Gold-rush speculators staked Denver on a South Platte bluff
Denver is Colorado’s capital and largest city, a consolidated city-county in the South Platte valley about twelve miles east of the Rockies’ foothills. Named for Kansas Territory governor James W. Denver, it dominates culture across a 560-mile radius. Indigenous Ute, Cheyenne, Arapaho and others long held the plains before the 1858 Pike’s Peak rush.
The Mile High City earns its nickname from an official elevation of exactly 5,280 feet, and the 105th meridian that anchors Mountain Time runs straight through Union Station. The first settlement, Montana City, was planted on the South Platte by Lawrence, Kansas prospectors in the summer of 1858 but soon faded. On 22 November that year the speculators William Larimer and Jonathan Cox laid cottonwood logs on the bluff above Cherry Creek, across from the mining camp of Auraria, and called it Denver City to flatter the territorial governor, not knowing he had already resigned. The spot, opposite seasonal Cheyenne and Arapaho camps, is now Confluence Park.
In February 1861 six Southern Cheyenne and four Arapaho chiefs signed the Treaty of Fort Wise near present-day Lamar, giving up more than 90 percent of the lands promised at Fort Laramie. Disputes over it fed the Colorado War of 1864–65 and the Sand Creek massacre. Colorado Territory was created that same month, Denver City was incorporated on 7 November 1861, dropped City from its name in 1866, became territorial capital in December 1867 and permanent state capital by an 1881 referendum.
When the first transcontinental line went through Cheyenne, 100 miles north, residents led by John Evans, David Moffat and Walter Cheesman raised $300,000 in three days, and the Denver Pacific linked up on 24 June 1870. Silver money then built Horace Tabor’s opera house and the Brown Palace Hotel.
From 1880 to 1895 crime bosses such as Soapy Smith worked hand in hand with police and politicians, and the silver crash of 1893 brought depression; yet in 1887 local clergy founded the forerunner of United Way. Flower growing boomed as the Carnation Gold Rush, and on 1 December 1902 home rule created the City and County of Denver.
Source: Denver
