Colorado: A History of the Centennial State, Fifth Edition

14. Denver and the Reform Crusade

243 14 Ever since the gold rush, Denver has been Colorado’s gateway and major metropolis. With its location at the intersection of the plains and the mountains, its people and institutions have tied together the sections of the state and served as a point of contact between Colorado and the wider world. As the state’s political capital and largest city, Denver has been the natural center for decision-making. New programs and ideas have typically spread outward through the public agencies and private organizations that have Denver headquarters. By the early twenty-first century Denver had become the hub of a swath of communities, from Fort Collins on the north to Pueblo on the south—a Front Range megalopolis. On the ranches of Wyoming, in the small towns of Colorado, in the western counties of Kansas and Nebraska and South Dakota, the Denver metropolitan area stood out as a place of opportunity, the city one read about in the papers, the city where friends and relatives found jobs, the place that offered a refuge from the loneliness of cold winds and the big sky. Commerce has also centered in Denver. The extension of railroads in the late 1800s gave Denver access to all parts of the West. From a retailing town, Denver grew into the primary supply center for a large portion of the Rocky Mountain West. The Denver and Rio Grande and other lines tackled the mountain barrier that had bedeviled the original transcontinental railroads. Proudly the City of Denver stands out in the “spotlight” as a truly great western capital.1 —Grace IGo Hall, 1938 Denver and the reform crusade DOI: 10.5876/9781607322276:c14 chapter fourteen 244 Denver became the break-of-bulk point for goods shipped in from the East and the Midwest. Carloads of freight could be stored until needed, split into smaller consignments, and shipped out again to fill the bins and shelves of Georgetown’s, Leadville’s, and Aspen’s stores. Simultaneously, Denver factories began manufacturing mining equipment for the Rocky Mountain market. By the early 1890s the city’s warehouses and foundries were supplying mining towns throughout Colorado, Wyoming, northern New Mexico, parts of Utah, and sometimes as far away as Arizona, Montana, and Idaho. Denverites proudly advertised their city by publishing illustrations of their factories with thick black smoke billowing from every chimney—not a sign of air pollution to nineteenth-century promoters but rather proof of their city’s industrial might. Because of its railroad network, Denver dominated a regional hinterland that included most of the southern Rockies and the high plains. The trade areas of most US cities are elongated east and west, along railroad trunk lines. Denver’s runs north and south, along the base of the mountains. To the east, competition from Kansas City and Omaha has confined business to Colorado and a fringe of Nebraska and South Dakota, but north and south there is no city of comparable importance between El Paso and Calgary. As a result, the city boomed as a processing hub. The Boston and Colorado Company built Denver’s first smelter in 1878. The erection of the Omaha and Grant Smelter and the Globe Smelter; the construction of breweries, flour mills, and stockyards; the establishment of packing plants by Armour, Swift, and Cudahy all bespoke the city’s capacity to process the primary products of Colorado and neighboring states. When the National Western Stock Show was first held in Denver in 1906, it heralded the city’s regional dominance and demonstrated that Denver had clearly become the commercial and financial capital of the Rocky Mountain empire foreseen by railroad builder William Jackson Palmer. Denver’s trade with the Rocky Mountain empire required financing. Branch agencies of national insurance firms served customers in Colorado and adjacent states. Banks not only channeled outside investment into Colorado mines, irrigation ditches, real estate, and cattle but also furnished the credit that kept goods flowing throughout the Rockies. Denver banks organized a private clearinghouse in 1885. The federal government designated them the official depositories for reserve funds of smaller banks in Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming in 1900. Fourteen years later the city was chosen for a branch of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank, with a territory embracing Colorado and northern New Mexico. denver and the reform crusade 245 With railroads, factories, and prosperity came population. A large town of around 35,000...