Colorado: The Highest State, Second Edition

14. The Automobile Age

203 For many Americans, life seemed to speed up after the arrival of the automobile . During the 1920s, these horseless carriages changed the places and the ways people lived, worked, and played. Autos enabled people to move to new suburban homes and still work, go to school, and play in the city. Cars cost a lot of money, but during the 1920s many people had money. World War I (1914–1918) had strengthened Colorado’s economy. When the war began in Europe in 1914, Colorado farmers and ranchers found European markets for their crops and livestock. Colorado’s mining industry also enjoyed new booms in coal, copper, lead, molybdenum, tungsten, and zinc. World War I was also a tragic time. About 43,000 Coloradans joined the armed forces, and around 1,000 of them died. After the war ended on November 11, 1918, an even deadlier menace swept the globe—the 1918 worldwide influenza (flu) epidemic. In ten months alone, flu killed more than 500,000 Americans, including 7,738 in Colorado. Every Colorado community mourned its losses. One issue of The Silverton Standard listed over 125 deaths in that small mountain mining town. To help keep the infection from spreading, public meetings were canceled , schools were closed, and people stayed home. If people did venture out in public where they might catch the flu, they wore masks over their mouths and noses. Following the double tragedy of war and flu, the The AuTomobile Age 14 204 T h e A u T o m o b i l e A g e 1920s proved to be a safer, happier time. Colorado developed a broad-based economy that included mining, agriculture, industry, and tourism. Most Coloradans received decent wages for a forty-hour workweek. Many families saved money to buy a car and a new home. WATer New housing subdivisions were made possible by another twentieth-century trend in Colorado—massive water projects. As settlers arrived in the state, they usually settled along creeks or rivers where water could be found. But in the early 1900s, the federal, state, and local governments began building dams and tunnels to deliver water anywhere people wanted to live. Western Slopers benefited from the first major rearrangement of Colorado’s waterways. This 1909 US Reclamation Service project funneled Gunnison River water through a tunnel under Vernal Mesa to the farms and ranches around Delta and Montrose. Much of the water at the headwaters of the Colorado River, however, was diverted by the Denver Water Department for the fast-growing Denver metro area. A few years later, Roaring Fork water was diverted under Independence Pass to Twin Lakes and the Arkansas River to benefit sugar beet and melon growers in southeastern Colorado. Later, the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project When early automobiles broke down, motorists often had to push them into town for repairs. Courtesy, Colorado HistoriCal soCiety, denver. T h e A u T o m o b i l e A g e 205 took even more water from the Aspen area to further increase the streamflow of the Arkansas River, which waters Leadville, Salida, Cañon City, Pueblo, La Junta, Las Animas, Lamar, and many smaller towns. The Colorado River, with headwaters in Rocky Mountain National Park, was dammed by the Big Thompson–Colorado Project. This created Lake Granby and Shadow Mountain Reservoir for water storage. Water from these manmade lakes was channeled under the Continental Divide through a thirteen-mile tunnel that empties into the Big Thompson River at Estes Park. Hydroelectric plants built as part of this $169 million project provided electricity as well as water for northeastern Colorado. Stream diversions, irrigation ditches, deep wells, and new machines enabled agriculture to flower on the plains during the first twenty years of the twentieth century. Sugar beets and Russian wheat became more important than mining to Colorado’s economy. Agriculture, like mining, had its ups and downs, its booms and busts. Following the good years between 1900 and 1920, lower farm prices, the Crash of 1929, and the Dust Bowl in the 1930s left the eastern plains littered Water supply system. Courtesy, denver Water department. 206 T h e A u T o m o b i l e A g e with ghost towns. Dry ditches, broken windmills, and the sun-baked skeletons of abandoned houses are reminders that agriculture can be as risky as mining. In a state where...