The region that is today the U.S. State of Colorado has been inhabited by Native Americans and their Paleo-American ancestors for at least 13,500 years, and possibly more than 37,000 years. The eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains was a major migration route that was important to the spread of early peoples throughout the Americas. The Lindenmeier site in Larimer County contains artifacts dating from approximately 8720 BCE.
When explorers, early trappers, hunters, and gold miners visited and settled in Colorado, the state was populated by American Indian nations. Westward expansion brought European settlers to the area and Colorado's recorded history began with treaties and wars with Mexico and American Indian nations to gain territorial lands to support the transcontinental migration. In the early days of the Colorado gold rush, Colorado was a Territory of Kansas and Territory of Jefferson. On August 1, 1876, Colorado was admitted as a state, maintaining its territorial borders.
European exploration
In 1787 Juan Bautista de Anza established the settlement of San Carlos near present-day Pueblo, Colorado, but it quickly failed.Carl Ubbelohde, Duane A. Smith, Maxine Benson: A Colorado History, Pruett Publishing, 2006, p. 17 This was the only Spanish attempt to create a settlement north of the Arkansas River. Colorado became part of the Spanish province of Santa Fe de Nuevo México as part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. The Spaniards traded with Native Americans who lived there and established the Comercio Comanchero (Comanche Trade) among the Spanish settlements and the Native Americans.
In 1819, the United States ceded its claim to the land south and west of the Arkansas River to Spain with the Adams-Onís Treaty, at the same time purchasing Florida. Mexico won its independence with the Treaty of Córdoba signed on August 24, 1821, and assumed the territorial claims of Spain.
During the early history of the Arkansas Valley in Colorado from 1832 to 1856, traders, trappers, and settlers established trading posts and small settlements along the Arkansas River, and on the South Platte near the Front Range. Prominent among these were Bent's Fort and Fort Pueblo on the Arkansas and Fort Saint Vrain on the South Platte. The trade was mainly native Cheyenne and Arapaho who sold buffalo and other furs for refined goods such as alcohol from the United States.Janet Lecompte, Pueblo, Hardscrabble, Greenhorn: The Upper Arkansas, 1832-1856, University of Oklahoma Press, 1977, hardcover, 354 pages, Nearly all the construction was done by Mexicans who traveled to the valley for work. The Arkansas river was not navigable so wagon trails were used to transport goods to and from Missouri and Kansas. The Arapaho continued to occupy and influence the area on the Front Range near the Platte River. The Ute retained territorial control over the rest of what is now Colorado.
South of the Arkansas Valley, the Mexican government had planned to settle the land via a land grant system in which a small number of individuals where granted ownership of millions of acres of land with the expectation that they would lead settlement. However these settlements were largely unsuccessful because the Utes continued to control the land until 1851.
In 1846 the United States went to war with Mexico. Mexico's defeat forced the nation to relinquish its northern territories by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. This opened the Southern Rocky Mountains to American settlement, including what is now the lower portion of Colorado. The newly gained land was divided into the Territory of New Mexico and the Territory of Utah, both organized in 1850, and the Territory of Kansas and the Territory of Nebraska, organized in 1854.
On April 9, 1851, Hispanic settlers from Taos, New Mexico, settled the village of San Luis de la Culebra, then in the New Mexico Territory, but now Colorado's first permanent European settlement.- - - - .
The 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie formed a basis for relations with the local Arapaho and Cheyenne tribes. However the immigrants did not respect the terms of treaty, treated natives unjustly, and directly provoked native people which lead to tensions.
Gold Rush
From 1850-1853, several parties of gold seekers panned various streams in the South Platte River Valley, but their activity produced more rumors than gold. These groups found Little Raven's Arapahoe band, which occupied the area, to be welcoming. In the summer of 1857, a party of Mexican gold seekers worked a placer deposit along the South Platte River about above Cherry Creek. By 1858 several parties of gold seekers had founded several camps which eventually conglomerated into Denver. News of these parties began the Pike's Peak Gold Rush.
Jefferson Territory
Golden City was established on June 16, 1859, along Clear Creek west of Denver. Its geographic location made it a center of trade between the gold fields to the west and settlements to the east. By the end of 1860, Golden was capital of Jefferson Territory.
Territory of Colorado
Statehood was regarded as fairly imminent, as during the run-up to the 1864 presidential election the Republican–controlled Congress was actually eager to get two more Republican senators and three more electoral votes for President Lincoln's re-election bid. Territorial Governor John Evans persuaded Congress to adopt an enabling act, but a majority of the 6,192 Coloradoans who voted, in a population of around 35,000, turned down the first attempt at a state constitution and the second attempt at statehood. Later, at the end of 1865, territorial ambitions for statehood were thwarted again, this time by a veto by President Andrew Johnson. Statehood for the territory was a recurring issue during the Ulysses Grant administration, with Grant advocating statehood against a less willing Congress during Reconstruction.
Colorado War
The Colorado War (1863–1865) was an armed conflict between the United States and a loose alliance among the Kiowa, Comanche, Arapaho, and Cheyenne nations of Native Americans (the last two were particularly closely allied, which is unusual since the various tribes were notorious for inciting violence against each other). The war was centered on the Eastern Plains of the Colorado Territory and resulted in the removal of these four Native American peoples from present-day Colorado to present-day Oklahoma. The war included a particularly notorious episode in November 1864 known as the Sand Creek Massacre. The battle, initially hailed by the U.S. press as a great victory, was later learned to be one of genocidal brutality. The resulting hearings in the United States Congress regarding the malfeasance of the U.S. Army commander, John Chivington, were a watershed in the white views of the Indian Wars at the close of the American Civil War. In 1868 the U.S. Army, led by George Armstrong Custer, renewed the conflict against the Arapaho and Cheyenne at the Battle of Washita River.
Early statehood 1876-1900
The United States Congress passed an enabling act on March 3, 1875, specifying the requirements for the Territory of Colorado to become a state. On August 1, 1876 (28 days after the Centennial of the United States), President Ulysses S. Grant signed Proclamation 230 admitting the state of Colorado to the Union as the 38th state and earning it the moniker "Centennial State". The borders of the new state coincided with the borders established for the Colorado Territory.
Women won the right to vote in Colorado via referendum on November 7, 1893. Colorado was the first state in the union to grant universal suffrage through a popular vote. (The territory of Wyoming approved the right of women to vote in 1869 through a vote of the territorial legislature.) Governor Davis H. Waite, a left-wing Populist, campaigned for the amendment but he a year later he blamed the women voters for defeating his reelection campaign.Rebecca J. Mead, How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868–1914 (New York University Press, 2004) pp. 53-72. Waite favored labor unions and is one of the few American state governors ever to call out the state militia to protect miners from a force raised by mine owners in the Cripple Creek miners' strike of 1894.James Edward Wright, The Politics of Populism: Dissent in Colorado (Yale U.P., 1974) pp. 179-180.
Mining in Colorado
Participants in the Pike's Peak Gold Rush from 1858 to 1861 were called Fifty-Niners and many of the new arrivals settled in the Denver area. Gold in paying quantities was also discovered in the Central City area. In 1879, silver was discovered in Leadville, resulting in the Colorado Silver Boom.
Many early mining efforts were cooperative ventures. However, as easy-to-reach surface deposits played out, miners increasingly turned to hard rock mining. Such industrial operations required greater capital, and the economic concept of mineral rights resulted in periodic conflicts between the mine owners, and the miners who increasingly sold their labor to work in the mines.
As the mines were dug deeper, they became more dangerous, and the work more arduous, creating the conditions for conflict. In 1880, Colorado Governor Pitkin, a Republican, declared martial law to suppress a violent mining strike at Leadville. In the 1890s many Colorado miners began to form unions in order to protect themselves. The mine operators often formed mine owners' associations in response, setting up the conditions for a conflict. Notable labor disputes between hard rock miners and the mine operators included the Cripple Creek strike of 1894 and the Colorado Labor Wars of 1903–04.
Coal mining in Colorado began soon after the first settlers arrived. Although the discovery of coal did not cause boom cycles as did the precious metals, the early coal mining industry also established the conditions for violent confrontations between miners and mine owners. The usual issues were wages, hours, and working conditions, but miners were also concerned about issues of fairness, and company control over their personal lives.
Early coal mining in Colorado was extremely dangerous, and the state had one of the highest death rates in the nation. During the three decades from 1884 to 1914, more than 1,700 workers died in Colorado's coal mines. Coal miners also resented having to pay for safety work such as timbering the mines, and they were sometimes paid in scrip that had value only in the company store, with the cost of goods set by the company.
The Colorado Coalfield War, centered around the 1913-1914 United Mine Workers of America strike against the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron company, saw dozens die in battles on the Southern Colorado coalfields. The Ludlow Massacre became the peak of the violence, when Colorado National Guard and militia fired into a tent colony of strikers, in which many children were killed. The violence would continue until Woodrow Wilson sent federal soldiers to disarm both sides.Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Harvard University Press, 2008).
Another coal strike in 1927 is best known for Colorado's first Columbine massacre. In 1933, federal legislation for the first time allowed all Colorado coal miners to join unions without fear of retaliation by instituting penalties for mine owners who obstructed collective bargaining.
Like all resource extraction, mining is a boom or bust industry, and over the years many small towns were established, then abandoned when the ore ran out, the market collapsed, or another resource became available. There were once more than a hundred coal mines in the area north of Denver and east of Boulder. The mines began to close when natural gas lines arrived. Coal and precious metals are still mined in Colorado, but the mining industries have changed dramatically in recent decades.