Boulder is Colorado’s eleventh-most populous city, twenty-five miles northwest of Denver, nestled against the foothills of the Front Range. Home of the University of Colorado (CU), the city has a population of 97,385 and is the seat of Boulder County…

Central City and Black Hawk took shape during the boom years after John Gregory discovered gold on May 6, 1859, near the North Fork of Clear Creek in what is now Gilpin County. For much of the 1860s and 1870s, the area was the richest mining region in…

Clara Brown (c. 1803–85) was an ex-slave who became a philanthropist, entrepreneur, and humanitarian in Denver and Central City. She is said to be the first African American woman to have traveled West during the Colorado Gold Rush. While in Central City…

Clear Creek County lies thirty miles west of Denver on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains. One of Colorado’s seventeen original counties, it covers 396 square miles and spans Clear Creek Canyon, from which it takes its name. Clear Creek County has…

The discovery of gold near present-day Denver in 1858–59 drew thousands of people to present-day Colorado, prompting the political organization of first a US territory and later a state. Many current cities and towns, including Denver, Boulder,&nbsp…

Denver is the capital of Colorado and the twenty-first largest city in the United States, sprawling over six counties and 3,497 square miles of the High Plains and the Rocky Mountain foothills. Centered at the confluence of the South Platte River and…

Douglas County covers 843 square miles between Denver and Colorado Springs on the western Great Plains along the Front Range. The county was established in 1861 as one of the original seventeen counties of the Colorado Territory. It is bordered to the…

Gilpin County, located in the high country east of the Continental Divide some thirty-seven miles west of Denver, was established in 1861 as one of the original seventeen counties of the Colorado Territory. The county encompasses about 150 square miles…

Gold Hill was established in 1859 as the first permanent mining camp in the Colorado mountains. Located at an elevation of about 8,300 feet in Boulder County, the town experienced several booms and busts before settling into a small-scale tourist economy…

Jefferson County, commonly referred to as “Jeffco,” is named after former president Thomas Jefferson and covers 774 square miles in central Colorado west of Denver. Jeffco is bordered to the north by Boulder and Broomfield Counties, to the east by Adams,…

The Panic of 1893 touched off a nationwide economic depression that lasted for at least three years, threw millions out of work, and caused banks and businesses to fail across the country. In Colorado and other silver-mining states, the panic was tied to…

Built in 1871–72 by brothers Henry M. Teller and Willard Teller, the Teller House is one of the oldest and most important buildings in Central City. It has served as the town’s main hotel for more than sixty years. The four-story brick hotel played…

Colorado’s role in the American Civil War (1861–65) was part of a broader geopolitical contest: control of the American Southwest. The war began in 1861, just two years after the Colorado Gold Rush and mere months after Congress established the Colorado…

Signed in 1851, the Treaty of Fort Laramie was made between the US government and several Indigenous nations of the Great Plains—including the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota—who occupied parts of present southern Wyoming and northern Colorado. The treaty…