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

INTRODUCTION

I N T R O D U C T I O N Twenty-four-year-old Henry Porter left Atchison, Kansas, for Denver in 1862. Like many other talented young men, he saw opportunity in the frontier town along the front range of the Rocky Mountains. Recognizing the young city’s role as the regional entrepôt, Porter hoped to make his fortune in freighting and merchandising there. He soon expanded into telegraphing and joined other residents in a local railroad when the Union Pacific left Denver off the transcontinental line and threatened their city’s existence. Over the decades, he owned ranches and general stores in Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona and orchards and residential lots in Los Angeles. Porter became vice-president of the Denver National Bank, directed the Trinidad National Bank, and had international dealings in Mexico and England. Among other charitable contributions, he donated one million dollars for the construction of a Denver hospital. 1 Porter’s career illustrates the dynamic and innovative ways in which Denver’s entrepreneurs seized control of the region’s nascent economy following the discovery of gold in 1858. They diverged into new commercial activities and extended the city’s influence over hinterlands throughout the West and across international borders. At the same time, these urban leaders remained committed to the welfare of their communities, sometimes sacrificing personal profit for a lasting social legacy. Porter’s Denver stood at the intersection of the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains. Denver and its front range cohorts, Colorado Springs and Pueblo, became cities of nature. Their growth and survival depended on the extraction, processing, and marketing of the region’s natural capital—precious metals, industrial ores, livestock, produce. More than this, residents viewed their cities as natural phenomena, destined to greatness by geography and joined in some unwritten birthright with the ecosystems from which this capital flowed. Denver, Colorado Springs, and Pueblo provide the geographical focus for this book, but their history contains implications that 1 y transcend the region. Their struggles for control defined a new United States in the latter half of the nineteenth century: cities’ control over diverse hinterlands; local entrepreneurial control over outside investment dollars; regulated societies’ control over laissez-faire capitalism; and humans’ control over their physical world. These same tensions shaped the transformation from a nation of disparate traditional agrarian communities to a modern urban industrial society. This contested transformation in the Rocky Mountains and on the adjacent plains was an urban story. Like Chicago three decades earlier, Denver quickly emerged as a “nature’s metropolis.” It dominated key financial, transportation, and communication functions that, in turn, enabled its entrepreneurs to develop fledgling mining, agricultural, and industrial hinterlands and to rapidly and permanently alter their environments. Cities such as Denver became hubs of market activity and places of cultural interactions; they belong at the center of our understanding of the American West. 2 Yet, in emphasizing urban primacy and the preeminence of a particular metropolis, it is important to recognize that the metropolis did not exist in an urban vacuum. Hierarchical relations with other cities and towns defined Denver’s ascendancy as much as its control of resource-rich hinterlands. 3 Colorado Springs and Pueblo, for example, sometimes competed with Denver to control certain sectors of an increasingly integrated, specialized regional economy, but more frequently filled roles that complemented the primary entrepôt. Associates in the hinterlands, including often transient mining towns and smaller, permanent agricultural communities, performed more limited functions. 4 Front-range entrepreneurs, like Porter, managed an urban system on the periphery of a national and international economy that had turned toward industrialism. On this western frontier, the extension of an urban-based economy allowed for the assimilation of such marginal areas. Before 1858, the Rocky Mountains remained loosely bound to the country’s expanding market economy. This sparsely populated region was distant from the core geographically, economically, and socially, but activities there involved more complexity than most nineteenth -century commentators acknowledged. On the adjacent plains, the Cheyennes and Arapahos participated in commercial bison INTRODUCTION 2 hunting for decades. Ute communities of the western slope bartered at Bent’s Fort and in Taos, as did European and American traders. New Mexico established a few isolated agricultural settlements in the arid San Luis Valley. 5 The U.S. Army scattered forts throughout the region after 1848, but few Americans envisioned a basis for urban...