COLORADO HISTORY

PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

EARLY BEGINNINGS

• The human history of Colorado extends back more than 13,000 years

• The region that is today the state of Colorado was first inhabited by Native Americans

• The Lindenmeier Site in Larimer County, Colorado, is a Folsom culture archaeological site with artifacts dating from approximately 8710 BCE

SPANISH SETTELRS• When Spanish explorers, early trappers and hunters and gold miners

visited and settled in Colorado, the state was populated by Native American tribes• Westward expansion brought European settlers to the area and

Colorado's recorded history began with treaties and wars with Mexico and Native American 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, Territory of Jefferson and Territory of Kansas. On August 1, 1876, Colorado was admitted as a state, maintaining its territorial borders

GOLD RUSH

• The Pike's Peak Gold Rush, which followed the California Gold Rush by approximately one decade, produced a dramatic but temporary influx of immigrants into the Pike's Peak Country of the Southern Rocky Mountains

• The rush was exemplified by the slogan "Pike's Peak or Bust!", a reference to the prominent mountain at the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains that guided many early prospectors to the region westward over the Great Plains

• The prospectors provided the first major European-American population in the region

• The rush created a few mining camps such as Denver City and Boulder City that would develop into cities.

• Scores of other mining camps have faded into ghost towns, but quite a few camps such as Central City, Black Hawk, Georgetown, and Idaho Springs survive

STATEHOOD

• On August 1, 1876 (28 days after the Centennial of the United States), U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant signed a proclamation admitting the state of Colorado to the Union as the 38th state and earning it the moniker "Centennial State"• Women won the right to vote in Colorado in 1893, and Colorado

was the first state in the union to grant this right to women through a popular election. (Wyoming approved the right of women to vote in 1869 through a vote of the territorial legislature• Governor Davis H. Waite belonged to the Populist Party and he

was one of the first elected officials to call out the state militia to protect miners from a force raised by mine owners

TWENTIETH CENTRY

• The 19th century ended with a difficult law-and-order situation in Colorado, most notably, Creede, Colorado, where gunmen like Robert Ford (the assassin of Jesse James) and con men like Soapy Smith reigned. In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was an important political force in Colorado.• In the 1940s, the Republican governor of Colorado, Ralph Carr, spoke

out against racial discrimination and against the federal internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.• In the 1930s saw the beginning of the ski industry in Colorado.

Resorts were established in areas such as Estes Park, Gunnison, and on Loveland Pass. During WWII, the 10th Mountain Division established Camp Hale to train elite ski troops.

TWENTIETH CENTURY

• In 1964, the Colorado legislature passed the nation's first liberalized abortion law, written by Richard Lamm, then a state legislator, later governor. The late 1960s saw violence in Denver, in the form of race riots, and college buildings being burned by radicals.• In 1972, Colorado became the only state to reject the award of

hosting the Olympic Games after they had been granted. When Representative Lamm led a successful movement to reject a bond issue for expenses related to hosting the event, the International Olympic Committee relocated the 1976 Winter Olympics to Innsbruck, Austria. No venue had rejected the award before nor has any venue since.• In 1999, the Columbine High School massacre became the most

devastating high-school massacre in United States history, when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 students and one teacher before taking their own lives as well.

TWENTY FIRST CENTURY

• Colorado has experienced several devastating wildfire seasons since 2000 including the Hayman fire, High Park fire, Waldo Canyon fire, and the most destructive fire in the state’s history, the Black Forest fire. • In July 20, 2012, 12 people were killed and 70 people

were injured in the 2012 Aurora shooting, when James Eagan Holmes walked into an Aurora, Colorado Cinemark movie theater with three different guns and started shooting at random at people trying to escape.• Heavy rains in September 2013 caused extensive

flooding and the flood waters spread across a range of almost 200 miles (320 km) from north to south, affecting 17 counties.

POPULATION PREDICTION