Denver: An Archaeological History

1: Greater Denver as a Region of Frontiers and Boundaries

C H A P T E R 1 GREATER DENVER AS A REGION OF FRONTIERS AND BOUNDARIES Space—like history—is a product of human imagination and more often than not serves as an arena of social competition and conflict. —Mark P . Leone and Neil Asher Silberman, Invisible America This book is written for readers interested in archaeology and in Denver’s past, but the sources are unwritten history.Archaeological evidence and the evidence of material culture do not merely provide all we can know of the prehistoric inhabitants of the area; they enhance the written record of the historic period as well.The unwritten history of Denver is a story of the relationship of people to their environment on the edge between the High Plains and the Rocky Mountains,a story of frontiers and boundaries. Even in the geologic past the region was characterized by boundaries—sharp transitions —between mountains and plains, the wet and the dry.As a crossroads of cultures for millennia,the Greater Denver area is also an area of frontiers—areas of interpenetration of cultures or environments.It provides a backdrop for understanding the nature of cultural interactions and the processes of integration as well as maintenance of distinct expressions of unique cultural identities. Here many different groups of people have succeeded each other or coexisted. Denver, nestled up against the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, occupies a place of contrasts in altitude, geology, and climate.These contrasts have contributed to the juxtaposition of different ways of life.So the archaeology of Greater Denver tells a story of many frontiers—and many kinds of frontiers. The urban core of Denver, the place where the city began, is centered on the confluence of two rivers,the Platte River and Cherry Creek.Since the 1850s this town site has been a confluence of cultures as well (Fig. 1.1), a meeting ground for a variety of economic and social interests, and at times the scene of struggles for dominance and an urge toward expansion. But although the second half of the nineteenth century was a period of particularly great change for Denver, various groups met at the Platte River and Cherry Creek for many centuries and perhaps millennia prior to that.The fact that Denver has been a frontier reflects its natural setting, in which the High Plains meet the mountains,creating a dynamic and unique environment that merges some elements and separates others. Its unique flavor was created by the blending and distinctiveness of the different people who have called it home.  | C H A P T E R O N E A frontier is often thought of as the interaction of civilized and uncivilized, developed and undeveloped. No such implicit value judgment is intended here. Our concept of frontier includes earlier peoples with varied technologies and adaptations to the different ecological zones that abut in Greater Denver. Our sense of the frontier, then, is that it is a zone of interaction rather than a boundary line. In order to survive in the difficult “frontier” environment, the technologically advanced minority, in spite of their technology, had to borrow from the knowhow of the locally adapted majority and streamline its social order simply to cope with the new surroundings, difficult because unfamiliar. On the American frontier, this simpler mode of life—and all its perceptions of virtue—was short-lived for the Euro-American settlers. Learning from Figure 1.1. Indian tepees and settlers’ houses at the confluence of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River. Courtesy of the Colorado Historical Society. F R O N T I E R S A N D B O U N D A R I E S |  the less technologically advanced Native American populations (and exploiting their lands and resources) rapidly changed into self-sufficiency in Greater Denver. Patricia Limerick shows that the American west was a meeting ground of cultures . “Happily or not,” Limerick points out, “minorities and majorities occupied a common ground” (Limerick 1987:7).This is particularly true of Denver, which was settled later than Salt Lake City and other towns farther west and was thus surrounded by established Euro-American outposts. Land developers in Greater Denver regarded Arapaho and Cheyenne ownership of the land as little more than a bothersome “technicality” (Clark et al.199).Treaties negotiated with tribes and other interaction with them was largely carried out under the ethnocentric assumption that the...