Colorado: The Highest State, Second Edition

17. Conserving Colorado

249 As the United States celebrated its 200th birthday in 1976, Colorado was observing its 100th anniversary as a state. Some Coloradans thought 1976 was a good time to look back at the first 100 years and think about their history. The biggest change was the number of people living in the state. In 1876, there were about 100,000 Coloradans. By 1976, there were over 2 million . In 1876, many Indians still lived in Colorado. In 1976, about 9,000 were left, mostly on two small Ute reservations in the southwestern corner of the state. About 4,000 other Native Americans lived in Denver. The 1858–1859 gold rush had brought over 40,000 fortune seekers to Colorado. These newcomers—miners and townspeople, farmers and ranchers—went to work like beavers. They built dams and ditches to provide water for their mines and towns, farms and factories. The settlers changed nature’s flow to serve people wherever they wanted to work and live. Many early Coloradans did not like the mountains. To them the Rockies were only waste rock that hid gold and silver, coal and oil, marble and granite . So the mountains were blasted, dug, and tunneled for mines, wagon roads, railroads, and auto roads. Conserving Colorado 17 250 C o n s e r v i n g C o l o r a d o nature’s revenge Nature soon gave a few warning signs. After trees were cut down, snow melted much faster with no trees to shade it and it ran off quickly, sometimes flooding towns. Trees along the headwaters of the Arkansas River around Leadville had been cut down, and the river flooded Pueblo in 1921. A wall of water killed more than 100 people. It carried away horses, wagons, cars, and railroad cars as if they were toys. After this flood, Coloradans built more dams. But dams do not always hold. Castlewood Dam broke in 1933, and Cherry Creek flooded Denver. Colorado’s waterways have continued to break through dams and channels. In 1976, nearly twelve inches of rain fell in four hours in the Big Thompson River Canyon. The river rose nineteen feet above its normal level and roared down the canyon from Estes Park to Loveland. This was the worst flood in Colorado history, killing 145 people and destroying 418 homes and 52 businesses. In 1982, another flood left Coloradans feeling uneasy because so many towns were located below dammed-up water. In that year, Lawn Lake Dam The Pueblo flood in 1921 was the most deadly and destructive in Colorado history to that time. Deforestation of the upper Arkansas River led to rapid snow melting and runoff that caused this disaster. Courtesy, Pueblo regional library. C o n s e r v i n g C o l o r a d o 251 burst in Rocky Mountain National Park. The roaring flood did not stop until it had buried the main street of Estes Park in mud and water. Some thought the answer was to build bigger and better dams. Others argued that Colorado already had too many dams and thought we should live in harmony with Natural disasters can sometimes lead to good things. Following the 1982 Estes Park flood, the town restored natural plants to the banks of the Big Thompson River and created this riverwalk. Photo by thomas J. noel. 252 C o n s e r v i n g C o l o r a d o nature rather than trying to rearrange waterways and the landscape. These conservationists, people who want to protect the environment, argued that modern Coloradans should try to live without altering and polluting the land. Conserving Wildlife Conservationists went back to the history books to find a hero who, early on, had begun to preserve Colorado’s wild animals. The person they found had made it her life’s work to preserve at least taxidermy specimens of Colorado’s creatures. “WOMEN’S WORK” was the sign Martha Ann Dartt Maxwell placed in front of her wildlife dioramas in Boulder and Denver and at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. She was a tiny Boulder woman who stood less than five feet tall and weighed barely 100 pounds. Yet she stands tall among the ranks of Colorado heroes. Martha went to work to support a husband who made little, if any, money. She taught herself to shoot a...