Colorado: The Highest State, Second Edition

1. The Highest State

 The young college professor hoped to see the Colorado prairies and mountains from the top of Pikes Peak. For a young woman in 1893, that trip would have been quite an adventure. So Katharine Lee Bates and some friends hired a wagon and a driver and started up America’s most famous mountain. The trip thrilled Professor Bates. Atop Pikes Peak she wrote: “I was looking out over the sea-like expanse of fertile country” when the opening lines of a poem “floated into my mind”: O beautiful for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties Above the fruited plain! These lines from her poem became the beginning of the song “America the Beautiful.” Years later, Denver poet Thomas Hornsby Ferril wrote a poem about the community in which he lived for over ninety years. “Two Rivers” describes the South Platte River and Cherry Creek and the people who came to settle along their banks in Denver: Two rivers that were here before there was A city here still come together: one Is a mountain river flowing into the prairie; The highesT sTaTe 1  T h e h i g h e s T s T a T e One is a prairie river flowing toward The mountains but feeling them and turning back The way some of the people who came here did. Ferril wrote about the mountains, prairies, water, and people—the major factors in Colorado’s history. He noted that Cherry Creek is one of the few creeks that flows toward the mountains instead of out of them. Like millions of other people, Katharine Lee Bates and Thomas Hornsby Ferril marveled at the wonders of Colorado. The high mountains most impressed the poets, as well as many other visitors and Coloradans alike. “The Highest State” is what writers over 100 years ago called our state. Colorado above all Colorado has the highest average elevation—6,800 feet above sea level—of the fifty states. If we leveled Colorado out to an average elevation of 1,000 feet, it would be the biggest state in the United States—larger than Texas or Alaska. Mount Elbert (14,431 feet) is the highest point in Colorado and the fourteenth -tallest mountain in the nation. Alaska has twelve taller mountains and California has one. Colorado, however, has fifty-four peaks that are 14,000 feet or higher. These are often known as Colorado’s “fourteeners.” The lowPikes Peak, America’s most famous mountain, has become Colorado’s best-known landmark. It inspired English teacher Katharine Lee Bates to write “America the Beautiful.” 1872 painting by george Caleb bingham. Landforms map. From the Historical Atlas of Colorado. Courtesy, university of oklahoma press. Rivers of Colorado. map by niCholas Wharton. T h e h i g h e s T s T a T e  est point in the state is in the Republican River Valley near Wray, where the tiny town of Laird is 3,402 feet above sea level. Colorado is the only state that is an almost perfect rectangle. At its widest, Colorado stretches 387 miles from the Kansas border to Utah. It is 276 miles from the Wyoming border on the north to the New Mexico border on the south. It is the eighth-largest state, with a total area of 104,247 square miles. Colorado became a state in 1876, the same year the United States celebrated its centennial, or 100th birthday. That is how Colorado got one of its nicknames, “the Centennial State.” The state is divided into sixty-four counties , with Las Animas and Moffat the largest in area and Gilpin the smallest . Broomfield, the newest county, was carved out of Boulder, Jefferson, Adams, and Weld Counties in 2001. In each county one town is designated the county seat. Denver is the state capital and Colorado’s largest city. rivers Colorado holds the US record for the deepest single snowfall—95 inches. This 32-hour continuous snowstorm fell at Silver Lake near Silverton on April 14–15, 1921. Heavy snowmelt in spring and summer feeds Colorado’s rivers. Our state is called the “mother of rivers” because so many waterways start in our mountains. You can explore Colorado’s rivers on tubes, rafts, canoes, or kayaks. These river rats are riding the Arkansas River. Courtesy, sanborn souvenir Company. [3.149.234.251] Project MUSE (2024-04-16 05:26 GMT...