Colorado: A History of the Centennial State, Fifth Edition

12. A Diverse People

197 12 Coloradans have always been a diverse people. Unfortu­ nately,thelabelsscholarsusetodesignatedifferentgroups fail to describe that diversity. Historians employ the term Native American as shorthand to write about numerous groups ranging from the Apaches to the Utes, each with distinctive languages and customs. The term Hispanic is also simplistic because it attempts to encompass a people of immense complexity, having Native American and European roots as well as New Mexican, Mexican, Caribbean, Latin American, and other homelands. Similarly, the designation Anglo-American is at best a convenient way to package the waves of newcomers, most from eastern and midwestern states, who came to Colorado in the nineteenth century, only a few of whom were purely English. In truth, the newcomers were a blend of peoples. Many had been born in the United States, but their ancestors had come from elsewhere— English to the English colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; Africans as slaves to those colonies, particularly the southern ones; Germans and Scotch­ Irish to Pennsylvania; Dutch to New York; French to Louisiana and the Mississippi Valley. Increasing numbers of Irish and Germans arrived in the United States between 1800 and 1860. By the 1850s, California capitalists were recruiting Chinese laborers. After the Civil War, Scandinavians and southern and east­ ern Europeans provided large additions to the immigrant Her climate mild and varied From plain to mountain dome Invites the poor from all the world Who here can find a home.1 —Ned e. Farrell, 1868 a diverse People DOI: 10.5876/9781607322276:c12 chapter twelve 198 stream, and in the early twentieth century migrants from Japan and Mexico fur­ ther enriched the nation’s ethnic mix. Foreign-Born Immigrants Colorado shared in that variety. In 1860 the population of Pikes Peak coun­ try included in Kansas and Nebraska Territories consisted of less than 8 percent foreign­born. Among them were 624 Irish, 576 Germans, and 352 English. The numbers increased dramatically in the 1860s. In 1870 more than 6,000 foreign­ born immigrants in Colorado contributed nearly 17 percent of the population. By 1910 the number of foreign­born had grown to nearly 130,000. Not only had the size of the foreign­born contingent increased, but its composition had also changed. In 1870 more than 95 percent of Colorado’s foreigners were from the German states, the British Isles, Scandinavia, France, Switzerland, and Canada. Many spoke English as their native language, and many others had learned it before venturing to the Rocky Mountain West. In 1910 these “old” immigrants accounted for less than 70 percent of the foreign­born population. Slovenians, Czechs, Slovaks, Croatians, Serbians, Russians, Poles, Greeks, Mexicans, Hungarians, Japanese, Chinese, Dutch, and Finns—groups represented sparingly, if at all, in 1870—counted their members by the hundreds or thousands by 1910. Italians and German­Russians, statistically insignificant in 1870, each claimed over 10,000 representatives in 1910. Unlike the earlier arrivals, these “new” immi­ grants often did not speak English. Each immigrant could testify to the powerful forces that uprooted people from their homelands. Economic factors moved most of them. The wealthy discovered that interest rates were higher in Colorado than in Europe, and shrewd western­ ers often promised and sometimes delivered profitable investment opportunities. Britons James Duff in Denver and William Bell in Colorado Springs channeled foreign funds into railroads, irrigation projects, mines, ranches, and real estate ventures. Mining engineers such as Philip Argall, Thomas Rickard, and Richard Pearce—many of them from Cornwall and Wales—unlocked the processing secrets that ensured the profitability of the precious metals industry. Managers such as cattleman Murdo MacKenzie, a Scot, found rewards in supervising vast western enterprises. Although experts and investors were important to the state’s development, they constituted only a small fraction of the foreign­born. Far more numerous a diverse people 199 were the thousands who fled hardship in their homelands. The Irish potato fam­ ine in the late 1840s triggered a mass exodus that saved some of Erin’s children from starvation. “Dear Patrick come! A dollar a day for ditching, no hanging for stealing, Irish petaties a dollar a bushel and Whisky the same! Dear Patrick come: if you can’t come in one vessel, come in two!”2 The letter was apocryphal, but the economic inducement was typical and persuasive. Grinding poverty in southern Italy and Slavic Austria, annual starvation in China, land hunger in the Netherlands, poor wages...