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Agnes W. Spring

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…

Albina Washburn

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,…

Alexander Cummings

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…

Alferd Packer

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…

Alice Hale Hill

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,…

Anna and Eugenia Kennicott

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…

Antonia Brico

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…

August Meyer

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…

Augusta Tabor

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…

Baron Walter von Richthofen

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…

Billy Fiske

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…

Bulkeley Wells

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,…

Burnham Hoyt

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…

Byron White

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…

Carrie Clyde Holly

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…

Colorado: An Overview

Colorado, “the Centennial State,” was the thirty-eighth state to enter the Union on August 1, 1876. Its diverse geography encompasses 104,094 square miles of the American West and includes swathes of the Great Plains, southern Rocky Mountains, and the…

Crawford Hill

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…

David Owen Tryba

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…

Delph E. Carpenter

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…

Eddie Eagan

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…

Eliza Tupper Wilkes

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…

Elizabeth Byers

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…

Elizabeth Iliff Warren

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…

Elizabeth Paepcke

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…

Emily Griffith

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…

Emma Florence Langdon

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…

Fort Uncompahgre

Fort Uncompahgre was constructed in 1828 by Antoine Robidoux, a trader based out of Mexican Santa Fé. The trading post was situated about two miles down from the confluence of the Gunnison and Uncompahgre Rivers near the present-day community of Delta in…

Frances Klock

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…

Frank E. Edbrooke

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…

George Bent

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…

Gertrude Hill Berger Cuthbert

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…

Godfrey’s Ranch

On January 14–15, 1865, immigrant Holon Godfrey found his family homestead in Colorado Territory under attack by about 100 Indigenous warriors engaged in a campaign of reprisal attacks after the Sand Creek Massacre of November 1864. The fierce battle at…

Gustaf Nordenskiöld and the Mesa Verde Region

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…

Helen G. Bonfils

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…

Helen Thorpe

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…

Henry Browne Blackwell

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…

Herbert Bayer

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…

Horace Tabor

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…

Jack Dempsey

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…

Jane Woodhouse McLaughlin

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…

Jewish Colony at Cotopaxi

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…

John C. Frémont

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…

John Wesley Iliff

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…

Josephine Meeker

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…

Juan Antonio María de Rivera

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…

Jules Jacques Benois Benedict

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…

Kate Ferretti

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…

Katharine Grafton Patterson

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…

Katherine Slaughterback (Rattlesnake Kate)

Katherine Slaughterback (1893–1969) was a dryland prairie homesteader on the Colorado plains. In 1925 she became known as Rattlesnake Kate after she  killed 140 rattlesnakes, allegedly in self-defense, in Weld County. Her story, which is likely an…

Kent Haruf

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…

Kit Carson

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,…

Los Piños Indian Agency

After the Treaty of 1868, the Los Piños Indian Agency became the center of governmental authority for the Uncompahgre Utes on the Ute Indian Reservation in western Colorado. While largely forgotten after its abandonment in 1881, the site of the second…

Lyulph Ogilvy

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…

Mary Hauck Elitch Long

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…

Mary Lord Pease Carr

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…

Mary Mullarkey

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…

Matt Carpenter

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…

Maurice Rose

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…

Neil Gorsuch

Neil Gorsuch (1967–) is an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Born in Denver 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…

Patricia (Pat) Schroeder

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,…

Philip Anschutz

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…

Rick Trujillo

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…

Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini

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…

Spencer Penrose

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…

Stan Kroenke

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…

Swedish National Sanatorium

The Swedish National Sanatorium in Denver was a tuberculosis treatment center active throughout the 1900s. As tuberculosis swept the nation, thousands of consumptives turned to the dry mountain air of Colorado to alleviate their symptoms, and sanatoriums…

Temple Hoyne Buell

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,…

United Mine Workers of America

The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) formed in 1890 to fight for better pay and working conditions for the nation’s coal miners. In Colorado the union was most active in the early twentieth century, with thousands of members joining strikes in the…

Western Federation of Miners

Founded in 1893, the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) was one of the largest and most active labor unions in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American West. The union was involved in some of the most important labor disputes in Colorado…

White River Ute Indian Agency

The White River Ute Agency at Meeker, Colorado was established at the same time as the first Los Piños Agency under provisions of the Treaty of 1868. The agency was intended to serve the White River Ute band as well as some of the other bands from…

Wilbur Steele

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…

William A. Lang

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…

William A.H. Loveland

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…

William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody

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…

William Gilpin

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…

William Gray Evans

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…

William H. Dickens

William Henry Dickens (c. 1842–1915) was a homesteader, farmer, and businessman in the St. Vrain valley. A prominent early citizen of Longmont, Dickens built the Dickens Opera House, established Farmers National Bank, and helped organize the Farmers…

William N. Byers

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…

Zebulon Montgomery Pike

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…