Colorado: A History of the Centennial State, Fifth Edition

Interlude: Coloradans in 1876

97 Visitors to the US Department of the Interior’s building at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876 often paused to take a good look at the exhibit of the Hayden Survey, the fruits of eight years of systematic exploration of the Rockies. Amateur scientists scrutinized geological maps and the cases of minerals. The public marveled at photographs of Yellowstone and the Colorado Rockies, as well as clay and plaster models of the newly discovered Native American ruins along the Mancos River near Mesa Verde. As interesting as the exhibits themselves was the man on hand to answer questions. Tall and straight at age thirty-three, William Henry Jackson had been the official photographer for the Hayden Survey since 1870, accompanying it first through Wyoming and then through Colorado in 1873, 1874, and 1875. The exhibit was his personal creation. For six months preceding the exposition Jackson had worked in Washington, DC, preparing the models and displays. In prior summers he had discovered and photographed a few of the ancient ruins, photographed the Mount of the Holy Cross, and made pictures of Yellowstone country that helped generate enthusiasm for the establishment of the nation’s first national park. interlude Coloradans in 1876 interlude 98 Frank hall One of the visitors to Jackson’s exhibit surely must have been Sue Hall of Central City. When she returned to Colorado in mid-July, her husband, Frank Hall, editor of the Daily Central City Register, would have listened with fascination to her description of the sights of Philadelphia, from the Jackson pictures to the great Corliss engine whose 2,500-horsepower capacity symbolized the progress of an advancing age. During the previous winter Frank Hall had campaigned vigorously to make sure Colorado would be part of that marvelous age by being represented at the exposition: “the most rational proposition for the prosperity of the whole commonwealth .”1 He had criticized the legislature for appropriating only $6,000 for the cause, applauded the efforts of Colorado’s centennial commissioners to gather exhibits, and reminded readers that Colorado would have to compete for attention with the well-financed representatives of Nevada’s silver mines. From May through October, he published a newsletter about the centennial and enthusiastically reported that the state’s mineral display had captured audiences. Hall’s support for the Centennial Exposition was not his first venture into boosterism. In his fifteen years in Colorado, he had frequently touted the region. HehadsuccessfullypushedforColoradotoberepresentedattheParisExposition in 1867. That same year he sent to the East as many copies as he could afford of Alfred E. Mathews’s Pencil Sketches of Colorado, a book of lithographic views of Denver and the mines. The volume, he told his mother, was “designed to convey an illustrated view of our Country.”2 In a decade as editor, he worked to make the press and the public partners in the great enterprise of territorial improvement and to spark local residents into the “full blaze of enthusiastic power.”3 Although he frequently complained about the burdens of frontier journalism, Hall was filled with optimism. For him, Denver was a wonder among cities, with newspapers better than those of Syracuse and Rochester. The completion of a railroad to the East would be “a stupendous monument erected to perpetuate the glory of American Civilization.”4 His politics expressed the same faith. He was a Republican and proud of it, an ally of Jerome Chaffee and other entrepreneurpoliticians . From 1866 to 1874, while still in his thirties, Hall served as territorial secretary, a post that made him acting governor when the chief executive was absent from Colorado and that allowed him to become acquainted with national figures—Ulysses S. Grant, William Seward, William Tecumseh Sherman, and especially his friend Vice President Schuyler Colfax. Hall viewed his task as a coloradans in 1876 99 political leader in the same terms as his journalism, working whenever he could to advance the commercial interests of Colorado. Fred Walsen Hall’s conviction that Republicanism was a synonym for progress was common in the late nineteenth century. Certainly, it was shared by another of Chaffee’s allies in the largely Democratic realm of Huerfano County. German-born Fred Walsen had served the Union during the Civil War and tried his hand as merchant at Fort Garland from 1864 to 1870. He then recrossed the Sangre de Cristo Range to open a store at Plaza de los Leones, a...