Uniting Mountain and Plain: Cities, Law, and Environmental Change along the Front Range

FIVE. Forging Steel: Pueblo’s Incomplete Challenge

Obeying the laws of gravitation and attraction, the drops of rain gather . . . running into natural channels down the steep inclines of our mountains . . . So are the products of our mines brought down from the mountains to these grand channels prepared by human ingenuity and enterprise known as railroads , then unloaded by them on platforms of the great ore market of the West, the Pueblos, to be distributed to our large metallurgical works . . . the railroad is the principal agency that carries to Pueblo the mineral resources of the Great Southwest. Pueblo Board of Trade, 1883 While its founders quickly defined Colorado Springs’s role within the regional hierarchy, other towns struggled to find their places. Urban careers were rarely stable or continuous. 1 From its trading post beginnings through its emergence as “the great ore market of the West,” Pueblo’s fortunes waxed and waned in response to local events like the gold rush and broader national developments like the movement toward capital consolidation within the United States economy. Pueblo’s entrepreneurs attempted to control complex hinterlands of agricultural, mineral, and fuel resources, and competed, albeit unsuccessfully , with Denver for regional leadership. In the process, Pueblo supplemented the activities of the metropolis. Pueblo coal and steel reached across the West and into Mexico, frequently along the north118 y F I V E F O R G I N G S T E E L Pueblo’s Incomplete Challenge south arc of the Rocky Mountains and the Rio Grande Valley, which its residents increasingly viewed as a natural phenomenon. Before 1859, various settlements existed near the confluence of Fountain Creek and the Arkansas River, where Pueblo now stands. In 1833, trader John Gantt raised Fort Cass, but unsuccessful in brutal competition with Bent’s Fort, abandoned it two years later. In 1842, George Simpson and Robert Fisher constructed a building called “the Pueblo.” A group of independent traders soon owned it, living there with their families, tending livestock, cultivating bottomland, and bartering with Indians. More a New Mexican ranch than a fort, its location possessed numerous geographic advantages. The nearest point in the United States to Taos, it offered easy access to the Santa Fe Trail. Routes south to Mexico and north to posts on the South Platte joined at the mouth of Fountain Creek. An abundance of water and grass seemed capable of sustaining these settlers and their crops and animals, but mismanagement and overgrazing, the declining fur trade, and emigrations to Oregon and California shifted the Pueblo from prosperity to decline. New settlers, primarily from New Mexico, arrived at an almost derelict Pueblo in 1853 following news of congressional approval of a transcontinental rail route through the Arkansas River Valley. Sectional tensions, however, distracted Washington from organizing the line. After violent confrontations with the Utes, settlement along the Arkansas came to a halt in the mid-1850s and migrants again deserted the Pueblo. 2 The gold rush renewed interest in the confluence of the Arkansas and Fountain Creek. Two hundred Kansans claimed the east side of the creek, near the ruins of the old Pueblo, and christened their community Fountain City in February 1859. Ten months later, a new camp across the creek adopted the name Pueblo. The fledgling settlements merged within two years under the latter’s name. Pleased with the mild winter climate, some prospectors opted for farming near town, while other emigrants established mercantile stores. They supplied and fed prospectors moving up the Arkansas to California Gulch and other diggings just as their counterparts in Denver serviced Clear Creek’s miners. Pueblo’s initial importance came as a central marketplace, a point of trade for these farms and mining districts. 3 Its founders hoped to make FORGING STEEL 119 Pueblo the front range entrepôt. They first sought a piece of the political pie. When the territorial legislature initially convened in 1861, George Chilcott and Jesús Barela led southern Colorado in urging Pueblo as the permanent capital, while Jerome Chaffee and other Denver leaders pushed for their northern city. Pueblo simply could not overcome Denver’s urban primogeniture. The government temporarily assembled in Colorado City as a compromise, but soon returned to Denver where it remained permanently except for one three-year period. Pueblo also lagged in the performance of the control exchange functions that secured Denver’s early dominance. For example, Pueblo obtained the telegraph more than a year after Denver. Nathaniel Hill...