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Walking Colorado: An Introduction to the Origins Section

Added by yongli on 01/20/2017 - 11:41, last changed on 02/02/2023 - 15:38
Hundreds of generations of Native American ancestors are represented in Colorado by scatters of artifacts along with the less portable evidence of shelter, the warmth of hearths, storage needs, and symbolic expression. We learn about them through archaeology and indigenous peoples’ oral traditions...

Dana Crawford

Added by yongli on 01/25/2021 - 17:21, last changed on 11/02/2022 - 02:40
Dana Crawford (1931–) is a nationally prominent preservationist and developer who exemplifies how one woman can transform a city. She started with Larimer Square and then Lower Downtown (LoDo), the hubs of Denver ’s skid row, and helped turn them into one of America’s most popular and dynamic urban...

Adolph Coors

Added by yongli on 02/03/2017 - 21:43, last changed on 06/23/2019 - 01:07
Adolph Coors (1847–1929) immigrated to the United States in 1868 after serving as a brewery apprentice in western Germany and then in the Kingdom of Prussia. After working in Chicago breweries, he moved to Colorado in 1872 and purchased a bottling company. He transformed it into the Coors Brewing...

Agapito Vigil

Added by yongli on 04/10/2020 - 15:33, last changed on 10/25/2022 - 19:40
Agapito Vigil (1833–?) was a delegate to the Colorado Constitutional Convention in 1875­–76, representing Las Animas and Huerfano Counties, and a member of the state’s First General Assembly, representing Conejos County . At the constitutional convention, he joined Henry Bromwell as the only two...

Agnes W. Spring

Added by yongli on 07/06/2020 - 16:07, last changed on 11/02/2022 - 02:50
Agnes Wright Spring (1894­–1988) was the first Wyoming state historian (1918–19) and the first female Colorado state historian (1950­–51 and 1954–63), making her the only person to serve as state historian of more than one state. She contributed to Wyoming and Colorado history through research,...

Alan Berg

Added by yongli on 08/30/2016 - 10:34, last changed on 10/03/2019 - 12:11
Alan Berg (1934–84) was an outspoken Denver radio broadcaster in the 1970s and 1980s known for his unapologetic attacks on the far right, religious extremism, and white supremacy. At the time of his assassination by the white supremacist group The Order in 1984, Berg was one of Denver ’s most...

Alan Berney Fisher

Added by Nick Johnson on 11/20/2022 - 08:18, last changed on 11/20/2022 - 08:19
Alan Berney Fisher (1905–78), the son of architect William E. Fisher, was an important modernist architect in twentieth-century Denver . Alan received early training in his father’s office before finishing his education at the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...

Alan Swallow

Added by yongli on 06/16/2021 - 09:25, last changed on 10/25/2022 - 22:41
Alan Swallow (1915–66) founded the University of Denver ’s creative writing program and established Swallow Press, a small publisher that focused in part on books about the American West. He also ran the University of Denver Press from 1947 to 1953. Known for his intense personality, his critical...

Albina Washburn

Added by yongli on 10/14/2020 - 13:42, last changed on 10/26/2022 - 20:38
Albina Washburn (1837–1921) was an important early resident of what is now Loveland and later an influential proponent of women’s suffrage and temperance across Colorado. In 1876 she advocated for women’s suffrage at the state constitutional convention, and in 1880 she cofounded the Colorado branch...

Alexander Cummings

Added by yongli on 02/11/2022 - 10:07, last changed on 11/12/2022 - 08:48
Appointed by President Andrew Johnson in 1865, Alexander Cummings (1810–79) was the third governor of the Territory of Colorado . Originally from Pennsylvania, Cummings gained his office as governor in 1865 largely because he served the Union during the Civil War . His time in office was fraught...

Alferd Packer

Added by yongli on 09/03/2019 - 15:23, last changed on 10/26/2022 - 09:44
Alferd E. Packer (1842–1909), also “Alfred,” was a prospector who became famous after confessing to eating his dead comrades while trapped in the San Juan Mountains in February 1874. With the group starving and disoriented, it appears likely that Packer killed another prospector in self-defense and...

Alice Hale Hill

Added by yongli on 02/16/2021 - 12:59, last changed on 02/16/2021 - 12:59
Alice Hale Hill (1840–1908) was a Denver philanthropist who helped lead institutions such as the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) and the Denver Free Kindergarten Association. Wife of Nathaniel P. Hill , a smelting entrepreneur and US senator, she created the first free kindergarten...

Alton “Glenn” Miller

Added by yongli on 07/07/2020 - 15:03, last changed on 11/23/2022 - 18:40
Glenn Miller (1904–44) rose from humble beginnings to become one of the most successful band leaders of the big band era, during the 1930s and 1940s. At the pinnacle of his popularity, in 1942, he volunteered to serve as a band leader in the army. The music he shared with the troops was met with...

Amy Van Dyken

Added by yongli on 01/14/2020 - 16:11, last changed on 11/02/2022 - 01:41
Amy Van Dyken (1973–) is a six-time Olympic gold medalist and former competitive swimmer for the United States. In 1996 she became the first American woman to win four gold medals at a single Olympic Games. Despite an ATV crash in 2014 that left her paralyzed from the waist down, the Colorado...

Ancestral Puebloans of the Four Corners Region

Added by yongli on 05/09/2016 - 14:21, last changed on 11/01/2022 - 19:36
Formerly labeled Anasazi, the Ancestral Puebloan culture is the most widely known of the ancient cultures of Colorado. The people who built the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde and the great houses of Chaco Canyon were subsistence farmers of corn, beans, and squash. The structures of this culture date...

Anna and Eugenia Kennicott

Added by yongli on 01/18/2017 - 15:49, last changed on 09/04/2021 - 12:26
Anna (1887–1963) and Eugenia Kennicott (1883–1934) grew up on a Colorado farm around the turn of the twentieth century and recorded their day-to-day lives in diaries and in rare photographic plates. Today, their chronicles of women’s experiences on a turn-of-the-century farm in the American west...

Anne Evans

Added by yongli on 10/14/2020 - 12:44, last changed on 09/03/2021 - 08:06
Anne Evans (1871–1941) was a Colorado civic leader and patron of the arts who transformed the Denver cultural community. Among her numerous activities, Evans started and helped guide the Denver Art Museum to national prominence, assisted in the development of the Denver Public Library , led the...

Antonia Brico

Added by yongli on 06/29/2021 - 15:53, last changed on 06/29/2021 - 15:53
Antonia Brico (1902–89) was the first woman to gain wide acceptance and recognition in the field of symphony conducting. Despite being told that women could not and should not be symphony conductors, she completed the rigorous conducting course at the University of Berlin and conducted many major...

Apishapa Phase

Added by yongli on 08/20/2015 - 16:22, last changed on 11/20/2022 - 22:05
The Apishapa phase is the name given to distinctive archaeological sites found primarily in southeastern Colorado that Native Americans occupied between AD 1050 and 1450. The Apishapa phase is related to both contemporaneous and more recent archaeological sites located in the Texas and Oklahoma...

Art Goodtimes

Added by yongli on 12/12/2018 - 15:02, last changed on 02/01/2023 - 08:20
Art Goodtimes of Norwood won a Colorado Council on the Arts poetry fellowship 29 years ago and served two years as Western Slope Poet Laureate. His most recent book is Looking South to Lone Cone: the Cloud Acre Poems (Sedona, AZ: Western Eye Press, 2013). Poems Skinning the Elk “There’s a whole lot...

Arthur Addison Fisher

Added by Nick Johnson on 11/20/2022 - 08:27, last changed on 11/20/2022 - 08:27
Arthur Addison Fisher (1878–1965) worked with his older brother William Ellsworth Fisher in one of the largest and most influential architectural firms in the Rocky Mountain region. Arthur brought to the firm an interest in Spanish and Mediterranean styles. In addition to designing elaborate houses...

Arthur Carhart

Added by yongli on 05/06/2016 - 14:37, last changed on 11/08/2022 - 18:43
Arthur Hawthorne Carhart (1892–1978) was a novelist, US Forest Service (USFS) official, and landscape architect known for developing a commonsense, nonpartisan, and democratic approach to conservation and natural resource management. His legacy lives on today in the Arthur Carhart National...

Arthur Lakes

Added by yongli on 05/03/2017 - 14:22, last changed on 04/25/2023 - 03:58
Arthur Lakes (1844–1917) was an English naturalist who discovered dinosaur bones near Morrison in 1877, setting off the “dinosaur bone rush” in Colorado and the American West. Additionally, his research on mineral deposits and extraction methods proved essential to the region’s mining industry. An...

August Meyer

Added by yongli on 03/13/2020 - 14:42, last changed on 03/13/2020 - 14:42
August Robert Meyer (1851–1905) was a mining engineer who played a central role in starting Leadville ’s silver boom in the late 1870s. Meyer recognized the value of the area’s lead carbonate ores, built a smelter , developed local infrastructure, and helped organize the new city. After leaving...

Augusta Tabor

Added by yongli on 01/16/2020 - 13:57, last changed on 11/02/2022 - 13:54
Augusta Tabor (1833–95), born Augusta Louise Pierce, came to Colorado with her husband Horace and young son during the Colorado Gold Rush of 1858–59. As an astute businesswoman and careful money manager, she helped her husband become one of the country’s wealthiest men in the late nineteenth...

Barney Ford

Added by Nick Johnson on 12/10/2015 - 14:54, last changed on 10/18/2022 - 13:43
Born into slavery in 1822, Barney Ford escaped to freedom and moved to Colorado in 1860. He soon became a successful businessman and an influential civic leader who pushed for Colorado statehood with suffrage for all. Ford died in Denver in 1902 and has been recognized for his contributions to the...

Baron Walter von Richthofen

Added by yongli on 07/08/2020 - 16:07, last changed on 10/18/2022 - 08:51
Baron von Richthofen (1859–98) was a flamboyant, versatile booster and developer who came to Colorado in 1878; he was one of many Germans who constituted the state’s largest foreign-born contingent between 1880 and 1910. Richthofen invested in Denver real estate, helped establish the suburban town...

Beatrice Willard

Added by yongli on 02/03/2017 - 13:27, last changed on 08/25/2022 - 07:24
Dr. Beatrice Willard (1925–2003) was an internationally recognized tundra ecologist who made significant contributions to environmental policy in Colorado and the nation. Her research in the Colorado mountains established her as a well-known ecologist, educator, and negotiator. Early Life Beatrice...

Beth Paulson

Added by yongli on 01/24/2019 - 15:16, last changed on 06/25/2020 - 01:07
Beth Paulson lives in Ouray County , Colorado where she teaches workshops, leads Poetica, a monthly workshop for area writers, and co-directs the Open Bard Poetry Series. She formerly taught English at California State University Los Angeles for twenty-two years. Her poems have been...

Bill Tremblay

Added by yongli on 01/28/2019 - 10:57, last changed on 11/17/2020 - 01:07
Bill Tremblay is a poet and novelist. His work has appeared in nine full-length volumes including Crying in the Cheap Seats (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1971), The Anarchist Heart (New York: New Rivers Press, 1977). Home Front (Spokane, WA: Lynx House Press, 1978),...

Billy Fiske

Added by yongli on 06/28/2021 - 17:20, last changed on 10/25/2022 - 22:51
Billy Fiske (1911–40) was a two-time Olympian who drove the US bobsled team to gold medals in the 1928 and 1932 Winter Olympics. A founder of Colorado’s ski industry , Fiske saw the potential for the state to rival the great winter resorts of Europe and helped lay the groundwork for Aspen to become...

Bob Beauprez

Added by yongli on 06/09/2020 - 14:56, last changed on 11/27/2022 - 08:50
Bob Beauprez (1948–) is a rancher and former banker and politician from Boulder County . He represented Colorado’s Seventh Congressional District from 2003 to 2007 and ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2006 and 2014. A devout Catholic and member of the Republican Party , Beauprez has long...

Buffalo Soldiers

Added by yongli on 06/24/2016 - 15:38, last changed on 11/27/2022 - 09:03
The so-called Buffalo Soldiers were several African American cavalry and infantry regiments that operated in the American West during the late nineteenth century. While there is no evidence that the black troops themselves adopted it, the nickname Buffalo Soldiers is widely believed to have come...

Bulkeley Wells

Added by yongli on 06/15/2021 - 16:19, last changed on 08/18/2022 - 07:12
Bulkeley Wells (1872–1931) was an influential mining investor and hydroelectric engineer best known for building the Smuggler-Union Hydroelectric Power Plant near Telluride and for his hostility toward unions. A controversial figure in Colorado history, Wells carried on an affair with Louise Sneed...

Burnham Hoyt

Added by yongli on 02/14/2022 - 14:45, last changed on 02/14/2022 - 14:45
Colorado’s most notable architect, Burnham “Bernie” Hoyt (1887–1960) designed eighty-five major constructed projects in a variety of styles, ranging from a fifteenth-century Scottish castle ( Cherokee Castle , 1926) in Sedalia to the radically modern Boettcher School for Crippled Children (1940) in...

Byron White

Added by yongli on 09/14/2020 - 15:18, last changed on 12/29/2022 - 06:39
Byron White (1917–2002) was Colorado’s first-ever US Supreme Court justice, serving from 1962 to 1993, as well as a nationally known college athlete for the University of Colorado and a star pro football player. As a justice, White was remembered for his belief in judicial restraint, writing brief...

Carol Taylor

Added by admin on 08/01/2019 - 11:57, last changed on 05/15/2020 - 01:07
Carol Taylor is a local historian and researcher with expertise creating compelling public programs and interpretive writing for historical exhibits. She has worked with partners such as the Native American Rights Fund, National Park Service, Colorado Music Hall of Fame, Boedecker Theater at The...

Caroline Bancroft

Added by yongli on 05/13/2016 - 16:32, last changed on 11/02/2022 - 02:50
Caroline Bancroft (1900–85) was a prominent author, journalist, organizer, and socialite in twentieth-century Denver. Bancroft’s extensive writings on Colorado’s local history established the importance of the genre and served as an example for generations of historians who followed in her...

Caroline Nichols Churchill

Added by yongli on 04/09/2020 - 10:51, last changed on 09/15/2020 - 11:31
Caroline Nichols Churchill (1833–1926) was a writer and newspaper editor best known for founding and editing the Queen Bee , a Denver weekly newspaper dedicated to “the interests of humanity, woman’s political equality and individuality.” Embracing progressive and feminist causes, Churchill...

Carrie Clyde Holly

Added by yongli on 09/14/2020 - 14:37, last changed on 10/19/2022 - 05:41
Carrie Clyde Holly (1856–1943) of Pueblo County was elected to the state House of Representatives in 1894, making her one of the first three female legislators in the United States. In 1895 Holly became the first woman to get a bill she drafted made into law, the so-called Holly Law, which raised...

Carrie Welton

Added by yongli on 08/15/2016 - 14:33, last changed on 10/04/2019 - 10:10
Carrie Welton (1842–84) was a relatively well-known socialite and amateur mountaineer who climbed Colorado Fourteeners in the 1880s. When Welton perished during an ill-advised autumn ascent of Longs Peak in 1884, she became the focal point of a national discussion concerning backcountry safety and...

Charles Boettcher

Added by yongli on 06/29/2021 - 15:46, last changed on 06/29/2021 - 15:46
Charles Boettcher (1852–1948) was an entrepreneur and philanthropist best known for founding the Great Western Sugar Company and the Boettcher Foundation, an organization that made the Boettcher name synonymous with generosity in Colorado. Boettcher built his wealth through a series of sound...

Charles Burrell

Added by yongli on 02/08/2021 - 16:17, last changed on 02/09/2021 - 13:39
Charles Burrell (1920–) is a classical and jazz musician who first joined the Denver Symphony in 1949 and played bass with the group for decades before his retirement in 1999. Sometimes called the “Jackie Robinson of classical music,” he was not actually the first Black classical musician in Denver...

Charles Deaton

Added by yongli on 08/30/2016 - 11:17, last changed on 03/26/2018 - 14:10
Charles Deaton was an influential western American architect best known for his Sculptured House (better known as the Sleeper House ) in the hills around Denver . Deaton is remembered as a pioneering Colorado artist whose work was an example of architecture’s shifting visual aesthetic in the mid-...

Chauncey Billups

Added by yongli on 01/14/2020 - 16:30, last changed on 11/02/2022 - 15:45
Chauncey Billups (1976–) is a retired National Basketball Association (NBA) player who played for seven teams, including the Denver Nuggets , before he retired in 2014. A Colorado native, Billups was a star player at the University of Colorado–Boulder before he was drafted into the NBA, where he...

Chin Lin Sou

Added by yongli on 02/16/2021 - 13:54, last changed on 08/27/2022 - 08:20
Cantonese immigrant Chin Lin Sou (1836–94) defied racial barriers to establish himself as an esteemed business and civic leader in Colorado. Not only do historians recognize Chin and his wife as the first Chinese American family in Colorado, but Chin and his descendants also established a positive...

Chipeta

Added by yongli on 01/16/2020 - 15:32, last changed on 03/30/2023 - 13:42
Chipeta (1843–1924) was a Ute woman known for her intelligence, judgment, empathy, bravery, and quiet strength, all of which made her the only woman of her time allowed on the Ute council. She was also the wife of Ouray , whom the United States recognized as the de facto Ute leader in the late...

Clara Brown

Added by yongli on 08/20/2019 - 14:48, last changed on 11/09/2022 - 12:41
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, she established Gilpin County ’s first...

Clara Cressingham

Added by yongli on 10/14/2020 - 13:33, last changed on 02/09/2023 - 20:36
Clara Cressingham (1863–1906) served in the Colorado House of Representatives in 1895, making her one of the first female legislators in the United States, along with Frances Klock and Carrie Clyde Holly . In office, she became the first woman to serve in a leadership role (as secretary of the...

Clovis

Added by yongli on 12/06/2017 - 13:59, last changed on 11/20/2022 - 22:20
The term Clovis refers to the earliest widespread archaeological culture to have occupied North and Central America, ca. 13,250–12,800 years ago. Since the discovery of the first Clovis artifacts in the 1930s, debate has raged over such fundamental issues as whether people who left behind Clovis...

Colorow

Added by yongli on 01/23/2017 - 15:59, last changed on 11/26/2022 - 10:41
One of the best-known Nuche (Ute) leaders of the nineteenth century, Colorow (c. 1813–88) was involved in many significant events in Colorado history, from his first contact with white Americans during the Colorado Gold Rush to the Meeker Incident and his namesake “ Colorow’s War ” of 1887. Colorow...

Crawford Hill

Added by yongli on 06/15/2021 - 17:31, last changed on 06/29/2021 - 12:45
Crawford Hill (1862–1922) was a successful Denver businessman and philanthropist. The firstborn child and only son of Alice and Nathaniel P. Hill , Crawford inherited their fortune and carried his father’s prosperous businesses into the next generation. A quiet, conservative man, dedicated...

Dale H. Maple

Added by yongli on 01/17/2017 - 13:59, last changed on 08/16/2022 - 16:15
Private First Class Dale H. Maple (1920–2001) was stationed at Camp Hale near Leadville during World War II when he assisted in the escape of three German prisoners-of-war prisoners of war in February 1944. Following Maple’s arrest along with the escapees in Mexico, he underwent one of the most...

Damon Runyon

Added by yongli on 08/15/2016 - 16:02, last changed on 05/10/2020 - 01:07
Damon Runyon (1880–1946) was a newspaperman, political reporter, author, screenwriter, and playwright in the early 1900s. Best known for his work after leaving Colorado, particularly Guys and Dolls , Runyon was a prolific writer during his time in Colorado, working for many of the state’s...

David H. Moffat

Added by yongli on 01/30/2017 - 11:14, last changed on 11/15/2022 - 11:42
David Halliday Moffat (1839–1911) left a lasting impression on Colorado from his involvement in many industries, including banking, mining , and railroads. Through his civic involvement in Denver , Moffat helped the city develop financially and industrially. His most significant contribution to...

David Mason

Added by yongli on 01/23/2019 - 14:54, last changed on 10/15/2019 - 12:26
David Mason’s books of poems include The Buried Houses (winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize), The Country I Remember (winner of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award), and Arrivals. His verse novel, Ludlow , was published in 2007 and named best poetry book of the year by the Contemporary Poetry...

David Owen Tryba

Added by yongli on 06/17/2021 - 16:21, last changed on 02/12/2022 - 09:21
David Owen Tryba (1955–) is a prominent and prolific Denver architect known for designing the Wellington E. Webb Municipal Office Building, the Union Station renovation, and the History Colorado Center as well as the Google campus in Boulder . He has handled the preservation and updating of many...

David Wilhelm

Added by yongli on 01/22/2019 - 14:25, last changed on 11/02/2022 - 12:43
David Cudahy Wilhelm (1919–2018) is a former Colorado rancher, World War II Fighter Ace, humanitarian, and Congressional Gold Medal recipient. A world traveler as well as a family man, Wilhelm brought his work ethic and love for adventure to every endeavor in his life. Having lived for nearly a...

Dean Reed

Added by yongli on 06/15/2016 - 16:00, last changed on 10/30/2019 - 11:40
Dean Reed (1938–86) was a singer-songwriter and actor from Denver who enjoyed a stint of popularity in the 1960s and 1970s before experiencing a slow slide into obscurity by the end of his life. Best known for his time spent living and recording in the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, Reed’s life reflects the intense polarization of the world he wrote about as well as the political activism typical of many musicians at the time.

Delph E. Carpenter

Added by admin on 02/17/2015 - 16:44, last changed on 08/12/2022 - 12:48
Lawyer, state senator, and interstate streams commissioner, Delph E. Carpenter (1877-1951) had lasting impact on Colorado and the western United States through his concept of river compacts. In persuading other states to negotiate the first interstate river-sharing agreement, Carpenter was...

Denver Nuggets

Added by yongli on 02/22/2017 - 12:08, last changed on 04/08/2020 - 10:17
The Denver Nuggets, Colorado’s professional basketball team, compete in the National Basketball Association (NBA) as part of the Northwest Division in the association’s Western Conference. While an amateur-league team named the Denver Nuggets competed in the 1930s and 1940s, the current Nuggets...

Diana DeGette

Added by yongli on 06/09/2020 - 15:03, last changed on 10/26/2022 - 06:42
Diana DeGette (1957– ) is a lawyer and politician who has represented Colorado’s First Congressional District —the city of Denver —in the US House of Representatives since 1997. A member of the Democratic Party , DeGette is known for her ardent support of reproductive and civil rights,...

Don Felipe Baca

Added by yongli on 05/06/2016 - 13:20, last changed on 04/20/2021 - 13:42
The Hispano farmer and sheep rancher Don Felipe de Jesus Baca (1829–74) was one of the first settlers of the Purgatoire River valley, one of the most important developers of Trinidad , and a member of the Colorado Territorial legislature. He is the namesake of Baca County in southeast Colorado...

Dr. Florence Rena Sabin

Added by yongli on 08/11/2016 - 15:42, last changed on 10/26/2022 - 04:41
One of the preeminent medical and scientific minds of the early twentieth century, Dr. Florence Rena Sabin (1871–1953) was a public servant devoted to improving public health. As the first woman to receive a full professorship at Johns Hopkins University, Sabin was also a successful woman in the...

Dr. Stanley Biber

Added by yongli on 08/30/2016 - 12:30, last changed on 11/04/2019 - 10:25
Stanley Biber (1923–2006) was a surgeon in Trinidad during the twentieth century who specialized in sex reassignment surgeries. His clinic, one of the first in the country to offer sex reassignment surgeries, grew in reputation thanks to its compassionate treatment of transsexual patients. Biber’s...

Earth Lodge

Added by yongli on 06/23/2016 - 16:33, last changed on 11/27/2022 - 08:46
An earth lodge is a distinctive type of timber-frame house built from the early 1400s to the late 1800s by a dozen different Indigenous nations on the Great Plains . These massive circular structures, often encompassing 1,500 square feet or more, featured four large support posts arranged around a...

Eddie Eagan

Added by yongli on 10/28/2021 - 14:00, last changed on 10/28/2021 - 14:00
Edward “Eddie” Patrick Francis Eagan (1897–1967) is the only person to have won gold medals in two different sports at the summer and winter Olympics. Born in Denver , Eagan attended Longmont High School and the University of Denver before going on to Yale, Harvard, and Oxford, where he earned his...

Edward M. McCook

Added by Nick Johnson on 11/19/2022 - 08:49, last changed on 11/20/2022 - 12:42
Edward Moody McCook (1835–1909) was a prominent lawyer, soldier, and politician who served as the fifth and seventh governor of Colorado Territory (1869–73 and 1874–75). A successful Union cavalry general during the Civil War , McCook became friends with Ulysses S. Grant, a friendship that resulted...

Edwin Carter

Added by yongli on 01/08/2019 - 11:49, last changed on 11/27/2022 - 09:00
Edwin Carter (1830–1900) was a prospector turned naturalist whose Colorado wildlife collection became the founding exhibit of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (DMNS). Originally from New York, Carter prospected in the Rocky Mountains during the 1860s, but he quickly gave up mining to collect...

Elijah McClain

Added by yongli on 02/08/2022 - 17:33, last changed on 10/25/2022 - 23:44
Elijah McClain (1996–2019) was a massage therapist in Aurora who was walking down the street when approached and killed by Aurora Police and Aurora Fire Rescue officers on August 24, 2019. The death of McClain, a young Black man whom his family described as “exceedingly gentle,” was immediately...

Eliza Pickrell Routt

Added by yongli on 01/15/2020 - 16:09, last changed on 09/11/2020 - 17:24
Eliza Pickrell Routt (1839–1907) was the first First Lady of the territory and later state of Colorado in 1875–79 and 1891–93. A strong supporter of women’s suffrage , she used her position as wife of Governor John Long Routt to advocate for expanded voting rights. When Colorado became the second...

Eliza Tupper Wilkes

Added by yongli on 08/08/2022 - 15:46, last changed on 08/08/2022 - 15:47
Eliza Tupper Wilkes (1844–1917) was a circuit-riding preacher who started eleven Universalist and Unitarian churches in the American West. The Unitarians and Universalists were two Protestant denominations that shared an interest in abolition, women’s rights, including suffrage . They were some of...

Elizabeth Byers

Added by yongli on 04/10/2020 - 15:37, last changed on 08/02/2022 - 11:46
Elizabeth “Libby” Minerva Sumner Byers (1834–1920) was a Colorado social reformer who arrived in Denver in the summer of 1859 and spent the next six decades establishing and supporting the city’s early charitable organizations, schools, and churches. Her focus on the poor led her to found...

Elizabeth Ensley

Added by yongli on 06/18/2021 - 15:56, last changed on 11/09/2022 - 03:41
Elizabeth Piper Ensley (1847–1919) was a political activist and reformer who worked throughout her life for gender and racial equality. The daughter and wife of formerly enslaved people, she came to Colorado in 1887 and soon helped lead the first successful campaign for statewide women’s suffrage...

Elizabeth Iliff Warren

Added by yongli on 06/10/2020 - 13:36, last changed on 08/11/2022 - 16:09
Elizabeth Fraser Iliff Warren (1844–1920) was one of Denver ’s most influential early citizens and was instrumental in founding the Iliff School of Theology . After arriving in Denver in 1869 as a twenty-four-year-old sewing-machine saleswoman, she married wealthy cattleman John Wesley Iliff . When...

Elizabeth Paepcke

Added by yongli on 10/28/2021 - 13:41, last changed on 10/25/2022 - 23:39
Elizabeth Paepcke (1902–94) is best known for working with her husband, Walter , to transform the former mining town of Aspen into a cultural hub after World War II . Trained in art and design, she was perhaps most influential in getting Walter interested in the modernist styles that shaped much of...

Elizabeth “Baby Doe” Tabor

Added by yongli on 06/21/2018 - 11:35, last changed on 12/27/2022 - 20:41
From her humble Midwestern origins to becoming the famous wife of a silver magnate to her demise as a madwoman living in a dilapidated cabin, Elizabeth McCourt “Baby Doe” Tabor (1854–1935) has become one of the most popular figures in Colorado history. Since her death, Baby Doe Tabor’s tumultuous...

Ellis Meredith

Added by yongli on 09/11/2015 - 15:43, last changed on 04/08/2020 - 10:55
Standing less than five feet tall and weighing around 100 pounds, Ellis Meredith was a tiny woman, but she took large strides to improve life for the women of Colorado. The daughter of a well-known suffragette and pioneer resident of Montana, Emily R. Meredith, Ellis understood the importance of...

Ellison Onizuka

Added by yongli on 01/31/2017 - 10:17, last changed on 08/16/2022 - 16:19
Ellison Onizuka (1946–86) was an astronaut for the US Space Shuttle program who earned degrees at the University of Colorado in Boulder before perishing in the 1986 Challenger shuttle disaster. Onizuka was Colorado’s highest-profile astronaut and is remembered today as an advocate for science...

Elvin R. Caldwell

Added by yongli on 05/02/2017 - 10:38, last changed on 10/26/2022 - 04:41
Elvin R. Caldwell Sr. (1919–2004) was one of the most significant African American policymakers in Colorado history. An accountant and businessman, Caldwell joined many community organizations before beginning his political career in 1950 in the Colorado House of Representatives. He later served on...

Emily Elizabeth Wilson

Added by yongli on 08/30/2016 - 12:37, last changed on 09/30/2022 - 01:43
Emily Elizabeth “Emmy” Wilson (1902–63) was a well-known Colorado business owner, entrepreneur, and socialite who ran the Glory Hole Tavern, a popular establishment in Central City . Wilson and her tavern played an integral role in reviving the ex- mining town’s social and cultural scene, and for...

Emily Griffith

Added by yongli on 07/07/2020 - 15:54, last changed on 10/18/2022 - 14:43
Emily Griffith (1868–1947) was a visionary educator in the field of adult, vocational, and alternative education. After working as a teacher and administrator in Denver , she started the Denver Opportunity School in 1916, premised on the idea that education should be accessible to everyone...

Emily Pérez

Added by yongli on 01/25/2019 - 12:58, last changed on 02/20/2019 - 14:48
Emily Pérez is the author of House of Sugar, House of Stone . She lives in Denver with her husband and sons. Poems Correction You are fifteen the first time it happens and you know the power of names and renaming from your study of the Bible, from learning about slavery, from that made-for-TV movie...

Emma Florence Langdon

Added by yongli on 10/11/2021 - 14:01, last changed on 10/12/2021 - 10:52
Emma Florence Langdon (1875–1937) was a linotype operator, historian, and labor leader celebrated for her courageous defense of the freedom of the press during the Colorado Labor Wars . When National Guardsmen arrested five prounion employees of the Victor Record , Langdon outraced the military to...

Enos Mills

Added by yongli on 10/06/2016 - 16:21, last changed on 05/26/2023 - 00:35
As a boy and as a man, Enos Mills (1870–1922) lived a remarkable life. His bond with nature and wildlife inspired him to overcome personal hardship and become a successful speaker, author, naturalist, businessman, and driving force behind the creation of Rocky Mountain Natio n al Park . Today,...

Estella Bergere Leopold

Added by yongli on 09/16/2015 - 14:59, last changed on 10/31/2019 - 11:41
Dr. Estella Leopold is a world-renowned paleobotanist who helped spearhead the 1969 fight to save Florissant Fossil Beds in Florissant, Colorado. She was the recipient of several awards during her career, including Conservationist of the Year (1969) from the Colorado Wildlife Federation, the Keep...

Fannie Mae Duncan

Added by yongli on 01/16/2020 - 16:05, last changed on 11/09/2022 - 08:42
Fannie Mae Duncan (1918–2005) was an entrepreneur and an activist for racial equality at a time of segregation in Colorado Springs . From 1947 to 1975, she owned and operated a series of businesses including the Cotton Club, the city’s first racially integrated nightclub, which hosted jazz greats...

Fluted Points

Added by yongli on 12/29/2015 - 12:38, last changed on 11/27/2022 - 08:59
Fluted projectile points represent the earliest North American stone tool technology, although they comprise a small portion of the overall stone technology observed in the New World. These easily recognized spear points represent one form of technology used by the earliest human inhabitants of...

Folsom People

Added by yongli on 06/22/2016 - 14:59, last changed on 04/25/2023 - 03:39
Folsom groups, also called Folsom peoples or Folsom culture , occupied all of Colorado between about 13,000 and 12,000 years ago. They were not the first people in these areas, although they might have been the first in some newly unglaciated portions of the high Rockies. Nevertheless, Folsom...

Frances Klock

Added by yongli on 09/14/2020 - 16:41, last changed on 11/12/2022 - 09:51
Frances S. Klock (1844–1908) was one of the first three women—along with Clara Cressingham and Carrie Clyde Holly —to serve as a state legislator in the United States. The three ran for office in 1894, one year after women in Colorado achieved the right to vote . In addition to serving as a member...

Frank E. Edbrooke

Added by yongli on 05/18/2022 - 13:16, last changed on 11/12/2022 - 10:01
Frank E. Edbrooke (1841–1921), Colorado’s best-known and most-celebrated architect, designed more than seventy buildings, including many now-landmarked structures that helped define Denver ’s built environment. He gave the city its first fine commercial buildings while also designing institutional...

Frank P. Marugg

Added by yongli on 08/31/2016 - 11:28, last changed on 11/07/2019 - 12:26
Frank Marugg (1887–1973) was an inventor who developed the “Denver Boot,” a device that immobilizes a vehicle for ticketing purposes. Despite a lifetime of pursuits in various other industries, the boot remains the most notable achievement of Marugg’s professional career. Still, his life story...

Fremont Culture

Added by yongli on 05/03/2016 - 15:31, last changed on 12/28/2017 - 13:41
Although it is on the eastern fringe of the area occupied by a people known to archaeology as the Fremont, Colorado is nevertheless important in the Fremont story, since clues to their origins and end are found there. Additionally, the presence of Fremont farmers had a profound influence on the...

Gary Hart

Added by yongli on 09/13/2017 - 15:13, last changed on 10/05/2018 - 01:07
Gary Hart (1936 –) is a former US Senator from Colorado, serving from 1975 to 1987, and two-time presidential hopeful who became embroiled in one of the first modern political sex scandals. The so-called “Monkey Business” scandal set the tone for future media coverage of politicians’ personal lives...

Gene Cervi

Added by yongli on 03/30/2017 - 13:54, last changed on 12/29/2017 - 08:08
Gene Cervi (1906–70) was an influential Denver newspaperman, publisher, and politician who published one of the first business weeklies in the western United States. Known for his probing insights, razor wit, and short temper, Cervi’s journalism and political activism shaped Denver’s economic and...

George Bent

Added by yongli on 08/11/2016 - 16:23, last changed on 11/12/2022 - 08:48
George Bent (1843–1918) was a half-white, half-Native American soldier who fought in multiple battles for the Confederacy during the Civil War and for the Cheyenne people in various wars of the late nineteenth century. His life reflects the shifts in alliances and the balance of power in Colorado...

Gertrude Hill Berger Cuthbert

Added by yongli on 06/16/2021 - 08:45, last changed on 06/29/2021 - 12:43
Gertrude Hill Berger Cuthbert (1869–1944) was a Denver socialite and philanthropist. Born into a prominent family, she inherited drive and ambition from her successful parents and established a legacy for herself in politics, suffrage , and local charitable organizations. She was regarded as one of...

Ghost Dance

Added by yongli on 12/29/2015 - 12:16, last changed on 11/12/2022 - 09:50
Ghost Dances are key ceremonies within a broader Indigenous religious movement that developed in the late nineteenth century in response to the brutal conquest of Native American nations by the US government and white settlers. By that time, most federally recognized tribes in Colorado lived on...

Glenn E. Morris

Added by yongli on 06/19/2018 - 12:53, last changed on 11/01/2022 - 12:43
One of the most highly accomplished athletes in Colorado history, Glenn E. Morris (1912–1974) was raised in the small rural town of Simla in southeastern Colorado. Morris was a standout in high school and college football and track. But his greatest athletic achievement was winning the gold medal...

Gray Goose Airways

Added by yongli on 08/31/2016 - 13:31, last changed on 08/25/2017 - 20:47
Denver’s history is full of innovation and success associated with the emergence of air travel, but perhaps just as many ventures failed. Though Gray Goose Airways was ultimately unsuccessful, founder Jonathan Edward Caldwell was doggedly persistent in its development and displayed an unwavering...

Gustaf Nordenskiöld and the Mesa Verde Region

Added by yongli on 08/20/2015 - 09:34, last changed on 04/03/2021 - 08:31
In 1891 the young Swedish scientist Gustaf Nordenskiöld (1868–95) arrived in Colorado, seeking both a cure for his tuberculosis and a look at the wonders of the West. His experiences over the next two years set in motion a series of events that would ultimately lead to the passage of the first...

Hannah Marie Wormington

Added by yongli on 11/19/2015 - 16:19, last changed on 11/20/2022 - 22:12
As a pioneering woman in a field dominated by men, Hannah Marie Wormington (1914–94) carved a scholarly niche for herself on the frontiers of American archaeology. She was a larger-than-life figure whose impact went far beyond the dozens of publications she produced to include mentorship for many...

Harry Buckwalter

Added by yongli on 05/06/2016 - 14:14, last changed on 12/28/2017 - 13:41
Photojournalist, radio reporter, and film producer Harry Buckwalter (1867–1930) is considered Colorado’s first photojournalist. He was also one of the great technological innovators of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American West, known for his advances in X-ray photography, early...

Harry Tuft

Added by yongli on 03/31/2017 - 14:51, last changed on 10/08/2019 - 12:40
Harry Tuft (1935–) is a Denver businessman, music promoter, educator, and proprietor of the long-standing Denver Folklore Center . As one of Denver’s enterprising musicians in the 1960s and 1970s, Tuft brought the genre of folk music and its culture to Denver and was responsible for some of Red...

Helen G. Bonfils

Added by yongli on 09/14/2020 - 16:28, last changed on 10/18/2022 - 13:43
Helen Gilmer Bonfils (1889–1972) was a well-known Colorado actress, businesswoman, and philanthropist. She is best known as manager of The Denver Post and for her contributions to the theater in Colorado through her time as an actress, producer, and later benefactress of the Helen G. Bonfils...

Helen Hunt Jackson

Added by yongli on 01/07/2019 - 15:41, last changed on 08/28/2020 - 01:07
Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–85) was an accomplished poet, author, and activist in the nineteenth century. Many of Jackson’s written works, notably A Century of Dishonor (1881) and Ramona (1884) , spurred progress toward recompense for the mistreatment of the Native American peoples by the US...

Helen Ring Robinson

Added by yongli on 01/15/2020 - 16:19, last changed on 08/26/2022 - 07:38
Helen Ring Robinson (c. 1860–1923) was the first woman elected to the Colorado State Senate in 1912 and the second woman elected to any state senate in the nation. In her role as senator during the Progressive Era , she was a passionate advocate for social reform that supported women, education,...

Helen Thorpe

Added by yongli on 01/26/2021 - 15:43, last changed on 11/01/2022 - 21:41
Helen Thorpe (1965–) is a Denver -based journalist and former first lady of Colorado. After spending the 1990s writing for the New York Observer, New Yorker, and Texas Monthly, she met and married Denver brewery owner John Hickenlooper just before he launched his political career. She served...

Henrietta “Nettie” Bromwell

Added by yongli on 09/21/2016 - 14:13, last changed on 11/02/2022 - 06:40
Henrietta “Nettie” Bromwell (1859–1946) was a prominent artist and author active in Denver ’s social scene during the early to mid-1900s. In addition to her artistic success, she was a Denver socialite. Today, Bromwell’s legacy is her writings and artwork, especially landscape paintings. ...

Henry Browne Blackwell

Added by yongli on 09/14/2020 - 13:42, last changed on 02/09/2023 - 15:42
Henry Blackwell (1825–1909) worked with his wife, Lucy Stone , to pave the way for women’s suffrage . Blackwell advocated for equal rights at the local, state, and national levels throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. He worked to create nationwide change, but his contributions to...

Henry Teller

Added by yongli on 08/12/2016 - 14:09, last changed on 11/02/2022 - 05:48
Henry Moore Teller (1830–1914) was a successful Colorado businessman, lawyer, and politician. His business and legal interests, which included mining and helping to organize the Colorado Central Railroad , were surpassed only by his political achievements. Teller served five full terms as US...

Herbert Bayer

Added by yongli on 10/11/2021 - 17:28, last changed on 10/11/2021 - 17:28
Herbert Bayer (1900–85) was an artist, architect, and designer best known in Colorado for his work in Aspen during the decades after World War II . Born in Austria and trained at the Bauhaus, Bayer brought to the United States a modernist belief in simple, stripped-down design, evident in...

Horace Tabor

Added by yongli on 08/20/2015 - 13:32, last changed on 11/02/2022 - 13:54
Horace “Silver King” Tabor (1830–99) rose from a smalltime prospector to one of the wealthiest men in Colorado because of his luck in Leadville ’s silver mines . He became tabloid fodder through his romantic liaisons with Baby Doe Tabor and his fall from power when the United States changed to the...

Impact of Disease on Native Americans

Added by yongli on 05/16/2017 - 11:12, last changed on 11/20/2022 - 22:20
Newly introduced diseases originating in Europe, Africa, and Asia swept what is now Colorado in the aftermath of Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage. While sparse historical and archaeological records make the effects of the earliest epidemics hard to determine, evidence is better for the eighteenth...

Industrial Workers of the World

Added by yongli on 06/28/2021 - 15:31, last changed on 06/29/2021 - 07:05
The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was founded in Chicago in 1905 as an explicitly anarchist-socialist alternative to the major labor unions of the time, which the IWW’s leaders deemed too conservative. In the following decades, the organization suffered from government suppression on both...

J. Quigg Newton

Added by yongli on 01/30/2017 - 16:28, last changed on 05/17/2023 - 10:38
James Quigg Newton, Jr. (1911–2003) was a distinguished lawyer, politician, and philanthropist who served as mayor of Denver (1947–55), president of the University of Colorado (CU; 1956–63), and the head of several national charitable foundations. As mayor, Newton modernized Denver’s city...

Jack Bradley

Added by yongli on 02/08/2021 - 16:51, last changed on 02/09/2021 - 13:36
Jack Bradley (1919–2000) was a violinist who became one of the first Black members of a major professional orchestra in the United States as well as the first Black member of the Denver Symphony Orchestra when he played with the group from 1946 to 1949. Bradley came up through the Denver Symphony’s...

Jack Dempsey

Added by yongli on 10/28/2021 - 14:03, last changed on 03/30/2023 - 10:43
William Harrison “Jack” Dempsey (1895–1983) was the US heavyweight boxing champion from 1919 to 1926 and a major American sporting icon of the twentieth century. Nicknamed “The Manassa Mauler” after his Colorado hometown, Dempsey was so popular that he helped remake sports into mass spectator...

Jane Woodhouse McLaughlin

Added by yongli on 06/28/2021 - 17:06, last changed on 01/25/2023 - 19:39
Jane Woodhouse McLaughlin (1914–2004) moved Colorado toward a more rights-based society for individuals with mental illness. As an assistant city attorney for Denver , first president of the Colorado Association for Mental Health, and a Democratic state representative, McLaughlin helped reform...

Jared Polis

Added by yongli on 06/09/2020 - 15:27, last changed on 11/02/2022 - 08:41
Jared Schutz Polis (1975– ) is the forty-third governor of Colorado , elected in 2018. A member of the Democratic Party , Polis formerly represented Colorado’s Second Congressional District and served on the State Board of Education . Polis is a progressive and the state’s first openly...

Jared Smith

Added by yongli on 01/27/2019 - 17:03, last changed on 02/03/2020 - 01:07
Jared Smith is the author of thirteen volumes of poetry. His work has appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies here and abroad. He is Poetry Editor of Turtle Island Quarterly (e-zine,) and has worked on the editorial staff of The New York Quarterly, Home Planet News , and The...

Jeff Campbell

Added by yongli on 02/11/2022 - 10:02, last changed on 10/25/2022 - 23:44
Jeff Campbell (1970–) is a Denver rapper, playwright, performance artist, and activist. Born in Alabama and raised along the Front Range , Campbell worked for a hip-hop label in California before returning to the Mile High City in the early 1990s and joining hip-hop group Kut-N-Kru. The group was a...

Jesse Nusbaum

Added by yongli on 04/27/2017 - 12:35, last changed on 12/19/2019 - 01:07
Jesse Nusbaum (1887–1975) was an early National Park Service (NPS) employee, historian, archaeologist, restoration specialist, and author active in Colorado and New Mexico in the early 1900s. As superintendent of Mesa Verde National Park , he imbued the fledgling National Park Service with a new...

Jessy Randall

Added by yongli on 01/25/2019 - 13:29, last changed on 11/25/2019 - 01:07
Jessy Randall lives in Colorado Springs. Her poems, stories, and other things have appeared in Asimov’s , McSweeney’s , and Poetry . She is the author of several books, including, most recently, Suicide Hotline Hold Music (Red Hen Press, 2016) a collection of poems and comics. Her...

Jewish Colony at Cotopaxi

Added by yongli on 10/06/2016 - 16:43, last changed on 11/07/2019 - 12:28
In 1882 a group of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe settled at the Cotopaxi Colony. The colony was the result of persistent efforts by several prominent American Jews and Jewish organizations to offer a better life for those fleeing the Pale of Settlement in the western region of Imperial...

Joe Neguse

Added by yongli on 07/06/2020 - 14:54, last changed on 10/25/2022 - 07:42
Joseph “Joe” D. Neguse (1984–) is a politician who represents Colorado’s Second Congressional District , which includes Boulder , Fort Collins , and most of the northern Front Range . A member of the Democratic Party , Neguse is the first African American elected to Congress from Colorado. He...

John C. Frémont

Added by yongli on 08/03/2016 - 15:52, last changed on 11/12/2022 - 18:47
John Charles Frémont (1813–90) was an American explorer and cartographer for the US Topographical Engineers who crossed Colorado on various expeditions. Between 1842 and 1853, Frémont led five western expeditions with numerous objectives. He was also involved in the Mexican-American War (1846–48)...

John Elway

Added by yongli on 01/15/2020 - 11:21, last changed on 11/02/2022 - 15:45
John Elway (1960–) is a former National Football League quarterback and general manager of the Denver Broncos . Elway won two Super Bowls as a Broncos player (1997 and 1998) and a third (2015) as the team’s general manager. As perhaps the most popular and most accomplished player in Broncos history...

John Evans

Added by yongli on 01/16/2020 - 15:22, last changed on 11/15/2022 - 09:39
John Evans (1814–97) served as second governor of Colorado Territory , from 1862 to 1865. His role in precipitating the massacre of peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians at Sand Creek in November 1864 forced him to resign. A doctor and Methodist minister who helped found Northwestern University in...

John Hickenlooper

Added by yongli on 06/09/2020 - 17:15, last changed on 11/02/2022 - 08:47
John Wright Hickenlooper II (1952– ) is a Colorado businessman and politician who served as mayor of Denver from 2003 to 2011 and forty-third governor of the state from 2011 to 2019. In 2020 Hickenlooper was elected to the US Senate. In 1988 he founded Wynkoop Brewing Company , Denver’s first...

John L. Routt

Added by yongli on 01/15/2020 - 16:41, last changed on 11/12/2022 - 18:45
John Long Routt (1826–1907) was Colorado’s last territorial governor and first state governor. A popular politician, he was elected to two separate, two-year terms as governor and is remembered for his leadership in bringing Colorado to statehood . He supported the cause of women’s suffrage in...

John R. Smith

Added by yongli on 07/06/2020 - 16:17, last changed on 07/07/2020 - 14:56
John R. Smith (1860–1927) was Colorado’s chief state prohibition officer during the years 1923–25. He successfully rooted out black-market alcohol crime but received harsh public criticism for his often-unconstitutional methods. He brought his friends on “booze” raids and did not shy away from...

John W. Gunnison

Added by yongli on 08/02/2016 - 16:26, last changed on 11/02/2022 - 05:48
John Williams Gunnison (1812–53) was a nineteenth-century US Army officer and explorer. In 1853 he was charged with finding a railroad route across the Rocky Mountains , and while carrying out his mission he explored the Western Slope of Colorado. His expedition moved on to Utah, where members of...

John Wesley Iliff

Added by yongli on 10/11/2021 - 14:22, last changed on 10/11/2021 - 14:22
If there is a name in Colorado history that is synonymous with cattle and ranching, it is John Wesley Iliff (1831–78). At the time of his death, Iliff owned approximately 35,000 head of cattle and thousands of acres stretching from northeast Colorado to Wyoming. His method of ranching forever...

John Williams

Added by yongli on 06/16/2021 - 12:40, last changed on 06/16/2021 - 12:40
John Edward Williams (1922–94) was a novelist and professor at the University of Denver, where he founded Denver Quarterly and helped build the school’s creative writing program. He is best known for his three major novels: Butcher’s Crossing (1960), a revisionist Western set partly in Colorado...

Joseph Hutchison

Added by yongli on 12/12/2018 - 13:31, last changed on 02/13/2019 - 12:24
Joseph Hutchison, Poet Laureate of Colorado (2014–2019), is the award-winning author of seventeen poetry collections, including The World As Is: New & Selected Poems, 1972-2015; The Satire Lounge; Marked Men; Thread of the Real ; and Bed of Coals . He has co-edited two poetry anthologies—the...

Josephine Meeker

Added by yongli on 03/13/2020 - 14:12, last changed on 11/12/2022 - 10:08
Josephine Meeker (1857–82) was the daughter of Nathan Meeker , the Indian agent who oversaw the White River Indian Agency during the Meeker Incident , a Ute uprising in 1879. After the revolt, Utes took Josephine, her mother, another woman, and her two children captive for nearly a month. Following...

Josephine Roche

Added by yongli on 03/31/2017 - 14:56, last changed on 11/09/2022 - 17:42
Josephine Aspinwall Roche (1886–1976) was a Colorado industrialist, labor advocate, and politician known for her role in reforming the Colorado coal industry in the 1930s. The daughter of a wealthy coal baron, Roche improved miners’ working conditions and pay when she took over the Rocky Mountain...

Juan Antonio María de Rivera

Added by yongli on 03/01/2016 - 15:44, last changed on 05/15/2020 - 01:07
Juan Antonio María de Rivera (1738–?) was a Spaniard and the first Euro-American to intensively explore the territory that eventually became the state of Colorado. In 1765 he made two trips into western Colorado from New Mexico, traveling as far as the Gunnison River in Delta County . Along the way...

Juan J. Morales

Added by yongli on 01/24/2019 - 14:35, last changed on 10/29/2019 - 10:45
Juan J. Morales was born in the United States to an Ecuadorian mother and a Puerto Rican father. He is the author of three poetry collections, including Friday and the Year That Followed (Fairweather Books, 2006), The Siren World (Fruita, CO: Lithic Press, 2015), and The Handyman's Guide to End...

Jules Jacques Benois Benedict

Added by yongli on 05/18/2022 - 13:19, last changed on 05/18/2022 - 13:19
Jacques Benedict (1879–1948), one of Colorado’s best-known and most-flamboyant architects, designed some of Colorado’s grandest Beaux Arts city homes and rustic mountain residences, as well as notable churches, libraries, schools, a town hall, shelters in Denver’s Mountain Parks , and a few...

Julia Greeley

Added by yongli on 06/19/2018 - 13:23, last changed on 11/02/2022 - 05:48
Julia Greeley (c. 1840–1918) was born into slavery in Missouri. Around 1880 she moved to Denver and became a Catholic. Despite being poor herself, Greeley spent the rest of her life doing good deeds for the impoverished. In 2016 the Catholic Church opened the Cause for Sainthood to determine...

Juliana Aragón Fatula

Added by yongli on 12/11/2018 - 16:03, last changed on 04/26/2020 - 01:07
Juliana Aragón Fatula, a southern Colorado native and a member of the Sandra Cisneros’ Macondo Foundation, won the High Plains Book Festival Poetry Award 2016 for her second book, Red Canyon Falling on Churches . Her first book, Crazy Chicana in Catholic City , published by Conundrum...

Julie Penrose

Added by yongli on 08/21/2015 - 12:35, last changed on 10/19/2022 - 07:40
Julie Villiers Lewis McMillan Penrose (1870–1956) was one of the primary benefactors of Colorado Springs institutions in the interwar years. Her husband, multimillionaire Spencer (“Speck”) Penrose , profited from Cripple Creek gold and Utah copper in the early twentieth century. He used his wealth...

Justina Ford

Added by yongli on 01/18/2017 - 15:12, last changed on 02/02/2023 - 05:36
Justina L. Ford (1871–1952) was a medical pioneer and Denver ’s first licensed African American female doctor. Ford is best known for her obstetrics and pediatric work in Denver’s Five Points community. Patients knew Dr. Ford as “the Baby Doctor,” and it is estimated that she delivered over 7,000...

Kate Ferretti

Added by yongli on 10/25/2021 - 15:03, last changed on 11/01/2021 - 08:27
Henrietta “Kate” Malnati Ferretti (1891–1987) was an early twentieth-century entrepreneur who established a successful millinery business in Denver . A first-generation Italian American, Ferretti founded her business in Denver’s Little Italy and catered to some of the city’s most elite clientele...

Katharine Grafton Patterson

Added by yongli on 10/11/2021 - 15:58, last changed on 10/11/2021 - 15:58
Katharine Grafton Patterson (1839–1902) came to Colorado in 1872 with her husband, Thomas Patterson , and soon established herself as an influential clubwoman, suffragist, and philanthropist. Devoutly religious, Patterson dedicated the majority of her life to the service of others. She was a...

Ken Buck

Added by yongli on 07/08/2020 - 15:44, last changed on 10/26/2022 - 09:44
Ken Buck (1959–) is an attorney and politician from Weld County . He represents Colorado’s Fourth Congressional District in the US House of Representatives, an office he has held since 2015, winning reelection in 2016 and 2018. Since March 2019, Buck has served as head of Colorado’s Republican...

Kent Haruf

Added by yongli on 01/26/2021 - 16:38, last changed on 12/21/2022 - 03:42
Kent Haruf (1943–2014) was a novelist best known for Plainsong (1999). Set in the fictional town of Holt in northeast Colorado, Plainsong and Haruf’s other novels examine the lives of ordinary people on the high plains . Often praised for his unadorned style and humane outlook, Haruf is generally...

Kevin Duggan

Added by yongli on 01/02/2020 - 11:30, last changed on 01/03/2020 - 09:11
Kevin Duggan is a senior reporter and columnist for the Fort Collins Coloradoan. He is a Colorado native and grew up in the Denver area. He graduated from Regis High School in 1974. He attended the University of Colorado in Boulder and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English with emphasis in...

Kierstin Bridger

Added by admin on 09/25/2018 - 10:27, last changed on 10/26/2022 - 22:41
Kierstin Bridger is a Colorado writer who divides her time between Ridgway and Telluride . She is author of two books: Women Writing the West's 2017 WILLA Award-winning Demimonde (Lithic Press) and All Ember (Urban Farmhouse Press). She is a winner of the Mark Fischer Poetry Prize , the...

Kit Carson

Added by yongli on 03/14/2016 - 14:16, last changed on 11/12/2022 - 10:01
The life of Christopher “Kit” Carson (1809–68) represents a broad sweep of Western American history in the early-to-mid nineteenth century. Carson was a Rocky Mountain fur trapper , a guide and scout for the US Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, rancher, Indian agent in New Mexico and Colorado...

Koshare Scouts

Added by yongli on 11/16/2015 - 12:55, last changed on 10/23/2019 - 01:07
The Koshare Scouts is primarily made up of Boy Scout troop 2230 in La Junta , Otero County , that has studied Native American lore and performed tribal rituals since the 1930s. This imitative white group is part of a long American history of “playing Indian.” In the twentieth century, groups like...

Ku Klux Klan in Colorado

Added by yongli on 08/20/2019 - 14:18, last changed on 11/02/2022 - 07:47
The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is an American white supremacist and terrorist organization whose history includes two distinct waves of activity. The first KKK was created in Tennessee in 1866 and was not active in Colorado. A chapter was not established in the Centennial State until 1915, after the group’...

Kyle Laws

Added by yongli on 12/13/2018 - 09:45, last changed on 10/29/2019 - 10:47
Kyle Laws is based out of the Arts Alliance Studios Community in Pueblo . Her collections include This Town: Poems of Correspondence with Jared Smith (Lafayette, CO: Liquid Light Press, 2017); So Bright to Blind (Five Oaks Press, 2015); Wildwood (Lummox Press, 2014); My Visions Are As Real As Your...

Lafayette Head

Added by yongli on 08/21/2015 - 16:08, last changed on 03/30/2023 - 23:41
Major Lafayette Head (1825–97) was an Indian agent to the Ute tribe for nine years after serving in the Mexican American War. In 1877, he became the first lieutenant governor of Colorado. He was influential in the early development of towns across the San Luis Valley . Born in Hunter...

Larry Walker

Added by yongli on 08/08/2022 - 15:30, last changed on 08/08/2022 - 15:30
Larry Walker (1966–) is a retired professional baseball player who played right field for the Montreal Expos, Colorado Rockies , and St. Louis Cardinals. In 2020 he became the first Colorado Rocky to be elected to the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame. After debuting in 1989 with Montreal, Walker...

Lena Stoiber

Added by yongli on 10/28/2021 - 11:36, last changed on 08/26/2022 - 19:52
Lena Alma Allen Webster Stoiber Rood Ellis (1862–1935) was the “Bonanza Queen” of Silverton . Known as “Captain Jack” or “Jack Pants” to the miners who worked for her, she was a tough boss who worked in conjunction with her second husband, Edward G. Stoiber, at the Silver Lake Mine. He managed the...

Lewis B. France

Added by yongli on 09/21/2016 - 13:55, last changed on 08/08/2021 - 10:04
Lewis B. France (1833–1907) was a nationally renowned nature writer in the late 1800s and early 1900s, best known for his works on fly-fishing. France represented an emerging trend in the American West—the melding of natural resource utilization, tourism, and boosterism to create the industry known...

Lisa Zimmerman

Added by yongli on 01/27/2019 - 14:28, last changed on 02/13/2019 - 13:32
Lisa Zimmerman’s poems and short stories have appeared in Cave Wall, Poet Lore, Florida Review, and many other magazines. Her poetry collections include The Light at the Edge of Everything (Tallahassee, FL: Anhinga Press, 2008) and The Hours I Keep (Mint Hill, NC: Main Street Rag, 2016). She...

Louis Vasquez

Added by yongli on 10/06/2016 - 16:37, last changed on 09/30/2022 - 07:41
Louis Vasquez (1798–1868) was a fur trapper and mountain man active in Colorado during the 1820s and 1830s. He reportedly constructed Fort Convenience and a hunter’s cabin that predated the majority of settlement in the region. One of the Colorado fur trade ’s more successful trappers, Vasquez is...

Louise Bethel Sneed Hill

Added by yongli on 01/14/2020 - 15:23, last changed on 02/08/2023 - 20:38
Louise Bethel Sneed Hill (1862–1955) was a socialite, philanthropist, and creator of Denver ’s Sacred Thirty-Six, the first internationally recognized elite society in the city. Hill helped Denver attain international attention as a refined city and desirable destination. Her life reflected the...

Lucile Berkeley Buchanan

Added by yongli on 08/09/2022 - 12:47, last changed on 08/09/2022 - 12:49
Lucile Berkeley Buchanan (1884–1989) was a gifted teacher and the first African American to graduate from the State Normal School of Colorado (today, the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley ) in 1905. Following graduation, she occasionally worked as a substitute teacher; race-based...

Lucy Stone

Added by yongli on 03/12/2020 - 15:12, last changed on 10/18/2022 - 08:51
Lucy Stone (1818–93) was an orator, abolitionist, and suffragette who founded the American Woman Suffrage Association. In 1877 she campaigned for a women’s suffrage referendum in Colorado alongside fellow suffrage champion Susan B. Anthony . Although the 1877 measure was defeated, Stone and Anthony...

Lyulph Ogilvy

Added by yongli on 01/15/2020 - 15:33, last changed on 11/12/2022 - 18:52
Lyulph Gilchrist Stanley Ogilvy (1861–1947) was an influential irrigator, rancher, journalist, and soldier in early Colorado. An immigrant son of Scottish aristocrats, Ogilvy helped build and maintain irrigation ditches in Weld County and later became a successful agricultural journalist in Denver...

Mallory Pugh

Added by yongli on 01/15/2020 - 11:32, last changed on 10/25/2022 - 21:39
Mallory Diane Pugh (1998–) is an American professional soccer player for the United States Women’s National Team (USWNT) and the Washington Spirit of the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL). One of the most accomplished Colorado soccer players in history, she also became the youngest American...

Margaret Coel

Added by yongli on 01/08/2019 - 14:36, last changed on 10/25/2022 - 12:49
Margaret Coel (1937– ) is a New York Times best-selling author of both fiction and nonfiction. She is best known for her Wind River Mystery Series but has also published five nonfiction books, a book of short stories, and two additional mystery novels that take place in Denver . She is...

Margaret W. Campbell

Added by yongli on 03/13/2020 - 16:06, last changed on 03/02/2023 - 03:39
Margaret West Norton Campbell (1827–1908) was an ardent advocate of women’s rights and one of the nation’s most sought-after suffrage speakers. In Colorado she was instrumental in the 1877 campaign for women’s suffrage . The measure failed, but her work paved the way for suffrage to be enacted in...

Mari Sandoz

Added by yongli on 08/12/2016 - 15:07, last changed on 02/21/2023 - 06:07
Mari Sandoz (1896–1966) was a popular author in the early- to mid-twentieth century whose works of both fiction and non-fiction focused on life in the Rocky Mountain West. Sandoz’s work represents some of the most widely read literature concerning the American West and has done much to influence...

Mark Udall

Added by yongli on 06/09/2020 - 17:18, last changed on 10/26/2022 - 06:42
Mark Emery Udall (1950–) is a former US representative (1999–2008) and senator (2009–14) from Colorado. A member of the Democratic Party , Udall comes from a prominent political family in the American West. His father was former senator Morris Udall; his uncle was three-term congressman Stewart Lee...

Mary Cronin

Added by yongli on 09/21/2016 - 14:04, last changed on 11/02/2022 - 13:54
Mary Cronin (1893–1982) was an active member of the Colorado Mountain Club (CMC) and the first woman to summit each of Colorado’s Fourteeners . Today, Cronin is best known for her accomplishments in the backcountry, and the CMC she helped develop continues its tradition of guiding people into the...

Mary Hauck Elitch Long

Added by yongli on 06/18/2021 - 14:53, last changed on 06/18/2021 - 14:53
Mary Hauck Elitch Long (1856–1936) was the first woman in the world to own and operate a zoo, located at Elitch Gardens in Denver . She and her husband, John Elitch, Jr. , opened the attraction in 1890, and after his death in 1891, Mary continued on as a pioneering businesswoman and entrepreneur...

Mary Lord Pease Carr

Added by yongli on 12/01/2021 - 14:58, last changed on 11/12/2022 - 09:56
Mary Carr (1838–1933) was a dedicated philanthropist, cofounder of Longmont ’s first public school and one of its first teachers, charter member of the National Woman’s Relief Corps , and an activist for women’s suffrage and equality. She helped shape modern Colorado by aiding in the establishment...

Mary Mullarkey

Added by yongli on 08/09/2022 - 15:45, last changed on 10/18/2022 - 06:48
Mary Mullarkey (1943–2021) was a Colorado lawyer and public servant whose career was marked by firsts. She was the first woman to serve as Colorado solicitor general, the first to serve as chief legal counsel to a Colorado governor, and the first to become chief justice of the Colorado Supreme...

Matt Carpenter

Added by yongli on 06/10/2020 - 13:30, last changed on 04/06/2023 - 19:41
Matthew Carpenter (1964–) is a mountain runner best known for his performances at high-altitude races such as the Pikes Peak Ascent and Marathon , where he set the course record in 1993, and the Leadville Trail 100 Run , where he set the record in 2005. In the 1990s, he traveled the world as a...

Maurice Rose

Added by yongli on 05/18/2022 - 10:06, last changed on 05/18/2022 - 10:06
Maurice Rose (1899–1945) served in the US Army during World War I and II . Raised and educated in Denver , Rose attained the rank of major general, making him the highest-ranking person of Jewish heritage in the US Army. He was known for his aggressive leadership style, directing his units from the...

Max Goldberg

Added by yongli on 08/15/2016 - 16:08, last changed on 11/04/2019 - 11:41
Max Goldberg (1911–72) was a pioneer of early television broadcasting and a television personality in the 1950s and 1960s. Goldberg worked to promote the growth of television in Denver , and his weekly talk show On the Spot set the stage for television’s early success in the local market. Today,...

Michael Hancock

Added by yongli on 07/08/2020 - 15:56, last changed on 05/17/2023 - 10:38
Michael Hancock (1969– ) is the forty-fifth mayor of Denver , elected in 2011. Currently in his third term, Hancock succeeded fellow Democrat John Hickenlooper and interim mayor Guillermo Vidal. Widely seen as a pro-growth mayor, Hancock is credited with boosting the city’s economy by investing in...

Michael Henry

Added by yongli on 12/11/2018 - 14:20, last changed on 02/13/2019 - 13:33
Michael Henry is co-founder and Executive Director of Lighthouse Writers Workshop, the largest independent literary arts center in the Rocky Mountain west. He is the author of three books of poetry and has received fellowships from the Colorado Council on the Arts and Platte Forum. He was recently...

Mike Coffman

Added by yongli on 06/09/2020 - 17:51, last changed on 12/07/2022 - 17:41
Mike Coffman (1955–) is a Colorado politician who is currently the mayor of Aurora , his childhood hometown. From 2009 to 2019, Coffman served in Congress, representing Colorado’s Sixth Congressional District , which includes Aurora. He also previously served as the state’s treasurer and secretary...

Minnie Reynolds Scalabrino

Added by yongli on 05/16/2016 - 11:48, last changed on 08/16/2022 - 10:42
Minnie Reynolds Scalabrino (1865–1936) was a newspaperwoman, candidate for political office, and lifelong suffragette in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. She played an important role in the women’s suffrage movement in Colorado and worked tirelessly in other states to secure the...

Mistanta (Owl Woman)

Added by yongli on 11/16/2015 - 13:44, last changed on 12/28/2017 - 13:41
Mistanta (Mis-stan-stur, ca. 1810–47), also known as Owl Woman, was the Southern Cheyenne wife of the American trader William Bent . Born about 1810, she is credited with helping maintain good relations between the white settlers and the Native Americans of the Colorado plains . As the eldest...

Nathan Meeker

Added by yongli on 01/15/2020 - 14:44, last changed on 11/12/2022 - 18:41
Nathan Cook Meeker (1817–1879) was an agriculturalist, newspaper editor, and Indian agent. He founded the Union Colony at present-day Greeley as well as the city’s oldest newspaper, the Greeley Tribune . In 1878 he was appointed Indian agent of the White River Agency in northwest Colorado. He was...

Nathaniel P. Hill

Added by yongli on 01/15/2020 - 16:02, last changed on 11/02/2022 - 06:40
Nathaniel Peter Hill (1832–1900) was a mining entrepreneur and US senator from Colorado. In the 1860s, Hill, an accomplished chemist and metallurgist, bought mining interests in Black Hawk and developed the first successful smelter in Colorado, revolutionizing the mining industry in the fledgling...

Neil Gorsuch

Added by yongli on 09/14/2020 - 16:22, last changed on 02/27/2021 - 01:07
Neil Gorsuch (1967–) is an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Born in D enver to a prominent legal and political family, he moved as a teenager to Washington, DC, where his mother, Anne Gorsuch , served in the administration of President Ronald Reagan. His education and...

Nisei Sisters

Added by yongli on 09/29/2016 - 14:39, last changed on 08/16/2022 - 16:27
Three of the Shitara sisters, known in the contemporary press as “the Nisei Sisters,” were prisoners at the Amache concentration camp who helped two Germans escape from a nearby prisoner-of-war camp. During their trial, the third treason trial of World War II, the sisters’ race, class, and sex all...

Niwot (Left Hand)

Added by yongli on 03/04/2016 - 09:41, last changed on 02/09/2023 - 08:40
Niwot (c. 1820s–64), known to English speakers as "Left Hand," was a prominent Arapaho leader in the mid-1800s. The tumultuous period in Colorado history followed the 1858 discovery of gold near present-day Denver , on the traditional lands of the Arapaho and Cheyenne . Diplomat, negotiator,...

Non-Partisan Equal Suffrage Association

Added by yongli on 01/16/2020 - 16:19, last changed on 09/30/2022 - 01:43
The Non-Partisan Equal Suffrage Association was the main organization in Colorado working toward granting women the right to vote . The association and its precursors were influential for more than thirty years, from Colorado’s failed suffrage referendum in 1877 to its successful suffrage...

Northern Ute People (Uintah and Ouray Reservation)

Added by yongli on 08/20/2015 - 15:20, last changed on 10/26/2022 - 01:43
Although the Ute Indian Tribe (Uintah and Ouray reservation) is the official designation of the tribe today, its members are frequently referred to as Northern Utes to distinguish them from the Southern Ute Indian Tribe and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe . The Ute Indian Tribe’s reservation is located...

Oliver Toussaint Jackson

Added by yongli on 09/29/2016 - 14:47, last changed on 11/11/2019 - 10:24
Oliver Toussaint “O. T.” Jackson (1862–1948) was an entrepreneur and prominent member of black communities in Denver and Boulder during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1910 he founded Dearfield , an-all black agricultural settlement some twenty-five miles southeast of Greeley...

Otto Mears

Added by yongli on 01/16/2020 - 16:13, last changed on 11/12/2022 - 10:10
Otto Mears (1840–1931) was a Colorado businessman who played a key role in the removal of the Nuche ( Ute ) people and is best known for building more than 450 miles of toll roads and railroads on the Utes’ former lands in the southern and southwestern parts of the state. Called the “Pathfinder of...

Ouray

Added by yongli on 02/03/2017 - 11:37, last changed on 11/02/2022 - 06:40
Ouray (1833–80), whose name means “Arrow” in the Ute language, was a leader of the Tabeguache (Uncompahgre) band of Ute Indians in Colorado during the late nineteenth century. Even though Ouray had no ultimate authority over Colorado’s Utes and spoke little English, the US government assigned him...

Painter Family

Added by yongli on 01/23/2017 - 11:00, last changed on 11/02/2022 - 05:48
The Painter was a prosperous ranching family in Colorado during the early 1900s. Even though ranching went into universal decline following a brutal winter in 1886, the Painter family remained successful due to equal parts luck, persistence, and scientific management of their cattle herds. They...

Paleo-Indian Period

Added by yongli on 05/02/2016 - 14:08, last changed on 11/20/2022 - 21:57
The Paleo-Indian period is the era from the end of the Pleistocene (the last Ice Age) to about 9,000 years ago (7000 BC), during which the first people migrated to North and South America. This period is seen through a glass darkly: Paleo-Indian sites are few and scattered, and the material from...

Pamela Uschuk

Added by yongli on 01/27/2019 - 15:34, last changed on 06/23/2020 - 01:07
Political activist and wilderness advocate Pam Uschuk has howled out six books of poems, including Crazy Love (2010 American Book Award) and her most recent collection, Blood Flower (2015). Translated into more than a dozen languages, her work appears in over 300 journals and...

Pat Stryker

Added by yongli on 07/06/2020 - 15:29, last changed on 04/21/2023 - 00:38
Patricia “Pat” Stryker (1956–) is a Colorado-based businesswoman and philanthropist. With an estimated net worth of $2.6 billion, Stryker has donated more than $195 million to charity in her lifetime, mostly through the Bohemian Foundation , her Fort Collins –based nonprofit. In addition to charity...

Patricia (Pat) Schroeder

Added by yongli on 12/01/2021 - 15:10, last changed on 12/06/2021 - 09:47
Patricia (Pat) Scott Schroeder (1940–) represented Colorado’s First Congressional District —the city of Denver —in the US House of Representatives from 1973 to 1997. The first female US Representative elected in Colorado, she championed liberal issues, including opposing the Vietnam War and...

Pattiann Rogers

Added by yongli on 01/27/2019 - 16:25, last changed on 02/03/2020 - 01:07
Pattiann Rogers has published fourteen books of poetry, two prose books, and a book in collaboration with the Colorado artist Joellyn Duesberry. Rogers is the recipient of two NEA Grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Award. Among other awards, her poems have received five Pushcart...

Patty Limerick

Added by yongli on 10/16/2019 - 09:31, last changed on 10/21/2019 - 11:16
Patty Limerick is the Faculty Director and Chair of the Board of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she is also a professor of environmental studies and history. In addition, Patty served as the Colorado State Historian and served on the National Endowment...

Peter Anderson

Added by admin on 09/25/2018 - 16:28, last changed on 11/05/2020 - 01:07
Peter Anderson’s most recent books include Heading Home: Field Notes (Conundrum Press, 2017), a collection of flash prose and prose poems exploring rural life and the modern day eccentricities of the American West; Going Down Grand: Poems from the Canyon (Lithic Press, 2015), an...

Peter Heller

Added by yongli on 07/09/2020 - 11:07, last changed on 10/26/2022 - 10:41
Peter Heller (1959–) is a novelist and travel writer based in Denver . Best known for his 2012 debut novel, The Dog Stars , he is also the author of three other best-selling novels and four nonfiction books. His writing powerfully evokes the natural landscape of Colorado and the West, where he has...

Philip Anschutz

Added by yongli on 01/21/2021 - 16:28, last changed on 03/22/2023 - 16:41
Philip Anschutz (1939–) is a Denver -based businessman and Colorado’s richest person, with a wealth estimated at more than $10 billion. He has garnered comparisons to Gilded Age financier J. P. Morgan for his success across a wide range of businesses—oil and gas, railroads , telecommunications,...

Plains Woodland

Added by yongli on 02/25/2016 - 14:13, last changed on 08/11/2022 - 07:16
The Plains Woodland period covers approximately a thousand years of Colorado prehistory across a large portion of the state. Plains Woodland describes the groups of people occupying much of the western plains from present-day Nebraska and Kansas, west of the Missouri River, to the eastern plains of...

Preston Porter, Jr.

Added by yongli on 05/18/2022 - 11:00, last changed on 10/25/2022 - 23:44
On November 16, 1900, a white mob in Limon chained Preston Porter, Jr., a fifteen-year-old Black railroad worker, to a vertical steel rail, slung a rope around his neck, and burned him alive. Porter was accused of raping and murdering a local white girl; he had previously confessed to the crime...

Pueblo of Santa Ana–Tamaya

Added by yongli on 06/27/2016 - 15:56, last changed on 10/19/2022 - 10:43
The Pueblo of Santa Ana is one of the seven Keres-speaking Pueblos that currently inhabit the state of New Mexico. The homes of the current inhabitants’ ancestors can be found in what is now Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado. Archaeological data and pueblo oral history suggest that...

Ralph Carr

Added by yongli on 10/06/2016 - 16:46, last changed on 10/18/2022 - 06:48
Ralph Lawrence Carr (1887–1950) was governor of Colorado from 1939 to 1943. Carr is remembered for his outspoken criticism of the federal government’s internment of Japanese Americans during World War II , even though a regional concentration camp, Amache , operated inside his state’s borders. His...

Rev. John O. Ferris

Added by yongli on 09/21/2016 - 14:49, last changed on 01/31/2021 - 16:45
The Reverend John O. Ferris (d. 1942) was a spiritual leader in Trinidad during the Coalfield War and Ludlow Massacre of 1914. Ferris was one of the few people permitted to search the ruined Ludlow tent city for the bodies of slain miners, women, and children, and his account of the days after the...

Rev. Thornton R. Sampson

Added by yongli on 09/21/2016 - 14:53, last changed on 04/17/2020 - 08:56
The Reverend Thornton R. Sampson (1852–1915) was an important religious figure and educator in Texas who disappeared on a hike in the Rocky Mountains in 1915. Sampson’s disappearance received national coverage. The massive search effort launched by his wife was one of the largest ever, though it...

Richard Wetherill

Added by yongli on 10/22/2015 - 10:53, last changed on 08/16/2022 - 16:30
Richard Wetherill (1858–1910) was a nineteenth-century rancher and explorer who lived in southwest Colorado. Although he is often credited with "discovering" some of the most significant Ancestral Pueblo archaeological sites in the Four Corners area, the sites had already been known to various...

Rick Trujillo

Added by yongli on 06/10/2020 - 13:33, last changed on 10/18/2022 - 13:43
Richard “Rick” Trujillo (1948–) is a Colorado mountain runner best known for starting the Imogene Pass Run in 1974 and winning the Pikes Peak Ascent and Marathon { six times in the 1970s, long before trail and mountain running became popular activities. Later in his career, Trujillo helped scout...

Rita Brady Kiefer

Added by yongli on 12/12/2018 - 16:26, last changed on 02/13/2019 - 13:41
Rita Brady Kiefer has published two full-length poetry collections— Nesting Doll, finalist for the Colorado Book Award, and Crossing Borders —and three chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Face to Face (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Hunger...

Robert Cooperman

Added by admin on 09/26/2018 - 08:24, last changed on 02/13/2019 - 10:47
Robert Cooperman is the author of many collections of poetry, most recently, City Hat Frame Factory . In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains won the Colorado Book Award for Poetry. Poems At the Denver Botanical Gardens Beth and I have come early to view the on-loan Calders: whimsical bolted metal...

Robert S. Roeschlaub

Added by yongli on 05/16/2016 - 15:04, last changed on 11/26/2022 - 11:42
Robert Roeschlaub (1843–1923) was Colorado’s first officially licensed architect, working in Denver during the early settlement era. Roeschlaub played a central role in defining the city’s building code, which has affected the development of Denver’s built environment through the present. Today,...

Robert W. Speer

Added by yongli on 01/16/2020 - 16:00, last changed on 11/02/2022 - 07:47
Robert Walter Speer (1855–1918) served as mayor of Denver for two terms, from 1904 to 1912, then was reelected in 1916, serving another two years as mayor before passing away in 1918 during the Spanish influenza pandemic. Speer is remembered primarily for implementing the City Beautiful plan that...

Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales

Added by yongli on 01/17/2017 - 12:33, last changed on 12/06/2022 - 23:41
Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales (1928–2005) was a prominent figure in the Chicano Movement in Denver in the 1960s and 1970s. He also had ties to the greater Civil Rights Movement. In addition to his activist work, Gonzales had multifaceted careers in boxing, politics, and poetry, and left a lasting legacy...

Roger Wolcott Toll

Added by yongli on 08/03/2016 - 11:11, last changed on 10/31/2019 - 11:37
Roger Wolcott Toll (1883–1936) was a mountaineer, author, and early employee of the National Park Service (NPS), serving as superintendent of Mt. Rainier, Rocky Mountain , and Yellowstone National Parks before his untimely death in a car accident in 1936. Toll’s career is an example of effective...

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Added by yongli on 01/28/2019 - 09:44, last changed on 01/03/2020 - 01:07
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer lives in Placerville on the banks of the San Miguel River. She served as San Miguel County ’s first poet laureate and as Western Slope Poet Laureate. She teaches poetry for twelve-step recovery programs, hospice, mindfulness retreats, women’s retreats, teachers...

Ruth Underhill

Added by yongli on 05/16/2016 - 15:40, last changed on 09/30/2022 - 11:44
Ruth Underhill (1883–1984) was a prominent anthropologist in the mid- to-late twentieth century, and one of the first female anthropologists to reach the stature regularly enjoyed by male colleagues. As a professor at the University of Denver later in life, Underhill published dozens of works on...

Saco Rienk DeBoer

Added by yongli on 05/16/2016 - 15:54, last changed on 10/19/2022 - 01:40
Saco Rienk DeBoer (1883–1974) was a prolific Denver -based landscape architect and city planner in the early twentieth century. DeBoer played a significant role in the development of Denver’s built environment, particularly the city’s parks and the establishment of its zoning codes. His work...

Sadie Likens

Added by yongli on 09/21/2016 - 15:16, last changed on 11/12/2022 - 10:09
Sadie Likens (c. 1840–1920) was a prominent officer of the court in Denver ’s formative period, served as Colorado’s first prison matron, and was also known for her charitable work on behalf of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and other women’s organizations. Before losing her job as prison...

Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini

Added by yongli on 01/21/2021 - 16:17, last changed on 10/25/2022 - 17:40
Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850–1917) was an Italian Catholic nun who came to the United States in 1889 as a missionary tasked with ministering to the country’s growing population of Italian immigrants . Over the next three decades, during her missionary work, Cabrini established sixty-seven...

Samuel Elbert

Added by Nick Johnson on 11/19/2022 - 08:59, last changed on 12/03/2022 - 10:42
Samuel Hitt Elbert (1833–99) was the sixth governor of the Colorado Territory (1873–74) and was elected as one of the first justices on the Colorado Supreme Court after statehood in 1876. The son-in-law of territorial governor and businessman John Evans , Elbert held multiple positions in Colorado...

Samuel Gerish Colley

Added by yongli on 10/21/2015 - 15:28, last changed on 01/26/2023 - 10:43
Holding political offices in Wisconsin and Colorado throughout his life, Samuel G. Colley (1807–90) is best known for serving as Indian Agent for the Upper Arkansas Indian Agency from 1860 to 1865. He was responsible for managing the Cheyenne and Arapaho prior to and during the Colorado War (1863–...

Sapiah

Added by yongli on 03/01/2016 - 16:41, last changed on 11/02/2022 - 05:48
Sapiah (1840–1936) was the preeminent chief of the Muache band of the Southern Ute Tribe beginning around 1870. He was born to a Muache father and an Apache mother, perhaps in the vicinity of Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico. The origins of his English name, "Buckskin Charley," are obscure, and later in...

Sarah Platt Decker

Added by yongli on 03/13/2020 - 14:18, last changed on 11/02/2022 - 08:47
Sarah Platt Decker (1855–1912) was a beloved leader of women, known nationwide for her advocacy of women’s suffrage and social reform. Her influence was instrumental in the 1893 vote that gave Colorado women equal suffrage. She later became the founder and first president of the Woman’s Club of...

Saul Halyve

Added by yongli on 08/12/2016 - 16:20, last changed on 08/18/2022 - 16:17
Saul Halyve was a Hopi distance-running champion raised near Grand Junction who exploded onto the athletic scene in the early 1900s. Although Halyve would never compete in an Olympics due to a multitude of factors, his accomplishments match and possibly surpass those of other famous Native American...

Silvia Pettem

Added by yongli on 11/27/2018 - 15:11, last changed on 10/03/2019 - 12:30
Silvia Pettem is a longtime Boulder County resident who has been poking around historic sites for at least forty years. Her research and writing has evolved into two niches –– Boulder County history and missing persons/unidentified remains –– and she has authored more than a dozen books including...

Sopris Phase

Added by yongli on 11/03/2015 - 10:35, last changed on 11/20/2022 - 22:17
Archaeologists use the term Sopris phase to refer to unique Native American sites found only on the Purgatoire River west of Trinidad, Colorado, and on the upper tributaries of the Canadian River west of Raton and Cimarron, New Mexico (Fig. 1). Sopris people were the only indigenous farmers who...

Spencer Penrose

Added by yongli on 08/21/2015 - 14:19, last changed on 10/26/2022 - 17:45
Spencer Penrose (1865–1939) was a businessman, miner , entrepreneur, philanthropist, and investor who worked primarily in the Pikes Peak region. Penrose had assets in Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and Kansas, including mines and real estate properties. He is most notable for owning the C.O.D. mine in...

Stan Kroenke

Added by yongli on 02/16/2021 - 13:48, last changed on 11/01/2022 - 23:42
Stan Kroenke (1947–) is a Missouri-based billionaire whose extensive portfolio of real estate and sports franchises includes Denver ’s Nuggets (basketball), Avalanche (hockey), Rapids (soccer), and Mammoth (lacrosse), as well as Ball Arena , Dick ’ s Sporting Goods Park , and the Altitude Sports...

Stephen H. Long

Added by yongli on 03/12/2020 - 14:17, last changed on 11/02/2022 - 12:43
Stephen Harriman Long (1784–1864) was an American military explorer best known for leading an expedition into present-day Colorado in 1820. On his expedition map, he famously labeled the arid Great Plains as a “ Great American Desert ” where agriculture could not thrive. His description was...

Susan B. Anthony

Added by yongli on 01/15/2020 - 11:35, last changed on 11/02/2022 - 02:40
Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) was a well-known civil rights activist and prominent leader of the women’s suffrage movement . She made her first visit to Colorado in 1877 to advocate for women’s suffrage before an upcoming referendum. Although she spent little time in Colorado, Susan B. Anthony...

Teenokuhu (Friday)

Added by yongli on 06/09/2020 - 11:44, last changed on 11/27/2022 - 08:46
Teenokuhu (ca. 1822–81), known to English speakers as “Friday” or “Friday Fitzpatrick,” was a nineteenth-century Northern Arapaho leader. As a boy, Teenokuhu (Arapaho for “sits meekly”) was separated from his band and adopted by Thomas Fitzpatrick, a white trapper who took him to St. Louis. After...

Temple Grandin

Added by yongli on 05/17/2022 - 16:32, last changed on 12/28/2022 - 13:40
Temple Grandin (1947–) is a renowned advocate and expert in two very different fields: animal welfare and autism. A prolific author on both subjects, Grandin has taught at Colorado State University (CSU) since 1990. Her focus on animal welfare, particularly cattle, changed the way animals are...

Temple Hoyne Buell

Added by yongli on 05/18/2022 - 13:24, last changed on 04/25/2023 - 07:31
Temple Hoyne Buell (1895–1990) was a leading Colorado architect, developer, socialite, and philanthropist from 1923 to 1990. By 1940, he headed the largest architectural firm in the Rocky Mountain region. A tall, handsome bon vivant noted for his wit, charm, and steady stock of anecdotes, Buell...

The Archaic Period in Colorado

Added by yongli on 08/21/2015 - 14:07, last changed on 10/03/2022 - 02:46
The Archaic period is an era in the human history of Colorado dating from ca. 6500 BC–AD 200. It is one of the three prehistoric periods used by archaeologists to characterize broad cultural changes that occurred throughout the Americas. It was preceded by the Paleo-Indian period (ca. 11,500–7000...

The Formative Period in Prehistory

Added by yongli on 11/03/2015 - 10:09, last changed on 08/11/2022 - 07:21
The Formative is the last of several periods in a sequence of cultural development that traces the overall progression from stone-tool-using, hunter- gatherer societies to fully developed agricultural societies. The process that occurred is analogous to the Old World’s “Neolithic Revolution.” It is...

The Gateway Tradition

Added by yongli on 11/13/2015 - 09:32, last changed on 11/04/2019 - 12:06
The Gateway tradition refers to a set of archaeological sites within western Montrose and San Miguel Counties, Colorado, that appear similar to Pueblo II –period (AD 900–1150) sites to the south in the core homeland of the Ancestral Puebloans (Figs. 1 and 2). The sites in Montrose and San Miguel...

The Reynolds Gang

Added by yongli on 04/27/2017 - 15:12, last changed on 11/12/2022 - 08:25
The Reynolds Gang, formally members of Company A of Wells’s Battalion, Third Texas Cavalry, was a group of about fifteen Confederate cavalrymen who conducted raids and robberies in the South Park area near the end of the Civil War . Initially considered to be a group of Confederate sympathizers,...

The Tenth Mountain Division

Added by yongli on 11/16/2015 - 13:11, last changed on 10/03/2022 - 01:45
The Tenth Mountain Division (hereafter, the Tenth), was US Army division created in 1941. The Allies took notice of a Finnish division of soldiers on skis that defeated and embarrassed a larger and better-equipped invading Soviet force during the Winter War of 1939. Inspired by Finland’s success,...

Theodosia Ammons

Added by yongli on 01/15/2020 - 12:42, last changed on 10/25/2022 - 21:39
Theodosia Ammons (1862–1907) worked extensively throughout her life to advance the cause of women’s suffrage . She became president of the Colorado Equal Suffrage Association and was cofounder of the department of domestic economy at Colorado Agricultural College (now Colorado State University ),...

Thomas E. Ketchum

Added by yongli on 09/21/2016 - 15:46, last changed on 03/26/2018 - 14:10
Thomas “Black Jack” Ketchum was a famous outlaw in the late 1800s who, along with his brother Sam and their gang, was responsible for a number of high-profile robberies and murders. While his criminal career achieved great notoriety, it was Ketchum’s eventual hanging, which was badly botched by New...

Thomas Noel

Added by yongli on 06/01/2020 - 14:50, last changed on 06/19/2020 - 15:36
Thomas Jacob "Dr. Colorado" Noel, a Professor of History and Director of Public History, Preservation & Colorado Studies at the University of Colorado Denver, is the author of more than fifty books. He was a longtime Sunday columnist for the Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post and appears...

Tree-Ring Dating

Added by yongli on 02/25/2016 - 13:19, last changed on 12/19/2019 - 01:07
Tree-ring dating is formally known as “dendrochronology” (literally, the study of tree time). It is the science of assigning calendar-year dates to the growth rings of trees, and Colorado figures prominently in its development and application in archaeology and other disciplines. Uses...

Upper Republican and Itskari Cultures

Added by yongli on 10/22/2015 - 15:03, last changed on 10/23/2019 - 11:12
Upper Republican is a name archaeologists use for a prehistoric cultural group that occupied the upper Republican River area in northeast Colorado, western Nebraska, northern Kansas, and southeast Wyoming from AD 1100–1300. As a phase of a larger cultural tradition, the Central Plains tradition,...

Verner Zevola Reed

Added by yongli on 04/27/2017 - 12:46, last changed on 10/03/2022 - 04:43
Verner Zevola Reed (1863–1919) was one of Colorado’s most successful businessmen, playing a central role in the development of mining operations during the Cripple Creek Gold Rush and for the US oil industry. Early Life and Business Ventures Born in 1863 on an Ohio farm,...

Veronica Patterson

Added by yongli on 01/24/2019 - 13:54, last changed on 02/13/2019 - 13:46
Veronica Patterson’s most recent full-length poetry collection is Sudden White Fan (Cherry Grove Collections, 2018). Others include How to Make a Terrarium (Cleveland State University, 1987), Swan, What Shores? (NYU Press Poetry Prize, 2000), Thresh & Hold (Gell Poetry Prize, 2009), & it...

Walter Paepcke

Added by yongli on 11/16/2015 - 12:59, last changed on 10/26/2022 - 19:41
Walter P. Paepcke, a Chicago businessman, was pivotal in developing Aspen into a resort known for its exceptional skiing and as a hub for intellectuals, artists, politicians, and celebrities. Paepcke’s efforts have made Aspen stand out among Colorado’s many ski towns and resorts. Born...

Wayne Aspinall

Added by yongli on 08/01/2016 - 14:56, last changed on 08/18/2022 - 16:22
At the memorial service for long-time congressman Wayne Aspinall in 1983, Colorado Governor Richard Lamm said, “you can’t take a drink of water in Colorado without remembering Wayne Aspinall.” Wayne Norviel Aspinall (1896–1983) was born in Ohio and moved with his family to Palisade , Colorado, in...

Wayne Miller

Added by yongli on 01/23/2019 - 16:46, last changed on 02/13/2019 - 13:47
Wayne Miller is the author of four poetry collections, including Post- (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed, 2016), which won the Rilke Prize and the Colorado Book Award. He lives in Denver with his wife and two children and teaches at the University of Colorado Denver, where he edits the literary journal...

Wendy Videlock

Added by yongli on 01/27/2019 - 15:25, last changed on 01/14/2020 - 01:07
Wendy Videlock is a writer, visual artist, teacher, and a life-long student of the world. She lives on the Western Slope of Colorado in Palisade . Her books include Nevertheless (San Jose, CA: Able Muse Press, 2011) , Slingshots & Love Plums (San Jose, CA: Able Muse Press,...

Wilbur Steele

Added by yongli on 12/02/2021 - 11:03, last changed on 12/02/2021 - 11:03
Albert Wilbur Steele (1862–1925) was an early twentieth-century artist and editorial cartoonist for Denver newspapers. The first American cartoonist to appear daily in a newspaper, Steele drew front-page cartoons that appeared above the fold in The Denver Post for nearly thirty years. Celebrated by...

Willard Frank Libby

Added by yongli on 12/28/2015 - 12:30, last changed on 11/11/2020 - 01:07
Willard Frank “Bill” Libby (1908–80) was a native Coloradan who won the Nobel Prize for inventing the radiocarbon dating method. Radiocarbon dating is one of the most commonly used dating techniques by archaeologists and other scientists across the world. Willard Libby was born in Grand...

William A. Lang

Added by yongli on 05/18/2022 - 13:29, last changed on 11/12/2022 - 09:56
William A. Lang (1846–97), one of Colorado’s premier residential architects, practiced in Denver between 1887 and 1895, both individually and in the firm of Lang and Pugh. During that period, Lang designed some 250 buildings and made a name for himself as Denver’s top residential designer, notable...

William A.H. Loveland

Added by yongli on 01/15/2020 - 15:14, last changed on 11/02/2022 - 22:39
William Austin Hamilton Loveland (1826–94) was a leading businessman, railroad executive, and politician in early Colorado. A well-traveled man by early adulthood, Loveland arrived in Colorado during the Colorado Gold Rush . He played a critical role in the development of Golden , putting up the...

William Bent

Added by yongli on 12/29/2015 - 11:23, last changed on 11/12/2022 - 18:57
William Bent (1809–69) played a pivotal role in the early development of Colorado. He initially came to the area as a fur trapper but became a liaison between whites and Native Americans via his trading fort on the Arkansas River near present-day La Junta . The Santa Fé Trail was the strategic...

William Dudley Haywood

Added by yongli on 01/21/2021 - 15:32, last changed on 01/22/2021 - 10:07
William Dudley “Big Bill” Haywood (1869–1928), a labor activist in the late 1800s and early 1900s, was the most prominent leader of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), the largest union ever operating in Colorado and the Rocky Mountain states. Hardened by tragic and bleak experiences early in...

William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody

Added by yongli on 09/21/2016 - 16:06, last changed on 12/11/2022 - 09:42
William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody (1846–1917) was neither born in Colorado nor lived in the state. In death, however, he became one of its most famous residents. Cody’s first experience in Colorado came in 1859, when he was a thirteen-year-old participant in the Colorado Gold Rush . Like many other...

William Fisher

Added by Nick Johnson on 11/20/2022 - 09:46, last changed on 11/20/2022 - 09:46
William Ellsworth Fisher (1871–1937) headed one of the largest and most influential architectural firms in the Rocky Mountain region. Working most notably with his younger brother, Arthur Addison Fisher, he designed many elaborate houses for the wealthy, especially in Denver ’s Polo Club, Cheesman...

William Gilpin

Added by yongli on 01/15/2020 - 15:10, last changed on 11/12/2022 - 09:49
William Gilpin (1815–94) served as the first governor of Colorado Territory in 1861–62. A gifted speaker with a flair for the dramatic, Gilpin was a firm believer in Manifest Destiny and in Colorado’s importance to the young American West. As governor during the Civil War , Gilpin illegally raised...

William Gray Evans

Added by yongli on 05/18/2022 - 09:59, last changed on 11/12/2022 - 18:57
William Gray Evans (1855–1924) was a Denver businessman best known as the Denver Tramway Company president. The son of Territorial Governor John Evans , he was involved in many of Denver’s early foundational enterprises and played an integral role in constructing the Moffat Tunnel . During the...

William Henry Jackson

Added by yongli on 01/07/2019 - 15:52, last changed on 11/12/2022 - 10:11
William Henry Jackson (1843–1942) was one of the best-known photographers of the American West. He is renowned for his photographs of Colorado’s mountain scenery, many of which show now-famous landmarks such as Mount of the Holy Cross , Garden of the Gods , Mesa Verde , and Royal Gorge . His...

William Jackson Palmer

Added by yongli on 08/01/2016 - 13:33, last changed on 11/12/2022 - 08:43
William Jackson Palmer (1836–1909) was a military general, railroad tycoon, and founder of Colorado Springs . Though a Quaker from Delaware, Palmer fought for the Union Army during the Civil War . After the war, he moved west and became a civil engineer and philanthropist who played an integral...

William Larimer, Jr.

Added by yongli on 05/18/2016 - 15:35, last changed on 11/02/2022 - 05:48
General William Larimer, Jr. (1809–75), was a prominent nineteenth-century town promoter, prospector, and legislator in the Kansas and Colorado Territories. He is known for establishing the city of Denver . Larimer’s life serves as an example of the pitfalls of conducting business in the American...

William N. Byers

Added by yongli on 01/16/2020 - 15:27, last changed on 11/16/2022 - 08:40
William Newton Byers (1831–1903) founded the first newspaper in Colorado, the Rocky Mountain News (1859–2009) and was Denver ’s biggest booster during the city’s early days. Byers used his newspaper as a platform for his advocacy, as his knowledge of the territory allowed him to broker land deals...

William “Bat” Masterson

Added by yongli on 01/17/2017 - 13:06, last changed on 08/27/2022 - 07:46
William Barclay “Bat” Masterson (1853–1921) was a US marshal whose life and work in the American west during the mid-to-late 1800s granted him legendary status in the region’s folklore. In Colorado, where he spent several years during the 1880s, Masterson’s run-ins with the law and other important...

William “Cement Bill” Williams

Added by yongli on 08/15/2016 - 15:55, last changed on 02/12/2021 - 01:07
William “Cement Bill” Williams (1868–1945) was a prominent contractor, political agitator, and personality in Golden during the early 1900s. Williams’s tireless campaigning brought crucial road construction to Golden, much of which he built himself. Today, Williams’s legacy as a businessman and the...

Women During Prohibition

Added by yongli on 06/10/2020 - 13:27, last changed on 05/26/2023 - 03:39
Alcohol prohibition in Colorado (1916–33) disrupted social and gender relations in ways that would shape the state long after the law was repealed. Not only did women help enact the law, but they also helped enforce the law and even broke it, taking advantage of a new outlaw industry. Women...

Women in Early Colorado

Added by yongli on 05/06/2016 - 15:01, last changed on 02/22/2023 - 05:41
In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Colorado, women’s labor was often vital to a family’s economic survival. Historian Katherine Harris demonstrated in her study of Logan and Washington Counties that women’s earnings from butter, eggs, and the garden often provided much of a farm family’s...

Women's Suffrage Movement

Added by yongli on 05/06/2016 - 15:15, last changed on 02/22/2023 - 05:41
The women’s suffrage movement was a sociopolitical movement in the late nineteenth century that secured voting rights for Colorado women by state referendum on November 7, 1893. The movement’s success made Colorado the first state to enact women’s suffrage by popular referendum. Origins...

Zebulon Montgomery Pike

Added by admin on 08/14/2014 - 08:45, last changed on 10/18/2022 - 06:48
In 1806–7, Captain Zebulon Montgomery Pike (1779-1813) led a US Army expedition to the southwestern reaches of the Louisiana Purchase, including the area that is now Colorado. Along with Lewis and Clark’s famous journey to the Pacific in 1804–6, Pike’s was one of many Jeffersonian-era expeditions...
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