Colorado History

Before the 1920s, Colorado was a rough-and-tumble saloon and brewery state that had strictly gendered norms around the creation and consumption of alcohol. Dubbed the “liquor Oasis” of the USA, masculine identities dominated in public social spaces, and women and minorities were largely prohibited from participating in the public imbibing. Progressives in the state, eager to create a morally pure society reflecting their own Protestant values, drove Colorado to pass one of the earliest statewide prohibitions of alcohol in 1916. Ironically enough, through the prohibition of alcohol, Colorado saw the evolution of increasing social rights for marginalized groups. Disregard of the law created new social spaces for drinking and propelled the public social-mixing of genders and classes, thus creating a decade of increased social rights and cultural revolution. This study includes an analysis of newspapers, police reports, and court cases to show that prohibition in Colorado created a new avenue for women and labor classes to participate in their own economic futures through the production, consumption, and distribution of bootleg liquor.

In 1934, Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) Camp DPE-203-C/SCS-7-C was established along McMurdo Gulch near Castle Rock, Colorado. Over the next seven years, CCC enrollees dramatically transformed the surrounding landscape with diverse water and erosion control features. The conservation techniques the CCC shared with local farmers and ranchers overhauled agricultural practices and reinvigorated the Depression-era economy. Today, suburban housing developments are encroaching on this historic vernacular landscape. Since 2014, PaleoWest Archaeology has worked with SLV Castle Oaks, LLC (SLV), the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the State Historic Preservation Officer to record and preserve the remains and legacy of CCC Camp DPE-203-C/SCS-7-C. Combining archaeological inventory, historical research, engineering drawings, and public education, PaleoWest has identified the camp and dozens of features and guided preservation and interpretation efforts. Extensive and complex, these CCC features should not be considered mere remnants of the past, but integral elements of the modern landscape.

This paper illustrates that epistemological barriers can stand in
the way of communication about, and understanding of, natural
heritage resources. This common problem becomes explicit by
using the 2017 killing of a living Ute ‘Grandfather Tree’ in Delta,
Colorado. The 260-year-old tree, which was recognised as
culturally central to the three Ute Indian Tribes and the people of
the State of Colorado, was cut down while still alive by the Delta
County Historical Society. Communication about this action
was short, one-sided, and clouded by the contrasting beliefs of
the two parties: i.e., to Euro-Americans the tree was just wood
without rights, while to the Ute people the tree was a living
grandfather with full rights to exist.
Keywords
Ute Indian Culture, ‘Living Grandfather Tree’, settler colonialism,
Colorado Native Americans, Delta County Historical Society,
environmental heritage communication, epistemological divide,
Delta, Colorado, Ute Indian tribes.

The structural, formal, and social eccentricity of the Drop City artists’ commune in Colorado defied conventional definition as architecture, but rendered it a singular motif in accounts of
experimental architecture, and made it a countercultural domicile without peer. Drop City’s architectural innovations included a ‘‘bricolage’’ interpretation of Richard Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, a geometric structural system known as the Zome, and passive solar devices. Before it became a spectacle of degeneration, Drop City was posited as a creative laboratory for cultural and environmental ‘‘praxis,’’ and it remains a case study of altered architectural parameters.

This paper examines the first year of the Garden of the Gods Chautauqua in Colorado Springs. Building from the success of the Colorado College Summer School and the popularity of the Chautauqua movement, the Garden of the Gods Chautauqua hosted a number of talented speakers in 1902. These guests served to create a typer of early mass culture that brought the ideas of the East to those living in the West.

1992 Colorado Case-Study by Cara DeGette in this 2012 PRA report by Pam Chamberlain is essential reading in 2016, as North Carolina pushes against history and progress to single-out Queers for discrimination.  If you ever wished for more than marriage, here's why.

Antique arms collectors have noticed over the decades that some Model 1878 Sharps Borchardt rifles are stamped on the buttstock with a scrolled LB mark surrounded by a circle.  Many have speculated on the origin and meaning of this distinct marking.  The following article briefly outlines these theories and cites published data that resolves the origin of the LB inscription.  A database on some extant examples have been compiled.

Peter Shirts Project:  Application of Methods from Forensic Anthropology, Archaeology and Osteology.
Matthew Bond

Though the Peter Shirts Project is still underway, this paper/presentation will illustrate the methods and current findings involved in the exhumation conducted in March 2013. The purpose of the Peter Shirts Project is the comparison and subsequent confirmation or contradiction of the information contained on a grave marker in Kirtland, New Mexico. Peter Shirts is a dynamic and enigmatic historical figure that was heavily involved in the Mormon pioneer migration and the subsequent colonization, surveying, and mineral interest identification of current day Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. Amid varying narratives concerning Shirts’ life, the greatest riddle of all is associated with the time, place, and manner of his death. According to oral accounts, Mr. Shirts was exhumed in 1961 though no report was given nor is the identity of the excavators known. As a result of conflicting histories, inaccurate death records, and vague funerary/interment documentation – further measures were desired by the Tuft family (descendants of Mr. Shirts) to establish the identity of remains buried in Kirtland, New Mexico under the name of Peter Shirts. The Peter Shirts Project was a privately funded and small-scale excavation that was conducted in March 2013 in Kirtland, New Mexico with the purpose of building a biological and DNA profile with the interred remains that could then be compared against historical and living profiles provided by family histories and living mitochondrial DNA. Currently a full inventory has been taken of the remains, and the excavation processes have been documented and are being organized. Finalized interpretations will be reached upon the completion of in-depth identification and verification of osteological and taphonomic markers. Ultimately an authoritative confirmation or contradiction will be established with the results from DNA testing on viable osteological remains derived from the exhumation.

Mary C.C. Bradford became Colorado‟s 6th female State Superintendent of Public Instruction in 1913. She revamped the previous curriculum and published its predecessor in 1918. Entitled “A War-Modified Course of Study for the Public Schools of Colorado,” this curriculum was influenced by the current economic and political situation affecting America at this time as a result of the countries participation in the First World War. This article will discuss this new curriculum.

The historical and anthropological excavation by the authors in this collection, Nación Genízara, retrieves the cultural memory of generations of “indigenous people of mixed tribal origins living among the Hispano population” in New Mexico and southern Colorado. The result will be a further awakening of what Tomás Atencio referred to as “Genízaro Consciousness” (1985), including an affirmation for many whose historical memory has been deeply embedded in their psyches and a recalibration for those whose identities have been tied to the victors of conquest. The implications are enormous, as the connections to the past bring forth directions for the future, particularly in defense of spirit, place, and cultural survival. This epilogue encapsulates the chapters of this historic volume and discusses its larger significance for indigenous across the Americas, while interweaving a personal story

The Adler & Sullivan Pueblo Opera House
April D. Knudsen
Colorado State University at Pueblo

The architectural firm of Adler and Sullivan had an immense influence on modern construction in the American west. My research concerns the Pueblo Opera House built in 1890, an overlooked gem in this Chicago firm’s portfolio.

In the nineteenth-century, the immigrants and cultural conservatives living in the frontier west saw formal architecture as the visual requirement of civility. Opera houses were the tangible pinnacle of civilized design and high culture and as such, an opera house became the major desire of Pueblo’s cultured elite. The esteemed Chicago firm of Adler and Sullivan was commissioned to contrive a visual solution to Pueblo’s developing urban landscape. The Pueblo Opera House became one of Adler and Sullivan’s highest paying commissions. Following its construction alongside the esteemed Auditorium and the Milwaukee Stadt Theater, the Pueblo Opera House became a major source of Pueblo’s regional cultural fame. Although this opera house has been brushed aside and all but forgotten, even by the firm who designed it, this American treasure deserves its place in history.

For the purposes of this presentation I will be discussing Dankmar Adler’s 1894 article Theater-Building for American Cities and how these elements of design were expressed and implemented in the Pueblo Opera House.

Frank Herbert Loud came to Colorado Springs in 1877 to teach mathematics and became interested in astronomy after witnessing the solar eclipse of 1878. His nearly 50-year astronomical career included overseeing the building of two observatories, founding the Western Association for Stellar Photography, supporting expeditions for two solar eclipses, supplying astronomers with meteorological data for the Rocky Mountains, educating students, publishing astronomical articles and giving public lectures, and aiding and influencing two Directors of Harvard College Observatory. Despite this, Loud and the two observatories he directed have been mostly forgotten, although they were well known by contemporary astronomers. Loud and his work deserve to be remembered given the relative scarcity of astronomers and observatories in the American West (i.e. west of the Mississippi River) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Mention the Colorado high country today and vacation imagery springs immediately to mind: mountain scenery, camping, hiking, skiing, and world-renowned resorts like Aspen and Vail. But not so long ago, the high country was isolated and little visited. Vacationland tells the story of the region's dramatic transformation in the decades after World War II, when a loose coalition of tourist boosters fashioned alluring images of nature in the high country and a multitude of local, state, and federal actors built the infrastructure for high-volume tourism: ski mountains, stocked trout streams, motels, resort villages, and highway improvements that culminated in an entirely new corridor through the Rockies, Interstate 70.

Vacationland is more than just the tale of one tourist region. It is a case study of how the consumerism of the postwar years rearranged landscapes and revolutionized American environmental attitudes. Postwar tourists pioneered new ways of relating to nature, forging surprisingly strong personal connections to their landscapes of leisure and in many cases reinventing their lifestyles and identities to make vacationland their permanent home. They sparked not just a population boom in popular tourist destinations like Colorado but also a new kind of environmental politics, as they demanded protection for the aesthetic and recreational qualities of place that promoters had sold them. Those demands energized the American environmental movement-but also gave it blind spots that still plague it today.

Peopled with colorful characters, richly evocative of the Rocky Mountain landscape, Vacationland forces us to consider how profoundly tourism changed Colorado and America and to grapple with both the potential and the problems of our familiar ways of relating to environment, nature, and place.

William Philpott grew up in the Denver suburbs and teaches history at the University of Denver. He formerly taught at Illinois State University.

"This history of the Colorado high country and the I-70 corridor will be indispensable in understanding how consumer culture and tourism shaped environmental politics and postwar landscapes. Vacationland is a smart analysis that's thoroughly researched and also fun to read." -Annie Gilbert Coleman, author of Ski Style: Sport and Culture in the Rockies

"Written in a lively style and peopled by characters like balladeer John Denver and gonzo jounalist Hunter S. Thompson, Vacationland is a must-read for those interested in the environmental movement, modern tourism, and the power of the state in building the twentieth-century West." -Susan S. Rugh, author of Are We There Yet? The Golden Age of American Family Vacations

"Vacationland is a wonderfully written book that brings new insights to environmental and Western history by emphasizing how modern tourism redefined Americans' sense of place. 'Vacationland' is more than the resorts to which we travel; it is also the place we call home." -John M. Findlay, coauthor of Atomic Frontier Days: Hanford and the American West

Private ordering's relationship to public law can be characterized as one of a complement, substitute, competitor, or foundation. This study of a transition from private to public ordering examines judicial techniques of the Supreme Court of Colorado that reduced transition costs. Initially, judicial faithfulness to local decisionmaking invoked custom, but this diminished over time. Simultaneously, the Court was puzzlingly deferential to unreliable land office decisions. The cases here suggest that recognition of custom and rewarding formal claimants each played a role in minimizing legal transition costs, with mineral rights custom proving to be the foundation for the nascent legal system.

Blackfoot Cave (rock shelter) is situated south of Denver, Colorado and it is not only a historic site where Rufus Sage camped during a snow storm but also was occupied by prehistoric hunter-gatherers and homesteaders. This book is a fictionalized description of some of the people who lived, worked and camped there.

Thirty-Three historic structures in various stages of decay are all that remain of the gold mining community of Summitville. Summitville, which is nestled in the mountains of southern Colorado, was once known as one of the most productive gold mines in all of the state. This community was organized into a Company Town in 1934. There have been no prior archaeological investigations at this site, and, therefore, little is known about how far the company went to control the residents and their everyday lives. Based on the results from survey, readings, and interviews it can be shown that Summitville had a different social dynamic when it came to the company versus employees. What emerges from this research is a picture of a company town that seemed to occupy a more central location somewhere between complete paternalistic control and something that is more akin to benign paternalism. Background research, ethnographic interviews, in addition to comparative research into regional and national company town comparisons aided in the archaeological interpretations of what was a unique version of a Company Town.

The removal and destruction of Angelo di Benedetto’s Justice Through the Ages mural from the Colorado State Judicial Building in 2010 marked the loss of a civic icon by a local Denver artist. The mural did not have controversial imagery; rather, its toxic substance (i.e., asbestos) determined administrators’ push for demolition. Far from a thoughtless choice, however, di Benedetto’s use of compressed asbestos panels was in line with a career spent selecting materials for their formal and functional possibilities. This article considers how the end stage of the mural exposes public art’s material matters. When fear of invisible fibers floating in the air became a significant concern, a three-decade-old mural was reduced to just dust.