played a major role. It has been both a blessing and a curse. Colorado has been blessed with some of the greatest varieties of scenery, climate, and land forms to be found anywhere in one limited geographical area. Yet those who misjudged or underestimated it found the land unforgiving.
The salient facts that impress visitor and resident alike are extraordinary: 56 named summits over 14,000 feet, according to the US Geological Survey-79 percent of the nation s fourteeners outside of Alaska; over one thousand peaks