Rocky Mountain Empire

Rocky I flLOunt zn Empire ROCKY EMPIRE Revealing glimpses of the West in transition from old to new, from the pages of the Rocky Mountain Empire Magazine of The Denver Post Edited by ELVON L. HOWE With a foreword by Palmer Hoyt DOUBLEDAY COMPANY, INC. Garden City, N. Y. Foreword THE STORIES you will read in this volume go at a high lope from the hilarious to the poignant, from the exciting to the quietly dramatic. They are tersely told, timely as todays newspaper, and always, I think, both entertaining and revela tory of a young, important segment of America. But there is also a sober underlying significance to this book which I am impelled to point out by a glance at the past and the future. The westward course of empire was milestoned indelibly across the face of the Great American Desert a century ago. But the human tide that rolled on tarred wooden axles over the Santa Fe and Overland trails was at first not an enveloping but a passing flood. It piled up against the white-bearded Rockies only long enough to penetrate, then rough-locked its way down and through and rolled on to salt water. Gold was the lure California gold and the incredibly fertile croplands waiting at the far end of the Oregon Trail. To the men in those canvas-hooded wagons that thousand miles of grassy plains, buffalo, Indians, granite-hard slopes, and blaz than a grueling test of courage aftd endurance that was the purchase price of the promised land beyon l Eventually many came back. John Gregory, for example, returning disappointed from a land of unfulfilled promises, stopped where the mountains meet the plains and found the gold that had eluded him in California. His lode sprouted Central City, now the site ofa famous summer-long operatic and drama festival. It also aided the establishment of a supply depot at the edge of the plains which became the city of Den-ver. Thus the development of the huge expanse just west of the nations middle and equal to almost one third its total area became the last chapter in the epic of American pioneering. This development was a gradual process. In 1870, when Illinois had already 2,500,000 residents and distant California fully 500,000, lofty Colorado could claim only a sparse 40,000. But more gold rushes came, and lusty ones. Sportsmen from the East and across the seas came to hunt the abundant game and returned with stories no one would believe. Pushed along by steel-bodied, steel-willed cowboys, great rivers of long horned cattle streamed forth from Texas to harvest tall, rich grass left uneaten by the disappearing buff alo. Railroads came, and farmers and barbed-wire fences. A great photographer, William H. Jackson, trekked west from Omaha into the legendary wonderland called Colters Hell to make wet-plate exposures that popped open the eyes of Congress and led to the establishment of the nations first national park the Yel lowstone. Tine slow discovery of the Great American Desert, which men were once quite happy to survive and then ignore, con tinued over decades. Boom towns crumbled and trading posts blossomed into gleaming, modern, dynamic cities. Unique FOREWORD Vll among them in both its geography and its development was Denver, a most improbable metropolis and the only one within a radius of well over five hundred miles. Denver, to a degree approached by few other major popula tion centers in America, was a self-made, bootstrap city. There was, to be sure, a show of yellow in the sands of the trickle called Cherry Creek where it joins the South Platte under the sunset shadow of 14,260- oot Mount Evans, but scarcely enough to justify a good-sized hamlet. As the main wagon trails had been deflected far to the north and the south by the forbidding mountain wall, so were the railroads...