Amid the celebrations of the founding of Denver 150 years ago this month, one part of the urban saga may have been ignored: How did it become the dominant city of the state?
One oft-ignored facet of American history is the competition among cities to expand their hinterlands. New York City, for instance, defeated early competitors like Philadelphia and Boston by building the Erie Canal, which connected Gotham to the Great Lakes, and thus the produce and markets of the upper Midwest.
Chicago used railroads and a waterway of its own, which connected Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River system, to take the West away from St. Louis, which had previously dominated trade out here. On the Pacific coast, Los Angeles supplanted San Francisco by fabricating a harbor at San Pedro, hustling good rail connections and engineering a water supply.
Denver was by no means the first settlement in present-day Colorado, but we can skip the fur-trading and hide-hauling days. With the gold rush of 1858-59, Denver’s main competitor was Golden.
Most of the mining excitement of the day at Idaho Springs and Central City on Clear Creek and its tributaries, and Clear Creek emerges from the mountains at Golden. Golden was a place where the farmers of the plains and the miners of the mountains could trade.
Early Colorado politics featured two Republican factions: the “Denver Crowd” and the “Golden Crowd.” The latter seemed to be winning when Golden became the territorial capital.
Both cities had promoters who sought railroad connections. But Denver moved faster, with the 106-mile Denver Pacific north to the Union Pacific main line in Cheyenne, soon followed by the Kansas Pacific connection to the east.
The Colorado Central Railroad, a Golden project, reached the mines of Clear Creek, as well as Cheyenne to the north, via Fort Collins — but not in time to make Golden the hub.
Having vanquished Golden, Denver turned to another threat. Pueblo had good rail connections to the east and south, and was the plains terminus of Colorado’s first railroad connection to Salt Lake City and the West Coast, the Denver & Rio Grande line up the Arkansas.
The battle between Denver and Pueblo was long and hard. In 1904, Denver capitalist David Moffat tried building a rail line due west from Denver, so as to cut Pueblo out of the loop. But Moffat’s line dead-ended at Craig, far short of Salt Lake City, and it needed a tunnel under the Continental Divide to eliminate the expense and delay of 11,660-foot Rollins Pass.
Pueblo was able to block tunnel- building efforts until its disastrous flood in 1921. In exchange for state help with flood control, it allowed the state to form the Moffat Tunnel Commission. Denver’s direct rail route west was completed in 1937, and Pueblo got sidetracked. Denver finished the job in 1996, supporting a railroad merger that put Pueblo’s western connection out of service.
As for newer forms of transportation, Denver invested heavily, and lobbied well for federal dollars, to build its big modern airport that opened in 1995. On the ground, national transportation planners in the 1950s decided that Interstate 70, coming in from Kansas City, should dead-end at Denver. The city lobbied hard and got the western terminus extended about 500 miles to Cove Fort, Utah. Thus did it ensure that no other Colorado city would sit at the crossroads.
All this goes to show that while there may be “natural” places for a city, what really matters is a relentless determination to subdue rivals — and over the years, Denver has excelled at that.
Ed Quillen (ed@cozine.com) is a freelance writer, history buff, publisher of Colorado Central Magazine in Salida and frequent contributor to The Post.
