Colorado: A History of the Centennial State, Fifth Edition

Colorado Biographies

467 Wayne N. Aspinall Ohio-born Wayne Aspinall (April 3, 1896) moved with his parents to Palisade in 1904, where the family raised peaches. A Democrat, Aspinall defeated Robert Rockwell in 1948, earning the first of twelve consecutive terms representing Colorado’s Western Slope in the US Congress. In 1959 he became chair of the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs Committee. He pushed legislation authorizing the Glen Canyon, Navajo, Flaming Gorge, and Curecanti Dams on the Colorado River and its tributaries; backed the Fryingpan-Arkansas water project; and supported the mining, oil shale, and cattle industries. The flowering of the environmental movement and redistricting of his congressional district led to his primary election defeat in 1972 by Alan Merson, who was defeated in the general election by Republican Jim Johnson. Aspinall died October 9, 1983. Felipe Baca Felipe Baca was born in northern New Mexico in 1829. He cleared land along the Purgatoire River in Colorado in 1860 and started a permanent settlement in 1862. During the next decade that village grew into the town of Trinidad. Baca’s sheep herds and wealth also grew. A dominant figure in Trinidad, he opened the first general store, donated land for a Catholic church, and presided over the first school board. Elected to the territorial legislature as a Republican in 1870, he opposed statehood because he feared its effects on the Colorado Biographies colorado biographies 468 Hispanic minority. He died in 1874. His large house on Trinidad’s Main Street is now a museum. Casimiro Barela Casimiro Barela, the most prominent Hispanic leader in early Colorado, was born in New Mexico on March 4, 1847. He moved with his family in 1867 to about twenty miles from Trinidad, where they farmed. Growing rich from stock raising, freighting, and merchandising, he built an imposing mansion in Trinidad. He served in the territorial legislature, participated in the state constitutional convention, and represented Las Animas County in the Colorado Senate from 1876 to 1916. He began his career as a Democrat but switched to the Republican Party in 1901. Barela died December 18, 1920. William Bent Born in St. Louis on May 23, 1809, William Bent began trapping in Colorado’s upper Arkansas Valley at age fifteen. In the early 1830s he, along with his brother Charles and partner Ceran St. Vrain, built a large trading post, which came to be known as Bent’s Fort, on the Arkansas River. Bent abandoned his fort in 1849 and built a smaller post thirtyeight miles downriver. From 1854 to 1860 he was the US Indian agent who dealt with the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa tribes for the federal government. Marriages to Owl Woman and then to Yellow Woman of the Cheyenne gave him an understanding of Native Americans. He died on May 19, 1869, in a territory vastly changed from the land he had known in the 1820s and 1830s. In 1976 the National Park Service reconstructed Bent’s Fort as a living history museum. Charles Boettcher German-born Charles Boettcher (April 8, 1852) arrived in the United States in 1869. He sold hardware in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and in Greeley, Fort Collins, and Boulder in the 1870s. Removing to Leadville in the late 1870s, he sold hardware and engaged in banking and mining. He settled in Denver in 1890, helped organize the Great Western Sugar Company, and invested in meatpacking, cement manufacturing, and banking. By diversifying his portfolio, Boettcher thrived despite boom-and-bust cycles. As Charles grew older, his son Claude K. (born June 10, 1875) assumed control of the family empire. Charles died July 2, 1948. Claude died June 9, 1957. colorado biographies 469 Frederick Gilmer Bonfils and Helen Bonfils Born in Missouri December 31, 1860, Frederick Bonfils came to Denver in 1895, where he and his partner, Harry Heye Tammen (1856–1924), purchased the Denver Evening Post. Lurid stories, screaming headlines, plenty of local news, and occasional reform crusades soon made the Post Denver’s most read, most feared, and most profitable paper. In 1907, after the Rocky Mountain News accused Bonfils of being a blackmailer, Bonfils physically assaulted News publisher Thomas Patterson. Bonfils died February 2, 1933. His daughter Helen (1889–1972) let the paper drift under editor William Shepherd until 1946, when he retired and she hired Palmer Hoyt. Hoyt recruited fresh talent, including Bill Hosokawa, a Japanese American, and George Brown, an African American, signaling a...