Denver: An Archaeological History

Afterword

a f t e r w o r d John L. Cotter The title of this book implies,as the authors intended,that what is written here is based primarily upon what the trowel has revealed in the ground.Yet, as all archaeologists agree, what we really know about the prehistoric past has to be analyzed in the light of what we perceive as demonstrated analogues—we would know nothing whatever of the Paleoindians if we did not have the ethnographic record of living Plains tribal groups. By the same token, the vanished evidence of early Denver can best serve future archaeologists with archival and living references. What my family witnessed and what I remember vividly as a child and youth in Denver has become the archaeology of Denver—its atmosphere, its distinct character, its vanished or altered notable structures. Sarah Nelson and her group have noted here the cultural change as recorded in ground investigations and historical observations.My family and I have lived them—at least the ones that came after my family arrived in the 1880s, and what I observed for myself after the first decade of the twentieth century. What archaeology has not yet recorded by excavation is the clear atmosphere of the young city of electric street cars (my mother recalled earlier horse cars and one line that featured a rear platform on which the horse rode down a long hill toward town) (Fig. A1).That was when the automobile spent most of its time in the garage or on the street, awaiting family outings on weekends.The tram was the way to get to work downtown from uptown homes and how housewives got to the many department stores downtown to “shop”: Daniels and Fisher, the Denver Dry, Gano’s, Joselyn’s, and the Golden Eagle down across from D. and F., where “fire sales” offered alluring bargains , and so on including the many specialty shops. Even one that catered decorously to the “old fashioned,” where conservative ladies scornful of the latest fashions could find their familiar buttons, gloves, ribbons, and “personal things” still kept in drawers that ranged behind the counter to the ceiling (Fig.A2). And no archaeologist has evidently unearthed examples of pneumatic tubes in the dry goods stores that sucked up cylinders of cash from the clerk’s station and blew them back from the central cashier’s booth with change and receipt.And if not the pneumatic tube, the overhead wire that carried baskets with payments to the cashier’s box overhead and beyond and back (the clerk sent the basket on its way with a pull cord that gave it a mighty push, which the cashier reciprocated). Thus the marvels of modern merchandising before the cash register gave way to the computer and cash drawer. Figure A1.An early horse team in Denver, with the horse positioned for the downhill section of the line. Courtesy of the Colorado Historical Society. Figure A2.A retail store in early twentieth-century Denver. Courtesy of Denver Public Library. 232 | J o h n L . C o t t e r The archaeologist must one day delve into the sites of such industrial landmarks as the old Globe and Grant Smelters and locate their slag dumps long ago broken up for road ballast. I remember the tall Grant Smelter chimney, for many years rising high above the edge of the old cityscape, beyond the other high landmark, the tower of Daniels and Fisher (Fig A3). The archaeological evidence of so many vanished buildings is mainly in the minds of the very old or in the recorded recollections of the departed. But I can tell you how it was to thrill to the wonder of the new Denver Municipal Auditorium, which could be transformed from a great rectangular hall to a huge theater by lowering a proscenium arch from the center loft and swinging the balconies on either side in on great rollers to meet the proscenium and complete the theater, ready for operas, ballets, recitals, and convocations of all kinds (Fig A4). Figure A3. Denver smelter, circa 1906. Courtesy of the Colorado Historical Society. Figure A4. Denver City auditorium annex. Photo by Floyd H. McCall, the Denver Post. 234 | J o h n L . C o t t e r Other great theaters were the Broadway Theater, with its...