%1 http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/ en John Wesley Iliff http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/john-wesley-iliff <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">John Wesley Iliff</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> <span lang="" about="/users/yongli" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">yongli</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'time' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> <time datetime="2021-10-11T14:22:34-06:00" title="Monday, October 11, 2021 - 14:22" class="datetime">Mon, 10/11/2021 - 14:22</time> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'addtoany_standard' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * addtoany-standard--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * addtoany-standard--node.html.twig x addtoany-standard.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <span class="a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_32 addtoany_list" data-a2a-url="http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/john-wesley-iliff" data-a2a-title="John Wesley Iliff"><a class="a2a_dd addtoany_share" href="https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=http%3A%2F%2Fcoloradoencyclopedia.org%2Farticle%2Fjohn-wesley-iliff&amp;title=John%20Wesley%20Iliff"></a><a class="a2a_button_facebook"></a><a class="a2a_button_twitter"></a><a class="a2a_button_email"></a></span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item" id="id-body"><p>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 changed the American diet by making beef available at low cost for the average citizen.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Early Life</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>Iliff was born in Ohio on December 18, 1831, to wealthy Methodist parents who wanted their son (named for the founder of Methodism) to be a minister. They encouraged him to attend Ohio Wesleyan University, but school could not hold John’s interest. His father, Thomas Iliff, was a cattleman himself and instilled in his son an understanding of the complexities of raising large herds. Young Iliff believed he could use that knowledge to create his future in the West. In 1849 he asked his father for a small loan and left Ohio at the age of eighteen.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>In 1857 he opened his first store in Ohio City (now known as Princeton, Kansas), but two years later he heard rumors of gold strikes farther west and decided to head to <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/denver"><strong>Denver</strong></a>. Much like fellow Coloradan <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/charles-boettcher"><strong>Charles Boettcher</strong></a>, Iliff saw an opportunity to sell goods to miners instead of going to the mines himself. In 1859 he and two partners opened a dry goods store called the Commercial Emporium of the Pike’s Peak Gold Regions. The success of this store helped to finance Iliff’s next venture: cattle ranching.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Revolutionizing Western Ranching</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>On the road to Denver, Iliff noted the large herds of fat, happy <strong>buffalo</strong> that grazed on the <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/colorado%E2%80%99s-great-plains"><strong>plains</strong></a>. He wondered if he could be successful with cattle. He decided to experiment to see whether cattle would survive the long, harsh winters on prairie grasses alone. At first, he purchased cattle from immigrants headed west, but he soon combined his herd with Texas Longhorns that were driven across the state on the Goodnight-Loving Trail on their way to ranches in Wyoming and Idaho. The long grasses on the plains proved an ideal food source and the cows wintered well, selling for high prices in the spring.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Feeding his herds on the open range created an opportunity for large profits. As the US government forced the <strong>Cheyenne</strong> and <strong>Arapaho</strong> off their Colorado land, cattle could graze for free on thousands of acres. For a scant $10,000 investment, Iliff soon became the largest landowner in northeast Colorado, with approximately 15,500 acres. While grazing on the range was free, buying land secured Iliff the accompanying water rights along the <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/south-platte-river"><strong>South Platte River</strong></a>. Access to water meant everything on the arid Colorado plains. Within a few years, Iliff built nine different cattle camps with adobe shelters so the cows could live year-round. He soon sold cattle to Indigenous people, army posts like Fort Laramie, the city of Cheyenne, and railroad construction crews; the latter contract proved the most lucrative.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Railroad Contracts</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>As soon as the Union Pacific Railroad announced its plans to build the transcontinental railroad via Cheyenne and southern Wyoming, Iliff made plans to drive cattle to the area to feed construction crews. Iliff spent the late 1860s living in Cheyenne but returned to Colorado often. In 1869 former territorial governor <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/john-evans"><strong>John Evans</strong></a> awarded him the contracts to feed construction crews along the newly planned Denver Pacific Railroad connecting Denver to Cheyenne. Large profits from these railroad contracts helped Iliff expand his ranches that stretched between <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/greeley"><strong>Greeley</strong></a> and Julesburg.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Personal Life</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>Iliff was widely regarded as a simple, traditional cowboy. He believed that working alongside his men with his own hands helped him to better understand the cattle business. He often did so, even after he and his second wife moved to Denver. He forbade the use of alcohol in his camps and was known as a fair businessman. Although he had not fulfilled his parents’ wishes to become a minister himself, he wished there were more ministers in the area to help guide the colonists.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Iliff met Sarah Elizabeth Smith in 1863, and they married on January 11, 1864. Their son William Seward Iliff was born on October 20, 1865, but Sarah died in December. Iliff left his young son in the care of his in-laws and focused on building his cattle empire.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Iliff met <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/elizabeth-iliff-warren"><strong>Elizabeth Sarah Fraser</strong></a> in 1868 in Wyoming, and they married on March 3, 1871. At the time she met John, Elizabeth sold Singer sewing machines. The couple lived in Cheyenne until 1874, when they moved to a large mansion, known as Shaffenburg Place, in downtown Denver. The couple had two children, Louise on August 15, 1875, and John Wesley, Jr., on December 13, 1877. Iliff’s youngest son only outlived him by a year; he died on April 8, 1879.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Death</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>In December 1877, Iliff fell ill, and on February 9, 1878, he died of gallbladder complications. He left no will, and the courts awarded his wife Elizabeth stewardship of his land and finances, worth an estimated $10 million. This made her the wealthiest cattle magnate in the United States and one of the only women in that profession. Her sharp business acumen helped to grow Iliff’s business and wealth. She later sold the ranches and cattle, and the profits made her one of the wealthiest women in the state. Elizabeth and her second husband, Methodist bishop Henry Warren, would later make a large donation to establish the <strong>Iliff School of Theology</strong>, fulfilling John’s dream of educating ministers to serve in the West.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Legacy</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>The present <strong>cattle industry</strong> is composed of many individual ranchers and conglomerate ranchers that own and sell thousands of cattle to beef-processing facilities. These facilities then ship beef all over the country, making it a staple of the American diet. This practice originated in the late nineteenth century with magnates like Iliff. By the 1870s, Iliff was known internationally as the “Cattle King of Colorado” and boasted a herd of      35,000. He pioneered the practice of sheltering cattle on the plains and encouraged the use of new technologies that helped to make beef readily available to consumers. Today, raising cattle for beef on large ranches like Iliff’s is a multibillion-dollar industry in Colorado. </p>&#13; </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-author--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-author.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-author.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-author field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-author"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-author">Author</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-author"><a href="/author/campbell-alyse" hreflang="und">Campbell, Alyse</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-keyword--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-keyword.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-keyword.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-keyword field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-keyword"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-keyword">Keywords</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/john-iliff" hreflang="en">john iliff</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/john-iliff-biography" hreflang="en">john iliff biography</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/john-wesley-iliff" hreflang="en">John Wesley Iliff</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/cattle-ranching-colorado" hreflang="en">cattle ranching colorado</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/history-cattle-ranching-colorado" hreflang="en">history of cattle ranching colorado</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/weld-county" hreflang="en">weld county</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/greeley" hreflang="en">greeley</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/greeley-history" hreflang="en">greeley history</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/iliff-school-theology" hreflang="en">Iliff School of Theology</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * links--node.html.twig x links--inline.html.twig * links--node.html.twig * links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-references-html--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-references-html.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-references-html.html.twig * field--text-long.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-references-html field--type-text-long field--label-above" id="id-field-references-html"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-references-html">References</div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-references-html"><p>Carl Abbott, Stephen J. Leonard, and Tom Noel, <em>Colorado: A History of the Centennial State</em>, 4th ed. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2005).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Fay Abbott, <em>Famous Coloradans</em> (Paonia, CO: Mountaintop Books, 1990).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Phillip F. Anschutz, <em>Out Where the West Begins</em> (Denver: Cloud Camp Press, 2015).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Maurice Frink, <em>When Grass Was King: Contributions to the Western Range Cattle Industry Study </em>(Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1956).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>“<a href="https://www.coloradobusinesshalloffame.org/john-w-iliff.html">John W. Iliff</a><u>,</u>” Colorado Business Hall of Fame, n.d.</p>&#13; &#13; <p><a href="https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/97601620/john-wesley-iliff">“John Wesley Iliff Junior,”</a> Find A Grave, n.d.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Thomas J. Noel, <em>Riding High: Colorado Ranchers and 100 Years of the National Western Stock Show</em> (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2005).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Bill O’Neal, <em>Historic Ranches of the Old West</em> (Austin, TX: Eakin Press, 1997).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Carl Ubbelohde, Maxine Benson, and Duane A. Smith, <em>A Colorado History</em>, 9th ed. (Boulder, CO: Pruett Publishing, 2006).</p>&#13; </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-additional-information-htm--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-additional-information-htm.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-additional-information-htm.html.twig * field--text-long.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-additional-information-htm field--type-text-long field--label-above" id="id-field-additional-information-htm"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-additional-information-htm">Additional Information</div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-additional-information-htm"><p>Jeremy Rifkin, <em>Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture</em> (New York: Dutton Books, 1992).</p>&#13; </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> Mon, 11 Oct 2021 20:22:34 +0000 yongli 3607 at http://coloradoencyclopedia.org Beef Industry on the Colorado Plains http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/beef-industry-colorado-plains <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Beef Industry on the Colorado Plains</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> <span lang="" about="/users/yongli" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">yongli</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'time' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> <time datetime="2021-06-15T14:47:51-06:00" title="Tuesday, June 15, 2021 - 14:47" class="datetime">Tue, 06/15/2021 - 14:47</time> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'addtoany_standard' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * addtoany-standard--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * addtoany-standard--node.html.twig x addtoany-standard.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <span class="a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_32 addtoany_list" data-a2a-url="http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/beef-industry-colorado-plains" data-a2a-title="Beef Industry on the Colorado Plains"><a class="a2a_dd addtoany_share" href="https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=http%3A%2F%2Fcoloradoencyclopedia.org%2Farticle%2Fbeef-industry-colorado-plains&amp;title=Beef%20Industry%20on%20the%20Colorado%20Plains"></a><a class="a2a_button_facebook"></a><a class="a2a_button_twitter"></a><a class="a2a_button_email"></a></span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item" id="id-body"><p>Colorado’s beef industry traces its roots back to the latter half of the nineteenth century, when cowboys drove cattle across the plains in some of the most iconic imagery of the American West. However, the state’s modern beef industry did not begin until after <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/colorado-world-war-i"><strong>World War I</strong></a>, when stock raisers began adopting feedlots and other industrial methods. By the 1960s, these changes had given way to a beef-processing industry centered on the <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/colorado%E2%80%99s-great-plains"><strong>Great Plains</strong></a> of northeast Colorado, a historically important ranching region. Today, beef and beef processing represent a multi-billion-dollar industry in Colorado.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Background</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>After the <a href="/article/civil-war-colorado"><strong>American</strong> <strong>Civil War</strong></a>, the Chisolm, Western, and Lonestar cattle trails brought cattle from Kansas into eastern Colorado. The violent removal of Indigenous people during the 1860s allowed large ranchers such as <strong>John Wesley Iliff</strong> to graze their cattle on the wide-open prairies. This practice had its price, however. By the mid-1880s, the prairie grasses were denuded by large herds and harsh droughts. The brutal winter of 1886–87, known as the <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/great-die"><strong>Great Die Up</strong></a>, killed off thousands of cattle on the prairie; almost a quarter of the large herds was lost. This event started a shift that led to the enclosure of cattle ranches and to feedlots after World War I.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>The 1916 Grazing Homestead Act and the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act helped to privatize and support cattle-ranching interests, some would claim at the expense of farmers. Technical advancements such as refrigerated rail cars also opened markets for Western ranchers to sell their beef from coast to coast. Improvements in irrigation, such as the 1947 invention of the center-pivot irrigation system, allowed year-round food production for herds, which supported more stationary ranches. The increased availability and lower price of beef in turn changed the American diet as well as the beef-processing industry. Consumption of beef increased exponentially in the next twenty years. In Nebraska, Kansas, and Colorado, production of dressed beef increased threefold between 1950 and 1987.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>New Facilities</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>Between 1950 and 1964, the number of cattle feedlots increased from approximately 1,400 to almost 20,000 in Colorado. Cattle feeders in northeast Colorado were dissatisfied with the cattle markets in Denver and inconvenienced by the need to ship their cattle 120 miles for less-than-desirable prices. To better support local feeders, beef-processing facilities opened in <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/greeley"><strong>Greeley</strong></a><strong>, </strong><a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/fort-morgan"><strong>Fort Morgan</strong></a> and <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/sterling-0"><strong>Sterling</strong></a>.</p>&#13; &#13; <h3><em>Greeley</em></h3>&#13; &#13; <p>In Greeley the Monfort family is synonymous with beef. Between the end of World War I and the 1970s, company founder Warren Monfort built a vast beef empire that began with large feedlots and ended with an innovative, streamlined meatpacking process. The wealthy rancher partnered with and eventually bought out Capital Packing to open a large packaging facility for which his herds were the primary supplier. In 1969 Capital Packing processed more than 300,000 cattle and grossed more than $150 million.</p>&#13; &#13; <h3><em>Sterling</em></h3>&#13; &#13; <p>Sterling’s beef-processing facility, known as Sterling Colorado Beef Company, opened in January 1966. Operated by four cattle-feeding firms, it promised a $20 million market for local cattle and an estimated $450,000 payroll. By April it processed approximately 500 head of cattle a day with a workforce of more than 100. Ten years later, the Sterling Colorado Beef Company reorganized and became a producers’ cooperative. The goal was to support a better market for the large cattle feeders in northeastern Colorado. The co-op consisted of 185 feeders and six outside investors, providing a much-needed infusion of capital for the facility.</p>&#13; &#13; <h3><em>Fort Morgan </em></h3>&#13; &#13; <p>The Fort Morgan Dressed Beef facility opened in 1966. Construction took longer than initially planned, but the $650,000 facility began operation in May. The factory was equipped to process approximately 2,400 cattle per week. Before it opened, management offered tours for the public, and large crowds arrived to view the completed facility. Management promised that sixty employees would eventually work at the facility.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>However, plagued by financial difficulties, the factory went bankrupt within a year and was sold to American Beef Packers. This Iowa-based company turned the factory around and funded a half-million-dollar expansion project.  By 1968 the factory could process 1,500 cattle per day and employed 200 locals on a payroll of more than $2 million. The factory committed to serving local feeders, and more than 50 percent of the cattle it processed were from ranches within eighty miles.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>An economic downturn in the 1970s presented challenges for the beef industry, and the factory suffered. Beef consumption in the United States began a long, slow decline. Disputes with the city of Fort Morgan over odor and sewage also caused problems. Following a truck strike and an attempt to reorganize the company, American Beef Packers declared bankruptcy in 1975.  </p>&#13; &#13; <p>In 1976 the factory reopened under the Morgan County Beef Company, a local consortium of feeders. This group owned the factory for the next three years. Under its leadership the workforce expanded, as the factory eventually employed 375 workers on a payroll of $4 million. By 1979 Morgan County Beef Company merged with the Sterling Colorado Beef Company. In 1980 the enlarged Sterling Beef Company announced an expansion of the Fort Morgan factory, including a new bone-breaking facility. It opened two years later at a cost of approximately $6 million.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>1980s and 1990s</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>The next two decades were difficult ones for the beef industry. Pork and chicken producers ran an effective marketing campaign touting the health benefits of eating their products, causing a drop in demand for beef. The epidemic of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or “mad cow disease,” in the early 1990s also contributed to the downturn in beef consumption. To address this decline, ranchers began to emphasize the quality of their product to consumers, specifically by marketing “grass-fed” beef products, which required only a simple shift in food sources at feedlots. Colorado’s processing facilities also offered different cuts of beef that were easier to cook in the hope of increasing consumption.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Northeastern Colorado’s beef processors weathered this turbulent period in different ways. In Sterling, the Sterling Colorado Beef Company factory processed thousands of cattle in the late twentieth century, but the cooperative was not without its problems. Despite an 8,400-square-foot expansion of the factory in 1993, demand for beef outpaced the supply of cows in the Sterling area, which led the Excel Beef Company to close the facility in 1997.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>In Greeley, the Capital Packing facility endured ups and downs before being purchased by ConAgra foods in 1987. During a large-scale reorganization of the company, ConAgra sold its beef division to Swift &amp; Co. in 2002. The facility, now owned by JBS USA, is currently the largest employer in <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/weld-county"><strong>Weld County</strong></a>.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>In Fort Morgan, Excel, a subsidiary of the Cargill company, purchased the beef factory in 1987 and made it into one of the largest employers in <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/morgan-county"><strong>Morgan County</strong></a>. With more than 2,000 employees, the Fort Morgan plant has one of the largest beef-processing workforces in the country. During the 1990s, <strong>Temple Grandin</strong>, a nationally known advocate for humane treatment of cattle, helped to redesign the plant’s holding pens.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Today</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>The success of the JBS facility in Greeley and the Cargill plant in Fort Morgan has attracted immigrants and changed the social landscape in those towns. In the early 2000s, Cargill was the largest employer of Latino workers in Morgan County. After Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) targeted Latino workers in Greeley, refugee-focused US immigration policy brought an increasing number of Somali refugees to the area. The shifting workforce added new dynamics to the usual worker-employer tensions. In the 2010s, Cargill had to settle a discrimination suit after Muslim employees were fired over prayer breaks, while JBS experienced strikes over health care and, in 2020, a deadly <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/coronavirus-colorado"><strong>COVID-19</strong></a> outbreak at the plant.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>In 2019 beef was Colorado’s top agricultural export, amounting to approximately $4 billion (10 percent of the state’s agricultural exports). Consumer preferences now favor grass-fed beef and transparency in how animals get from ranch to factory to plate. Consumers also express concerns about the environmental impact of cattle ranching, specifically the large-scale emission of methane, a greenhouse gas. The industry recognizes the need to make its practices more sustainable, and emphasizes that grass-fed beef can improve soil health and carbon capture on grazing lands. Today, beef consumption is rebounding, and production in Colorado has increased over the last four years. </p>&#13; </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-author--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-author.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-author.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-author field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-author"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-author">Author</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-author"><a href="/author/campbell-alyse" hreflang="und">Campbell, Alyse</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-keyword--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-keyword.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-keyword.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-keyword field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-keyword"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-keyword">Keywords</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/colorado-beef-industry" hreflang="en">colorado beef industry</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/colorado-ranching" hreflang="en">colorado ranching</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/ranching" hreflang="en">ranching</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/john-wesley-iliff" hreflang="en">John Wesley Iliff</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/open-range" hreflang="en">open range</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/cargill" hreflang="en">cargill</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/weld-county" hreflang="en">weld county</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/morgan-county" hreflang="en">Morgan County</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/logan-county" hreflang="en">logan county</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/sterling" hreflang="en">Sterling</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/fort-morgan" hreflang="en">Fort Morgan</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * links--node.html.twig x links--inline.html.twig * links--node.html.twig * links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-references-html--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-references-html.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-references-html.html.twig * field--text-long.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-references-html field--type-text-long field--label-above" id="id-field-references-html"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-references-html">References</div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-references-html"><p>Philip F. Anschutz, <em>Out Where the West Begins</em> (Denver: Cloud Camp Press, 2015).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Greg Avery, “<a href="https://www.bizjournals.com/denver/news/2020/01/16/beyond-the-burger-colorados-beef-industry-holds-up.html">Beyond the Burger</a>,” <em>Denver Business Journal</em>, January 16, 2020.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Dan Barker, “<a href="https://www.fortmorgantimes.com/2014/03/21/tender-beef-a-big-success/">Tender Beef a Big Success</a>,”<em> Fort Morgan Times</em>, March 21, 2014.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>“Beef Plant Opening, 4 Year College Are Discussed by C. of C.,” <em>Fort Morgan Times</em>, March 31, 1966.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Cargill, “<a href="https://www.cargill.com/about/cargill-history-timeline">Our History</a><u>,</u>” n.d.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Anne Delaney, “<a href="https://www.greeleytribune.com/2020/07/24/jbs-buys-greeley-lamb-plant-mountain-states-rosen/">JBS Acquires Assets, Facilities From Closure of Greeley Mountain State Rosen Plant</a>,” <em>Greeley Tribune</em>, July 24, 2020.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Caitlin Dewey, “<a href="https://www.denverpost.com/2017/12/28/american-diet-needs-fixing/">How to Fix the American Diet</a>,” <em>The Denver Post</em>, December 28, 2017.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Marianne Goodland, “<a href="https://www.fortmorgantimes.com/2019/09/04/colorado-beef-industry-launches-education-campaign/">Colorado Beef Industry Launches #BetterWithBeef Education Campaign</a>,” <em>Fort Morgan Times</em>, April 24, 2019.</p>&#13; &#13; <p><a href="https://www.referenceforbusiness.com/history2/10/Monfort-Inc.html">History of Monfort, Inc</a>, Reference for Business, n.d.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Bill Jackson, “<a href="https://www.greeleytribune.com/2002/11/26/conagra-beef-sold/#:~:text=ConAgra%20Beef%20Co.,will%20be%20renamed%20Swift%20%26%20Co.">ConAgra Beef Sold</a>,” <em>Greeley Tribune</em>, November 26, 2002.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Callie Jones, “<a href="https://www.journal-advocate.com/2018/11/14/growth-in-the-beef-market/">Growth in Beef Industry</a>,” <em>Sterling Journal-Advocate</em>, May 8, 2019.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Barb Keenan, “<a href="https://www.fortmorgantimes.com/2018/09/06/portraits-of-the-past-beef-industry-follows-similar-path-as-beets/">From Beets to Beef</a>,” <em>Fort Morgan Times</em>, September 3, 2018.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>John La Porte, “Ag, Oil, Housing Area Economy Mainstays,” <em>Fort Morgan Times</em>, September 18, 1989.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>John La Porte, “<a href="https://www.fortmorgantimes.com/2011/02/02/cargill-featured-on-oprah/">Cargill Featured on Oprah</a>,” <em>Fort Morgan Times</em>, February 2, 2011.<br />&#13; Nancy Matsumoto, “<a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/08/13/746576239/is-grass-fed-beef-really-better-for-the-planet-heres-the-science">Is Grass-Fed Beef Really Better for The Planet? Here’s the Science</a>,” NPR, August 13, 2019.</p>&#13; &#13; <p><em>Morgan County: Colorado, U.S.A. A Land of Immigrants, Cultivating a Thriving Community</em> (Morgan County, Colorado: One Morgan County, 2014).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>“Open House Attracts Thousands,” <em>Fort Morgan Times</em>, April 25, 1966.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>“Open House of New Dressed Beef,” <em>Fort Morgan Times, </em>April 22, 1966.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Bill O’Neal, <em>Historic Ranches of the Old West</em> (Austin, TX: Eakin Press, 1997).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Jennifer Patten, <em>In View of the Mountains: A History of Fort Morgan, Colorado </em>(Fort Morgan, CO: Commercial Printers, 2011).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Earl Pomeroy, <em>The American Far West in the 20th Century</em> (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Jeremy Rifkin, <em>Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture</em> (New York: Dutton Books, 1992).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Christy Steele, <em>Cattle Ranching in the American West</em> (Milwaukee, WI: World Almanac Library, 2005).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>“Sterling Beef Plant Construction Begun,”<em> The Denver Post</em>, May 26, 1965.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>“Sterling Packing Plant Exceeds Expectations,” <em>The </em><em>Denver Post</em>, September 23, 1966.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Zach Schwindt, “<a href="https://www.fortmorgantimes.com/2018/07/02/cargill-opens-local-hiring-center/">Cargill Opens Local Hiring Center</a>,” <em>Fort Morgan Times</em>, July 2, 2018.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Carl Ubbelohde, Maxine Benson, Duane A. Smith, <em>A Colorado History</em>, 9th ed. (Boulder, CO: Pruett Publishing, 2006).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Clement E. Ward, “<a href="https://ideas.repec.org/p/ags/urdbrr/49822.html">Cooperative Meat Packing, Lessons Learned From Sterling Colorado Beef Company</a>,” Research Reports 49822, United States Department of Agriculture, Rural Development, 1981.</p>&#13; </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-additional-information-htm--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-additional-information-htm.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-additional-information-htm.html.twig * field--text-long.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-additional-information-htm field--type-text-long field--label-above" id="id-field-additional-information-htm"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-additional-information-htm">Additional Information</div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-additional-information-htm"><p>Thomas J. Noel, <em>Riding High: Colorado Ranchers and 100 Years of the National Western Stock Show</em> (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2005).</p>&#13; </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> Tue, 15 Jun 2021 20:47:51 +0000 yongli 3555 at http://coloradoencyclopedia.org The Great Die Up http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/great-die <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">The Great Die Up</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> <span lang="" about="/users/yongli" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">yongli</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'time' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> <time datetime="2021-02-16T13:40:30-07:00" title="Tuesday, February 16, 2021 - 13:40" class="datetime">Tue, 02/16/2021 - 13:40</time> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'addtoany_standard' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * addtoany-standard--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * addtoany-standard--node.html.twig x addtoany-standard.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <span class="a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_32 addtoany_list" data-a2a-url="http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/great-die" data-a2a-title="The Great Die Up"><a class="a2a_dd addtoany_share" href="https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=http%3A%2F%2Fcoloradoencyclopedia.org%2Farticle%2Fgreat-die&amp;title=The%20Great%20Die%20Up"></a><a class="a2a_button_facebook"></a><a class="a2a_button_twitter"></a><a class="a2a_button_email"></a></span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item" id="id-body"><p>“The Great Die Up” is one of three nicknames for the winter of 1886–87, when hundreds of thousands of cattle across the <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/colorado%E2%80%99s-great-plains"><strong>Great Plains</strong></a> died in harsh weather. The event changed the cattle industry forever, ending the practice of open-range grazing. <strong>Ranchers</strong> also called this weather event “The Big Die-Up,” or “Death’s Cattle Round-Up.” The deadly winter helped usher in an era of smaller-scale ranching and federal rangeland management to prevent massive, livestock-caused environmental degradation.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Open-Range Grazing</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>Between 1880 and 1885, the open-range cattle industry peaked in both cattle numbers and rancher profits. This was partly because many large cattle operations grazed on what was called the open range—a boundaryless way of grazing cattle on public land with little to no oversight. In some accounts, ranchers counted close to 80,000 head herded in a season. Cattlemen drove these huge numbers of livestock across the Great Plains to rail lines to be shipped to stockyards in places such as Kansas City and Chicago. From there, the cattle went to slaughterhouses to supply beef to other parts of the country, especially fast-growing urban areas.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Although it was profitable for large cattle companies, the open range came at a high environmental cost. The large-scale cattle drives degraded soils and reduced plant life across western rangelands. Millions of hooves compacted soils, making it difficult for plant life to regrow. Cattle also eroded the banks of streambeds and other water sources. Cattle trampled soils and removed vegetation, making it easier for water to carry away more sediment. When stream banks are eroded like this, water in the streambed dissipates faster. Additionally, overgrazing reduced grasses that were key to holding soils together, resulting in loose topsoil that was prone to erosion. Together, these effects of overgrazing made the rangelands vulnerable in a drought.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>The profitability of the open-range cattle industry did not last long. Cattle prices dropped in 1885, partly because of the overgrazed and denuded landscape. The following summer, drought struck and further reduced grasses for livestock. The hot summer also dried water sources that cattlemen depended on. The lack of forage and water made it difficult to fatten herds. In the <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/san-luis-valley"><strong>San Luis Valley</strong></a>, the summer drought sparked disputes over grazing lands. Under these conditions, the cattle industry was in a fragile state and could not withstand additional pressure.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>A Harsh Winter in the West</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>Nature did not relent that year. The 1886 winter was brutal, starting early and including at least one intense storm every month. In mid-November, for example, a large blizzard blanketed the plains, covering forage the cattle needed to graze and leading to their starvation. With bitter cold and heavy snows continuing through March, cattle began to die or disappear in large numbers. The snow and cold temperatures made grazing almost impossible, and some blizzards were so intense that many cattle disappeared from their herds, lost or dead.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>On the northern <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/front-range"><strong>Front Range</strong></a>, nearly 25 percent of cattle did not make it through the winter of 1886–87, affecting both large landholders and smallholders. Across the state, the number of large-scale cattle companies was slashed from fifty-eight in 1885 to just nine in 1888. In one telling example, the Poudre Livestock Company lost two-thirds of its herd, or $400,000 worth of cattle. Small cattle companies also felt the effects. Fort Collins stockman Peter Anderson lost 3,000 head, leaving him with almost no herd. In total, hundreds of thousands of cattle are said to have died, though reliable sources on the losses are unavailable.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>End of an Era</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>Across the West, the Great Die Up helped to end the days of massive cattle drives across the open range. Before the winter of 1886–87, American and European investors saw the American West as a place of limitless natural abundance, and they invested heavily in the cattle industry. Their investments overstocked the range, creating a surplus of livestock that contributed to the degradation of the range. The Great Die Up was the final blow, as prices dropped even further, investors lost their money, and cattle companies went out of business.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Many small-scale ranchers also suffered. However, given their smaller acreages and herds, they fared better through the winter. With less land and fewer cattle, small-scale ranchers were better able to keep track of their herds, tend to them in winter storms, and move them from areas where forage was depleted. Many in the livestock business adopted practices used by small-scale ranchers, such as reducing herd sizes and keeping cattle in smaller, barbed-wire–fenced pastures, in hopes of avoiding another economic catastrophe.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>In addition to reducing herd sizes, the livestock industry took other measures to protect against another catastrophe like the Great Die Up. Ranchers and cattle associates worked together to limit overgrazing and take better care of the land and their livestock. Fences were one significant change. The once-boundaryless rangelands across the West now hosted miles of fences, ending open-range grazing. Fences also allowed ranchers to close off sections of range to prohibit grazing and allow forage to regrow. Furthermore, beginning in the 1890s, Colorado Agricultural and Mechanical College (now <strong>Colorado State University</strong>) in <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/fort-collins"><strong>Fort Collins</strong></a> offered new courses for small-scale ranchers and farmers designed to help them better manage their land. The federal government also became more involved in the early 1900s, when the <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/us-forest-service-colorado"><strong>US Forest Service</strong></a> began monitoring rangelands and implementing a permit system for cattle ranchers to minimize overgrazing.</p>&#13; </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-author--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-author.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-author.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-author field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-author"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-author">Author</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-author"><a href="/author/maxwell-dillon" hreflang="und">Maxwell, Dillon</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-keyword--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-keyword.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-keyword.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-keyword field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-keyword"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-keyword">Keywords</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/great-die" hreflang="en">great die up</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/ranching" hreflang="en">ranching</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/ranching-colorado" hreflang="en">ranching in colorado</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/open-range" hreflang="en">open range</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/weld-county" hreflang="en">weld county</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/great-plains" hreflang="en">Great Plains</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/blizzard" hreflang="en">Blizzard</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * links--node.html.twig x links--inline.html.twig * links--node.html.twig * links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-references-html--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-references-html.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-references-html.html.twig * field--text-long.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-references-html field--type-text-long field--label-above" id="id-field-references-html"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-references-html">References</div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-references-html"><p>“<a href="https://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&amp;d=SCR18870609.2.31&amp;srpos=35&amp;e=-10-1886---1887--en-20--21--img-txIN%7ctxCO%7ctxTA-cattle-ARTICLE------0--">End of the Range Business</a>,” <em>Silver Cliff Rustler</em>, June 9, 1887.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>“<a href="https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-west/">Hell Without Heat</a>,” Rocky Mountain PBS (2001).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>“<a href="https://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&amp;d=SGD18861118-01.2.7&amp;srpos=11&amp;e=-10-1886--04-1887--en-20--1--img-txIN%7ctxCO%7ctxTA-cattle-------0--">An Important Cattle Decision</a>,” <em>Saguache Democrat</em>, November 18, 1886.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>“<a href="https://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&amp;d=CFT18860124-01.2.11&amp;srpos=1&amp;e=--1886---1888--en-20--1--img-txIN%7ctxCO%7ctxTA-cattle+deaths-------0--">Losses on the Range</a>,” <em>Pueblo Daily Chieftain</em>, January 24, 1886.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Ray H. Mattison “<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/4515754">The Hard Winter and the Range Cattle Business</a>,” <em>Montana Magazine of History </em>1, no. 4 (October 1951).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>John E. Mitchell and Richard H. Hart, “Winter of 1886–87: The Death Knell of Open Range,” <em>Rangelands </em>9, no. 1 (February 1987).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>“<a href="https://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&amp;d=CFT18860925-01.2.2&amp;srpos=9&amp;e=--1886---1889--en-20--1-byDA-img-txIN%7ctxCO%7ctxTA-pleuropneumonia-------0--">Pleuro Patients</a>,”  <em>Colorado Daily Chieftain</em>, September 25, 1886.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>“<a href="https://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&amp;d=CRV18861009-01.2.9&amp;srpos=34&amp;e=-10-1886---1887--en-20--21--img-txIN%7ctxCO%7ctxTA-cattle-ARTICLE------0--">Protecting the Cattle</a>,” <em>Chrystal River Current</em>, October 9, 1886.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Leland E. Stuart, “<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/4519114">The Winter of 1886–1887: The Last of Whose 5,000?,”</a> <em>Montana: The Magazine of Western History </em>38, no. 1 (Winter 1988).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Ansel Watrous, <em>The History of Larimer County, Colorado. </em>(Fort Collins: Old Army Press, 1911).</p>&#13; </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-additional-information-htm--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-additional-information-htm.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-additional-information-htm.html.twig * field--text-long.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-additional-information-htm field--type-text-long field--label-above" id="id-field-additional-information-htm"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-additional-information-htm">Additional Information</div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-additional-information-htm"><p>Laura Clark, “<a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/1887-blizzard-changed-american-frontier-forever-1-180953852/">The 1887 Blizzard That Changed the American Frontier Forever</a>,” <em>Smithsonian Magazine, </em>January 5, 2015.</p>&#13; </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> Tue, 16 Feb 2021 20:40:30 +0000 yongli 3541 at http://coloradoencyclopedia.org Coal Mining in Colorado http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/coal-mining-colorado <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Coal Mining in Colorado</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> <span lang="" about="/users/yongli" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">yongli</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'time' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> <time datetime="2021-02-16T13:06:10-07:00" title="Tuesday, February 16, 2021 - 13:06" class="datetime">Tue, 02/16/2021 - 13:06</time> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'addtoany_standard' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * addtoany-standard--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * addtoany-standard--node.html.twig x addtoany-standard.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <span class="a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_32 addtoany_list" data-a2a-url="http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/coal-mining-colorado" data-a2a-title="Coal Mining in Colorado"><a class="a2a_dd addtoany_share" href="https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=http%3A%2F%2Fcoloradoencyclopedia.org%2Farticle%2Fcoal-mining-colorado&amp;title=Coal%20Mining%20in%20Colorado"></a><a class="a2a_button_facebook"></a><a class="a2a_button_twitter"></a><a class="a2a_button_email"></a></span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item" id="id-body"><p>In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, coal mining was the most important industry in Colorado. Coal mines served as the crucibles of empire, churning out the fuel needed to power the railroads, <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/precious-metal-mining-colorado"><strong>precious-metal mines</strong></a>, and smelters that helped develop the region. They were also contested sites of worker resistance and rebellion where the power dynamics of industrial capitalism were acted out in tragic ways.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Although it is no longer mined in Colorado at the rates it once was, coal has maintained its relative importance to the state’s energy economy through the present. Today, coal mining remains an important industry in the <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/moffat-county"><strong>Moffat County</strong></a>, and coal-fueled power plants provide electricity to hundreds of thousands of residents along the <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/front-range"><strong>Front Range</strong></a>. These coal mines and power plants are sources of air and water pollution, and the industries coal helped fuel are equally pollutive.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Formation of Coal</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>About 70 million years ago, during the late Cretaceous Period, much of Colorado was covered by a shallow, tropical sea. When the uplift of the <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/rocky-mountains"><strong>Rocky Mountains</strong></a> began about a million years later, it pushed up the inundated land, giving rise to many swampy bogs. It was in these bogs that Colorado’s coal began to form as millions of years of the sun’s energy became trapped in vegetation that died and decomposed on top of itself. The plant material was gradually compressed into a primordial muck that eventually hardened into coal.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>When engineer <strong>Ferdinand V. Hayden</strong> surveyed the geology of Colorado in the late 1860s and early 1870s, he identified several areas that held vast coal reserves. These included the Raton Basin in southern Colorado, whose coal Hayden described as being “inexhaustible and of excellent quality,” as well as the northwest part of what was then <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/colorado-territory"><strong>Colorado Territory</strong></a>.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>The Advent of Industrial Coal</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>The earliest coal mining in Colorado took place in the late 1850s near the fledgling town of <a href="/article/denver"><strong>Denver</strong></a>, but industrial development of the state’s coal resources awaited the arrival of <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/william-jackson-palmer"><strong>William Jackson Palmer</strong></a> in the late 1860s. Over the next two decades, Palmer turned coal into Colorado’s most important commodity. In addition to founding the tourist town of <a href="/article/colorado-springs"><strong>Colorado Springs</strong></a> in 1871, Palmer opened dozens of new coal mines in southern Colorado, and his <strong>Denver &amp; Rio Grande Railroad</strong> (D&amp;RG) brought that coal to market in Denver. To manage his new coal empire, Palmer started Colorado Coal &amp; Iron, which eventually became <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/colorado-fuel-iron"><strong>Colorado Fuel and Iron</strong></a> (CF&amp;I), arguably the state’s most powerful coal company. The southern Colorado towns of <strong>Trinidad</strong> and <strong>Walsenburg</strong> became important hubs of coal mining and transport, with the latter known as “The City Built on Coal.”</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Coke and Industry</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>Coal mining in Colorado developed alongside precious-metal mining. In addition to providing the fuel needed to transport gold and silver ore, coal also warmed the homes of residents in Denver and other mushrooming Front Range cities.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>By the 1860s, as gold and silver miners left behind panned-out streambeds and began extracting more metal-bearing ore from the mountains, it became apparent that extreme heat was needed to separate gold and silver from the rock that held it. Coal would provide that heat, but not just any coal would do. Smelters, the heat-driven facilities that melted gold and silver ore to extract the metals, required coal that would burn hot enough to melt rock. This type of coal, a densely layered type called <em>coking coal</em>, was formed by the supercompression of underground coal seams. When heated without oxygen, coking coal turns into <em>coke</em>, a fuel that burns hot enough to melt rock and forge steel.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>In the 1880s, coke became even more essential in Colorado, as it fueled William Jackson Palmer’s <strong>steel mill</strong> in <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/pueblo"><strong>Pueblo</strong></a>. Coking coal was most commonly found in Colorado’s southern coalfields, making those fields even more important to the state’s industrial economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Major Coal Mining Locations</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>As Palmer’s southern coalfields coalesced in <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/las-animas-county"><strong>Las Animas</strong></a> and <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/huerfano-county"><strong>Huerfano</strong></a> Counties, railroad expansion allowed other parts of the state to become major coal producers as well. In 1881 the D&amp;RG reached <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/crested-butte"><strong>Crested Butte</strong></a>, in northern <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/gunnison-county"><strong>Gunnison County</strong></a>, which would contain some of the most productive mines in the state; it was also the site of the grisly <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/jokerville-mine-explosion"><strong>Jokerville Mine Explosion</strong></a> that killed fifty-nine workers in 1884. Toward the end of that decade miners began tapping coalfields in <a href="/article/boulder-county"><strong>Boulder County</strong></a>, which fueled the growth of towns such as <strong>Louisville</strong> and <strong>Lafayette</strong> in the 1890s.</p>&#13; &#13; <p><a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/garfield-county"><strong>Garfield County</strong></a> in western Colorado also held productive mines, including the volatile Vulcan Mine, which suffered <strong>three deadly explosions</strong> between 1896 and 1918. In the early 1900s, thanks to the completion of the <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/denver-northwestern-pacific-railway-hill-route-moffat-road"><strong>Moffat Road</strong></a> rail line, a relatively smaller coal industry developed in <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/routt-county"><strong>Routt County</strong></a> in the northwest part of the state. After the Moffat Road reached Craig in 1913, the coal beds of Moffat County could be tapped, too.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>By 1917 Colorado had 238 coal mines operating throughout the state, most of which were divided between three companies: CF&amp;I, <strong>Rocky Mountain Fuel Company</strong>, and <strong>Victor American Fuel Company</strong>. That year, the state’s coal mines produced a total of some 12.5 million tons of coal, an increase of nearly 2 million tons from the previous year.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Even as it gradually lost market share to oil and natural gas, coal mining continued throughout the twentieth century in Colorado. In Moffat County, for instance, production reached more than 100,000 tons annually between 1943 and 1951. Mining in the state also shifted during this period from deep mining, the kind that sent miners far belowground, to open-pit mining, where heavy machinery is used to excavate shallower coal seams. By the 1960s, coal production had dwindled to the point where the industry had only a small fraction of its earlier power and influence.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Work in the Coal Mines</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>Working in coal mines was dirty and dangerous, and labor conditions were dismal and underregulated. Most coal mines grouped together men from more than a dozen different nations and backgrounds, including Austria, Britain, Greece, Italy, Mexico, Poland, and the United States. In the 1880s, coal miners worked from fourteen to sixteen hours per day for paltry wages that were often paid in scrip, a kind of currency that could be used only at company stores. Since many coal camps were remote, these stores were often the sole local source of food and supplies, keeping miners tethered to the company. Moreover, coal companies such as CF&amp;I often built whole company towns, where workers paid rent to live. Along with company stores, company housing ensured that most wages were returned to the company.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>In the mines, workers inhaled coal dust all day long, which led to the devastating respiratory disease known as black lung. Mine shafts could collapse or flood. Rock slides and fires were also common; in 1917 the state mine inspector reported that sixty-six miners died from routine accidents, including “falls of rock, falls of coal, mine cars and motors, explosives,” and “electricity.” In addition, methane and other flammable gases released from coal beds often built up in the mines, and each morning an inspector had to check the air quality before work could begin. Employed since the early 1800s, safety lamps, whose flames burned differently when held close to flammable gases, helped determine whether a mine’s air quality was safe. Davy lamps with longer wicks were also used to burn off harmful gases.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Most mines employed inspectors to monitor safety conditions, but even a slight mistake could spell instant death for dozens of miners. This was the case in the <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/hastings-mine-explosion"><strong>Hastings Mine Explosion</strong></a>, Colorado’s deadliest mining disaster, which occurred north of Trinidad in 1917. For unknown reasons, the mine inspector took apart his safety lamp and attempted to relight it with a match, triggering a gas-fueled explosion that killed 121 workers. In addition, some mines exploded despite being declared safe; this occurred in the Jokerville Mine blast of 1884, which killed fifty-nine miners. A total of eighty-five workers perished during the three explosions of the Vulcan Mine between 1896 and 1918. These disasters reflected the troubling trend of Colorado miners dying at a rate of twice the national average between 1884 and 1912.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Labor Strife</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>Coal miners were victims of owner exploitation and hazardous working conditions, and they often tried to improve their lot. As early as the 1870s, they organized strikes and walkouts, and later they joined unions such as the <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/united-mine-workers-america"><strong>United Mine Workers of America</strong></a> (UMWA), formed in 1890. The first UMWA local in Colorado was formed in the Boulder County town of Erie that year, and the union organized its <strong>first major strike</strong> during the <strong><a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/panic-1893">financial calamity</a> </strong>of 1893-94. Thousands of coal miners across the state walked off the job, hoping to produce a coal shortage that would force owners to meet their demands of abolishing company stores and paying workers in cash. In the end, however, there were not enough walkouts to produce a shortage, so miners went back to work under prestrike conditions. By 1900 similar actions had earned some hard-won improvements, including a state law mandating an eight-hour workday, but coal miners had to pressure companies such as CF&amp;I to follow the laws.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Recognizing the power of strikes, mine owners and companies took them seriously, employing both economic oppression and violence to stop them. Owners fired striking workers and hired strikebreakers to work for lower wages than strikers were demanding, hoping to end the strikes. When these approaches failed, mine owners and companies raised citizen militias or petitioned the state to call in the National Guard to force miners back to work.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>In Colorado the UMWA was most active in the early twentieth century, with thousands of members joining strikes in the southern coalfields of <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/fremont-county"><strong>Fremont</strong></a>, Huerfano, and Las Animas Counties. A <strong>strike in 1903–4</strong> again called for the abolition of scrip and company stores, as well as implementation of the state’s eight-hour workday law. The failure of that strike led to rising tensions that exploded again in the spring of 1913. The UMWA led a strike in the southern coalfields that involved about 90 percent of the state’s coal workers and resulted in the <a href="/article/ludlow-massacre"><strong>Ludlow Massacre</strong></a> when National Guard members fired on striking miners and set the strikers’ tent colony on fire. It was the deadliest labor conflict in state history.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Coal mining conditions were hardly improved for miners by the time another major conflict broke out in the late 1920s. In 1927, during a strike in the northern coalfields of <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/weld-county"><strong>Weld County</strong></a>, the Colorado State Police (then known as the Colorado Rangers) <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/columbine-mine-massacre-0"><strong>opened fire on strikers</strong></a> and their wives at the Rocky Mountain Fuel company town of Serene, killing six and wounding twenty.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Strikes and labor conflict became less common after the passage of the federal Wagner Act in 1935, which recognized workers’ rights to unionize. Still, there remained periods of strife, such as in 1978, when miners at the Allen and Maxwell Mines in Las Animas County walked off the job for three months as part of a national strike organized by the United Mine Workers.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Environmental Effects</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>In addition to the injuries and health hazards to workers, coal mining has produced a number of negative environmental effects that Coloradans continue to deal with today. Air pollution is the largest environmental cost of coal production. To make the air in coal mines breathable, methane and other harmful gases are vented out into the atmosphere, contributing to local smog and global climate change. The West Elk Mine in Gunnison County is the largest methane emitter in Colorado, belching out emissions in 2017 that equaled those of 98,000 cars. Abandoned coal mines also release methane. Nationwide, coal mines account for almost 10 percent of all methane emissions.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>In addition, mines often need to be expanded to maintain their profitability, which leads to deforestation and other forms of habitat destruction. As such, environmental groups often take the coal industry to court over mine expansion as well as pollution. At the West Elk Mine, for example, a proposed expansion into a designated roadless forest resulted in years of litigation before it was ultimately blocked in 2020—but only after the company illegally bulldozed a road through the area.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Coal-fueled power plants are another major source of pollution. In 2020 <strong><em>The Denver Post</em></strong> named Colorado’s six coal-fired power plants among the state’s top ten greenhouse gas emitters. Coal-fired power can contaminate water sources, too; in 2019 an investigation by the <strong>Platte River Power Authority </strong>found that groundwater near the Rawhide Energy Station in <a href="/article/larimer-county"><strong>Larimer County</strong></a> was contaminated with selenium, a chemical that can harm both humans and wildlife. Aware of coal’s ongoing potential to harm air and water quality and wildlife, environmental groups such as the <strong>Sierra Club</strong> and <strong>WildEarth Guardians</strong> have repeatedly sued to stop the expansion of the coal industry in the state.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Today</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>Despite its environmental effects, coal mining continues in Colorado today. In Moffat County, coal still underwrites the local economy. As much as 46 percent of the total property value in the county is generated from its two major coal mines, the Colowyo and Trapper Mines. The Craig Station power plant, completed in the early 1980s and operated by the <strong>Westminster</strong>-based Tri-State Generation and Transmission company, provides hundreds of jobs in Moffat County and supplies power to some 250,000 square miles in Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico, and Wyoming. Despite its importance to local economies in places like Craig, Tri-State has decided to shut down the company’s coal-fired plants in Colorado and New Mexico by 2030.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Even though production has declined almost every year since 2012, Colorado remains the eleventh-largest producer of coal in the country, with nearly one-quarter of its coal exported to other countries. The West Elk Mine remains one of the state’s largest, employing around 220 people and producing nearly 4 million tons of coal in 2016. Coal from within and beyond the state provides more than half of Colorado’s net electricity generation. This means that coal will play a part in Colorado’s economy for at least the next decade, even as state and industry leaders move toward less pollutive and renewable energy sources.</p>&#13; </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-author--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-author.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-author.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-author field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-author"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-author">Author</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-author"><a href="/author/encyclopedia-staff" hreflang="und">Encyclopedia Staff</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-keyword--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-keyword.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-keyword.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-keyword field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-keyword"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-keyword">Keywords</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/coal-mining" hreflang="en">coal mining</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/coal-mining-colorado" hreflang="en">coal mining in colorado</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/coal-miners" hreflang="en">coal miners</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/coal" hreflang="en">coal</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/coal-mines" hreflang="en">coal mines</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/moffat-county" hreflang="en">Moffat County</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/craig" hreflang="en">Craig</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/energy" hreflang="en">energy</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/smelter" hreflang="en">smelter</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/railroads" hreflang="en">railroads</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/colowyo" hreflang="en">colowyo</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/routt-county" hreflang="en">routt county</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/west-elk-mine" hreflang="en">west elk mine</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/crested-butte" hreflang="en">crested butte</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/jokerville-mine" hreflang="en">jokerville mine</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/garfield-county" hreflang="en">Garfield County</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/vulcan-mine" hreflang="en">vulcan mine</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/hastings-mine-explosion" hreflang="en">hastings mine explosion</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/boulder-county" hreflang="en">boulder county</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/weld-county" hreflang="en">weld county</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/las-animas-county" hreflang="en">Las Animas County</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/ludlow-massacre" hreflang="en">Ludlow Massacre</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/ludlow" hreflang="en">ludlow</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/colorado-fuel-iron" hreflang="en">colorado fuel &amp; iron</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/pueblo" hreflang="en">pueblo</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/coking-coal" hreflang="en">coking coal</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/huerfano-county" hreflang="en">huerfano county</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/walsenburg" hreflang="en">walsenburg</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/lafayette" hreflang="en">Lafayette</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/louisville" hreflang="en">louisville</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/strike" hreflang="en">Strike</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/labor-history" hreflang="en">labor history</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/united-mineworkers-america" hreflang="en">united mineworkers of america</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/umwa" hreflang="en">umwa</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/unions" hreflang="en">unions</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/columbine-mine-massacre" hreflang="en">columbine mine massacre</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * links--node.html.twig x links--inline.html.twig * links--node.html.twig * links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-references-html--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-references-html.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-references-html.html.twig * field--text-long.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-references-html field--type-text-long field--label-above" id="id-field-references-html"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-references-html">References</div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-references-html"><p>John Aguilar, “<a href="https://www.denverpost.com/2020/06/18/west-elk-mine-court-ruling-poania/">State Orders Coal Company to Cease Expansion of West Elk Mine Into Roadless Area Near Paonia</a>,” <em>The Denver Post</em>, June 18, 2020.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Thomas G. Andrews, <em>Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War </em>(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Aspire Mining Limited, “<a href="https://aspiremininglimited.com/what-is-coking-coal/">What Is Coking Coal</a>,” n.d.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Allen Best, “Amid the Pandemic, Can Colorado Still Lead on a Just Transition From Coal?” <em>Energy News Network</em>, August 5, 2020.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Sam Brasch, “<a href="https://www.cpr.org/2020/03/05/craig-colorado-believes-in-coal-now-it-needs-a-plan-to-reinvent-itself/">Craig, Colorado Believes in Coal. Now It Needs a Plan to Reinvent Itself</a>,” <em>Colorado Public Radio</em>, March 5, 2020.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Center for Biological Diversity, “<a href="https://biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press-releases/lawsuit-launched-over-illegal-air-pollution-colorado-coal-mine-2019-12-17/">Lawsuit Launched Over Illegal Air Pollution at Colorado Coal Mine</a>,” December 17, 2019.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Tessa Cheek, “<a href="https://www.coloradoindependent.com/2015/05/14/environmentalists-are-targeting-colorado-coal-successfully/">Environmentalists Are Targeting Colorado Coal, Successfully</a>,” <em>Colorado Independent</em>, May 14, 2015.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Tamara Chuang, “<a href="https://coloradosun.com/2019/03/19/colorado-coal-ash-water-contamination/">Chemical Contamination From 7 Colorado Coal-Fired Power Plants Found During Groundwater Monitoring</a>,” <em>Colorado Sun</em>, March 19, 2019.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>City of Lafayette, Colorado, “<a href="https://www.lafayetteco.gov/DocumentCenter/View/152/Coal-Mining-Heritage-of-Lafayette?bidId=">The Coal Mining Heritage of Lafayette</a>,” n.d.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>“<a href="https://www.craigdailypress.com/news/craig-station-works-to-supply-the-demand/">Craig Station Works to Supply the Demand</a>,” <em>Craig Press</em>, October 14, 2014.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>James Dalrymple, <a href="https://spl.cde.state.co.us/artemis/nrserials/nr930010internet/nr9300101917internet.pdf"><em>Fifth Annual Report of the State Inspector of Coal Mines—1917</em></a> (Denver: Eames Brothers, 1917).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>“<a href="https://www.denverpost.com/2017/09/08/feds-approve-west-elk-mine-expansion/">Feds Approve Expansion of West Elk Mine in Western Colorado Against Environmental Group Objections</a>,” <em>Grand Junction Daily Sentinel</em> (via <em>The Denver Post</em>), September 8, 2017.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Ferdinand V. Hayden, <a href="https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2003/0384/report.pdf"><em>Preliminary Field Report of the United States Geological Survey of Colorado and New Mexico</em></a> (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1869).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Bruce Finley, “<a href="https://www.denverpost.com/2020/01/19/colorado-air-pollution/">What’s Polluting Colorado’s Air? 125 million Tons a Year of Heat-Trapping and Hazardous Gases</a>,” <em>The Denver Post</em>, January 19, 2020.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Mark Jaffe, “<a href="https://www.denverpost.com/2015/05/11/colorado-mine-approvals-failed-to-look-at-environmental-impacts/">Colorado Mine Approvals Failed to Look at Environmental Impacts</a>,” <em>The Denver Post</em>, May 11, 2015.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>“<a href="https://www.sierraclub.org/press-releases/2020/05/lawsuit-targets-arch-coal-s-illegal-air-pollution-colorado-coal-mine">Lawsuit Targets Arch Coal’s Illegal Air Pollution at Colorado Coal Mine</a>,” Sierra Club, May 14, 2020.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Noré V. Winter et al., <a href="https://www.treadofpioneers.org/pdf/Routt_County_Historic_Context_1994.pdf"><em>Historic Context of Routt County</em></a> (Boulder, CO: Winter and Company, 1994).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Kelsey Ray, “<a href="https://www.coloradoindependent.com/2016/05/03/colorados-worst-methane-polluter-is-an-arch-coal-mine-west-elk-john-hickenlooper/">Colorado’s Worst Methane Polluter Is an Arch Coal Mine</a>,” <em>Colorado Independent</em>, May 3, 2016.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Christopher J. Schreck, “<a href="https://scalar.usc.edu/works/the-colorado-fuel-and-iron-company/strikes-and-other-labor-disputes">Strikes and Other Labor Disputes</a>,” Labor Relations in the Industrial West, updated December 14, 2016.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Brian K. Trembath, “<a href="https://history.denverlibrary.org/news/remembering-colorados-coal-warsand-coal-miners">Remembering Colorado’s Coal Wars  . . . And Coal Miners</a>,” Denver Public Library Western History and Genealogy Department, September 2, 2015.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>University of Denver, “<a href="https://www.du.edu/ludlow/cfhist.html">A History of the Colorado Coal Field War</a>,” Colorado Coal Field War Project, n.d.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>US Energy Information Administration, “<a href="https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/mining-and-transportation.php">Coal Explained: Mining and Transportation of Coal</a>,” updated October 28, 2019.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>US Energy Information Administration, “<a href="https://www.eia.gov/state/analysis.php?sid=CO">Colorado: Profile Analysis</a>,” updated March 19, 2020.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>US Environmental Protection Agency, “<a href="https://www.epa.gov/cmop/sources-coal-mine-methane">Coal Mine Methane Sources</a>,” n.d.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Bian Zhengfu et al., “Environmental Issues From Coal Mining and Their Solutions,” <em>Mining Science and Technology </em>20 (2010).</p>&#13; </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-additional-information-htm--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-additional-information-htm.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-additional-information-htm.html.twig * field--text-long.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-additional-information-htm field--type-text-long field--label-above" id="id-field-additional-information-htm"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-additional-information-htm">Additional Information</div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-additional-information-htm"><p>Earthjustice.org, “<a href="https://earthjustice.org/features/colorado-forests-and-coal">Coal’s Toll on Colorado’s Forests</a>,” updated June 8, 2017.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Ferdinand V. Hayden, <a href="https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/70038931"><em>Seventh Annual Report of the United States Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories, embracing Colorado</em></a> (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1873).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Fawn-Amber Montoya, ed., <em>Making an American Workforce: The Rockefellers and the Legacy of Ludlow</em> (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2014).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>F. Darrell Munsell, <em>From Redstone to Ludlow: John Cleveland Osgood’s Struggle Against the United Mine Workers of America </em>(Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2009).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Randall H. McGuire and Paul Reckner, “<a href="https://users.clas.ufl.edu/davidson/Historical%20archaeology%20fall%202015/Week%204/McGuire%20&amp;amp;%20Reckner%202003.pdf">Building a Working-Class Archaeology: The Colorado Coal Field War Project</a>,” <em>Industrial Archaeology Review</em> 25, no. 2 (2003).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Jonathan H. Rees, <em>Representation and Rebellion: The Rockefeller Plan at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, 1914–1942 </em>(Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2010).</p>&#13; </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> Tue, 16 Feb 2021 20:06:10 +0000 yongli 3536 at http://coloradoencyclopedia.org Ken Buck http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/ken-buck <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Ken Buck</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> <span lang="" about="/users/yongli" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">yongli</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'time' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> <time datetime="2020-07-08T15:44:06-06:00" title="Wednesday, July 8, 2020 - 15:44" class="datetime">Wed, 07/08/2020 - 15:44</time> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'addtoany_standard' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * addtoany-standard--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * addtoany-standard--node.html.twig x addtoany-standard.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <span class="a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_32 addtoany_list" data-a2a-url="http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/ken-buck" data-a2a-title="Ken Buck"><a class="a2a_dd addtoany_share" href="https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=http%3A%2F%2Fcoloradoencyclopedia.org%2Farticle%2Fken-buck&amp;title=Ken%20Buck"></a><a class="a2a_button_facebook"></a><a class="a2a_button_twitter"></a><a class="a2a_button_email"></a></span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item" id="id-body"><p>Ken Buck (1959–) is an attorney and politician from <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/weld-county"><strong>Weld County</strong></a>. He represents Colorado’s Fourth <strong>Congressional District</strong> 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 <strong>Republican Party</strong>.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Buck is known for his uncompromising stances on certain issues, especially Second Amendment rights. Although he is mostly a reliable champion of conservative policies, such as President Donald Trump’s border wall and lower corporate taxes, Buck has also broken with his party on other issues, including federal relief money during a pandemic and the number of refugees allowed into the country.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>In addition to serving in the House, Buck made an unsuccessful bid for the US Senate in 2010. Before serving in Congress, Buck served as the Weld County district attorney from 2005 to 2014.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Early Life</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>Kenneth Robert Buck was born on February 16, 1959, in Ossining, New York, to Ruth and James Eugene Buck. His parents were both lawyers, and his father had served as a captain in the army during World War II. Beginning at the age of twelve, Ken spent summers with his aunt and uncle on their ranch in La Grange, Wyoming, where he developed a love for the open spaces and solitude of the West.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Ken’s parents encouraged him and his two brothers to attend Ivy League schools; Ken attended Princeton University, graduating with a degree in politics in 1981. From there he headed to the West, arriving in <strong>Cheyenne</strong> a few months after graduating. He worked for a year in the Wyoming legislative services office before starting law school at the University of Wyoming.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Politics and Business</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>Buck married his college girlfriend, Dayna Roane, in 1984, and graduated from law school in 1985. He landed a job with then-Wyoming congressman Dick Cheney, who was part of a congressional investigation into President Ronald Reagan’s involvement in an illegal arms deal known as the Iran-Contra affair. President Reagan was found to have exercised poor judgment but was not directly linked to the crime. Buck described his experience with Cheney as “a really fascinating view of American politics.”</p>&#13; &#13; <p>After the investigation, Buck began working as a federal prosecutor, landing in the US Attorney’s office in Denver by 1990. He was later fired for discussing a potential case with defense attorneys, and the uneasy departure cost him another potential job with Dick Cheney, who was then vice president, in 2002. By then Buck had divorced his first wife, moved to <a href="/article/greeley"><strong>Greeley</strong></a>, and married Perry Webster, a businesswoman with deep ties to the local Republican Party. Buck began working as an executive for <strong>Hensel Phelps</strong> Construction, one of the largest general contractors in the world.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Along with support from his employer, Perry’s connections allowed Buck to enter electoral politics. In 2004 he was elected Weld County district attorney, a position he held until 2014. Buck touted a large drop in crime during his stint as DA, but his tenure was also marked by several controversies, including his refusal in 2005 to prosecute a rape case on behalf of a student at the<strong> University of Northern Colorado</strong>. Buck was roundly criticized for describing the alleged rape as an instance of “buyer’s remorse.”</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Another controversy came in 2008. Buck’s office obtained tax documents from nearly 5,000 clients of Amalia’s Tax and Translation in Greeley, suspecting that the business was helping undocumented immigrants obtain Social Security numbers. The raid resulted in charges filed against seventy undocumented immigrants, but it also brought on a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Colorado, which claimed the raid was unconstitutional. Four district judges and the <strong>Colorado Supreme Court</strong> agreed, ruling that the raid violated the Fourth Amendment rights of Amalia’s clients. Weld County was ordered to pay the ACLU $295,000 to cover the organization’s legal fees.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>US Senate Campaign</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>In 2010, after five years as Weld County district attorney, Buck decided to challenge Democrat <strong>Michael Bennet</strong> for his US Senate seat. Hensel Phelps CEO Jerry Morgensen donated $4,800 to Buck’s campaign, the maximum amount for an individual contribution. Some $2 million in undisclosed contributions helped Buck secure the GOP primary. During a debate with Bennet in October 2010, Buck made several controversial statements, including a defense of his use of “buyer’s remorse” to describe the 2005 rape case he had declined to prosecute. Despite his poor debate performance, Buck lost the Senate race to Bennet by just 30,000 votes.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>House of Representatives</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>After his failed Senate bid, Buck returned to his job as Weld County DA, where he remained a favorite in the local Republican Party. In 2013 he underwent chemotherapy for stage-four non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and his cancer went into full remission that summer.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>His health scare inspired Buck to run for higher office again. In 2014 Republican representative <strong>Cory Gardner</strong> decided to challenge Democrat <strong>Mark Udall</strong> for his Senate seat. Buck easily won the district’s Republican nomination to take Gardner’s place in the House, then handily defeated Democratic opponent Vic Meyers by 45 percentage points in the general election.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>When he finally arrived in Washington, Buck was disappointed in his Republican colleagues, especially their handling of the budget. In his 2017 book <em>Drain the Swamp</em>, Buck called the first budget he looked at “fiction disguised as a budget,” because it included “assumptions” and “magical cuts” that represented wishful thinking rather than reality. In the book, Buck also criticized the single-mindedness of national politicians, writing that “there’s only one problem they’re serious about solving—getting reelected.”</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Stances and Legislation</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>Like many of his conservative colleagues, Buck often claims to want a balanced national budget even as he supports policies that increase the national debt, including the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 and President Donald Trump’s proposed border wall.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Despite his support for the wall, Buck has criticized the Trump administration’s policy of limiting refugees, claiming that as a Christian he could not support turning away those fleeing from legitimate crises. Nevertheless, Buck has defended President Trump’s policy of separating immigrant families at the border, saying that “there are consequences” to attempting to unlawfully enter the United States.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>In December 2019, Buck joined 194 Republican colleagues in the House to vote “nay” on two articles of impeachment against President Trump, one for abuse of power and another for obstruction of Congress.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Like many others in his party, Buck is particularly outspoken about Second Amendment rights. In early March 2020, as Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden called for increased regulation of military-style weapons, Buck brandished his own, American flag–painted AR-15 rifle in his congressional office, challenging Biden and other Democrats to “come and take it.” Buck has consistently voted against measures to increase firearms regulation, including the Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Within Colorado, Buck represents a district whose economy is heavily dependent on energy extraction, especially <strong>hydraulic fracturing</strong>. As such, he is a strong supporter of the oil and gas industry, opposing most initiatives to expand regulation.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Coronavirus Pandemic</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>During the <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/coronavirus-colorado"><strong>coronavirus</strong></a> pandemic of 2020, Buck joined other conservative commentators and lawmakers in opposing the mandatory shutdown of nonessential businesses. His stance was in opposition to the nation’s top medical experts, as well as the US Centers for Disease Control, which maintained that shutting down most businesses was essential to control the outbreak. Buck was also one of the few congresspeople of either party to vote against the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, which provided relief to businesses and sent one-time payments to most American families. He believed the act promoted a “bailout mentality” among young people and should have directed fewer resources to corporations and more toward protective equipment and other medical supplies.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>2020 Election Controversy</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>Buck again found himself in the public crosshairs after it was determined that, as chair of the state’s Republican Party, he had instructed a volunteer election staffer to put a GOP candidate on the ballot even though the candidate had not won the number of votes legally required to make the ballot. Buck said that the coronavirus pandemic had made the primary elections “unfair” and that he was merely abiding by the decision of the 500-member state Republican committee. A district court ruled that the party’s actions constituted a violation of state law; the party appealed to the Colorado Supreme Court, but it declined to hear the case.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Buck was re-elected in 2020, defeating Democratic challenger Ike McCorkle, 60 percent to 37 percent.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Personal Life</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>Buck has two children from his first marriage: son, Cody, born in 1988, and daughter, Kaitlin, born in 1991. Buck and second wife, Perry, split in 2018; the couple had no children.</p>&#13; </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-author--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-author.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-author.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-author field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-author"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-author">Author</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-author"><a href="/author/encyclopedia-staff" hreflang="und">Encyclopedia Staff</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-keyword--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-keyword.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-keyword.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-keyword field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-keyword"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-keyword">Keywords</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/ken-buck" hreflang="en">ken buck</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/republicans" hreflang="en">republicans</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/colorado-republicans" hreflang="en">Colorado Republicans</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/weld-county" hreflang="en">weld county</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/colorado-representatives" hreflang="en">colorado representatives</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/greeley" hreflang="en">greeley</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/windsor" hreflang="en">windsor</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/republican-party" hreflang="en">republican party</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/colorado-politics" hreflang="en">colorado politics</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * links--node.html.twig x links--inline.html.twig * links--node.html.twig * links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-references-html--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-references-html.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-references-html.html.twig * field--text-long.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-references-html field--type-text-long field--label-above" id="id-field-references-html"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-references-html">References</div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-references-html"><p>Ken Buck, <em>Drain the Swamp: How Washington Corruption Is Worse Than You Think</em> (Winter Park, FL: Legacy, 2017).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>John Burnett, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/01/19/797319968/-11-billion-and-counting-trumps-border-wall-would-be-the-world-s-most-costly">“$11 Billion and Counting: Trump’s Border Wall Would Be the World’s Most Costly</a>,” <em>NPR</em>, January 19, 2020.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Jenna Carroll, “<a href="https://kdvr.com/news/coronavirus/rep-buck-opposes-2-trillion-cares-act/">Rep. Buck Opposes $2 trillion CARES Act</a>,” Fox 31 Denver, March 27, 2020.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>David Catanese, “<a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2010/10/buck-stands-by-controversial-remarks-043716#ixzz12dmGvwr2">Buck Stands by Controversial Remarks</a>,” <em>Politico</em>, October 17, 2010.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Andrea Dukakis, “<a href="https://www.cpr.org/show-segment/rep-ken-buck-on-the-border-wall-mueller-investigation-partisanship-and-more/">Rep. Ken Buck on the Border Wall, Mueller Investigation, Partisanship, and More,</a>” Colorado Public Radio, December 13, 2018.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Benjamin Fearnow, “<a href="https://www.newsweek.com/gop-congressman-warns-young-americans-are-developing-bailout-mentality-says-country-must-get-1497478">GOP Congressman Warns Young Americans Are Developing ‘Bailout Mentality,’ Says Country Must Get Back to Work</a>,” <em>Newsweek</em>, April 12, 2020.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Caitlyn Kim, “<a href="https://www.cpr.org/2019/10/18/challenging-trump-rep-buck-calls-for-more-refugee-resettlement-as-a-christian/">Challenging Trump, Rep. Buck Calls for More Refugee Resettlement, ‘As A Christian,’</a>” Colorado Public Radio, October 18, 2019.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Ernest Luning, “<a href="https://www.coloradopolitics.com/quick-hits/impeachment-transcript-buck-says-democrats-lower-the-bar-for-impeachment-during-house-debate/article_f3a72706-21d4-11ea-b84b-f73bf60ccb6d.html">Impeachment Transcript: Buck Says Democrats ‘Lower the Bar for Impeachment,’ During House Debate,</a>” <em>Colorado Politics</em>, December 18, 2019.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Maya MacGuineas, “<a href="https://www.aei.org/economics/the-tax-cuts-and-jobs-act-made-the-debt-worse-and-makes-fixing-it-even-harder/">The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act Made the Debt Worse and Makes Fixing It Even Harder</a>,” <em>American Enterprise Institute</em>, October 22, 2019.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Dan Mangan, “<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/06/rep-ken-buck-dares-joe-biden-and-beto-orourke-to-take-ar-15-rifle.html">GOP Rep. Ken Buck Wields AR-15 in Office, Dares Joe Biden and Beto O’Rourke to ‘Come and Take It,’</a>” CNBC, March 6, 2020.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Mark K. Matthews, “<a href="https://www.denverpost.com/2017/12/20/colorado-lawmakers-tax-vote/">How Colorado Lawmakers Voted on the Federal Tax Overhaul—And Why</a>,” <em>The Denver Post</em>, December 20, 2017.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Lori Obert, “<a href="https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/buck-tea-partiers-questioning-obamas-citizenship-dumbasses/73-338115507">Buck: Tea Partiers Questioning Obama’s Citizenship ‘Dumbasses,’</a>” 9News, July 25, 2010.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Cay Leytham-Powell, “<a href="https://www.denverpost.com/2016/10/13/fact-check-ken-bucks-climate-change-agenda-statement/">Ken Buck’s ‘Radical Climate Change Agenda’ Statement at Odds With Department of Defense</a>,” <em>The Denver Post</em>, October 13, 2016.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>“<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/">Rep. Ken Buck Wins Colorado’s 4th Congressional District Seat</a>,” <em>Washington Post</em>, updated April 8, 2014.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Eddie Rodriguez, “<a href="https://www.newsweek.com/national-debt-has-increased-52-trillion-during-trumps-3-years-president-1503864">National Debt Has Increased $5.2 Trillion During Trump’s 3 Years as President</a>,” <em>Newsweek</em>, May 14, 2020.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Jason Salzman, “<a href="https://coloradotimesrecorder.com/2018/06/ken-buck-says-immigrant-parents-fault-children-taken/9596/">Immigrant Parents Are at Fault, Not Trump, for Having Their Children Taken From Them at the Border, Says Colorado Congressman</a>,” <em>Colorado Times-Recorder</em>, June 7, 2018.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Allison Sherry, “<a href="https://www.denverpost.com/2010/07/28/ken-bucks-family-background-helps-him-stand-strong-on-principles/?clearUserState=true">Ken Buck’s Family Background Helps Him Stand Strong on Principles</a>,” <em>The Denver Post</em>, July 28, 2010.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Allison Sherry, “<a href="https://www.denverpost.com/2010/09/25/bucks-east-coast-ambition-meets-west-allure/">Bucks’ East Coast Ambition Meets West Allure</a>,” <em>The Denver Post</em>, September 25, 2010.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Conrad Swanson, “<a href="https://www.denverpost.com/2020/05/06/colorado-ken-buck-gop-primary/">Colorado GOP Chair Ken Buck Pressured Local Official to Submit Incorrect Election Results</a>,” <em>The Denver Post</em>, May 6, 2020.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Rebecca Waddingham, “<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20101015210714/http:/www.greeleytribune.com:80/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060301/NEWS/103010095&amp;parentprofile=&amp;template=printart">Woman Angry That Her Sex Assault Case Won’t Be Prosecuted</a>,” <em>Greeley Tribune</em>, October 15, 2010.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Justin Wingerter, “<a href="https://www.canoncitydailyrecord.com/2019/12/09/impeachment-congress-neguse-buck/">Ken Buck Says Ukraine Interfered in Election; Joe Neguse Pushes Back</a>,” <em>Canon City Daily Record</em>, December 9, 2019.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Justin Wingerter, "<a href="https://www.denverpost.com/2020/11/03/jason-crow-steve-house-cd6-colorado-race/">US House incumbents in Colorado win reelection</a>," <em>The Denver Post</em>, November 3, 2020.</p>&#13; </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-additional-information-htm--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-additional-information-htm.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-additional-information-htm.html.twig * field--text-long.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-additional-information-htm field--type-text-long field--label-above" id="id-field-additional-information-htm"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-additional-information-htm">Additional Information</div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-additional-information-htm"><p>Courtenay W. Daum, Robert Duffy, and John A. Straayer, eds., <em>State of Change: Colorado Politics in the Twenty-First Century</em> (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2011).</p>&#13; </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> Wed, 08 Jul 2020 21:44:06 +0000 yongli 3381 at http://coloradoencyclopedia.org September 2013 Floods http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/september-2013-floods <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">September 2013 Floods</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: x field--node--field-article-image--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-article-image.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-article-image.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--field-article-image--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div id="carouselEncyclopediaArticle" class="carousel slide" data-bs-ride="true"> <div class="carousel-inner"> <div class="carousel-item active"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * node--3298--article-detail-image.html.twig * node--3298.html.twig x node--image--article-detail-image.html.twig * node--image.html.twig * node--article-detail-image.html.twig * node.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/content/node--image--article-detail-image.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-encyclopedia-image--image.html.twig * field--node--field-encyclopedia-image.html.twig * field--node--image.html.twig * field--field-encyclopedia-image.html.twig * field--image.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-encyclopedia-image field--type-image field--label-hidden field__item"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image_formatter' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> <a href="/image/2013-colorado-floods"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image_style' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-style.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <img loading="lazy" src="/sites/default/files/styles/wide/public/September%202013%20Floods%20Media%201_0.jpg?itok=8LMrY2Vk" width="1090" height="726" alt="" typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-wide" /> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-style.html.twig' --> </a> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="carousel-caption d-none d-md-block"> <h5><a href="/image/2013-colorado-floods" rel="bookmark"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--image.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--image.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">2013 Colorado Floods </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> </a></h5> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--image.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig * field--node--image.html.twig * field--body.html.twig x field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p>Colorado residents who were evacuated due to flooding arrive at Boulder Municipal Airport in Boulder, September 13, 2013, after being rescued by National Guard and civilian rescue personnel. Colorado and Wyoming National Guard units were activated to provide assistance to people affected by massive flooding along Colorado's Front Range.</p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/content/node--image--article-detail-image.html.twig' --> </div> <div class="carousel-item"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * node--3300--article-detail-image.html.twig * node--3300.html.twig x node--image--article-detail-image.html.twig * node--image.html.twig * node--article-detail-image.html.twig * node.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/content/node--image--article-detail-image.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-encyclopedia-image--image.html.twig * field--node--field-encyclopedia-image.html.twig * field--node--image.html.twig * field--field-encyclopedia-image.html.twig * field--image.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-encyclopedia-image field--type-image field--label-hidden field__item"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image_formatter' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> <a href="/image/jamestown-colorado-cut-2013-colorado-floods"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image_style' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-style.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <img loading="lazy" src="/sites/default/files/styles/wide/public/September%202013%20Floods%20Media%202_0.jpg?itok=pv-S2fnN" width="1090" height="726" alt="" typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-wide" /> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-style.html.twig' --> </a> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="carousel-caption d-none d-md-block"> <h5><a href="/image/jamestown-colorado-cut-2013-colorado-floods" rel="bookmark"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--image.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--image.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Jamestown, Colorado Cut Off by 2013 Colorado Floods</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> </a></h5> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--image.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig * field--node--image.html.twig * field--body.html.twig x field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p>In September 2013, the small mountain town of Jamestown (population 300) was cut off by flooding in Boulder County.</p>&#13; </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/content/node--image--article-detail-image.html.twig' --> </div> <div class="carousel-item"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * node--3302--article-detail-image.html.twig * node--3302.html.twig x node--image--article-detail-image.html.twig * node--image.html.twig * node--article-detail-image.html.twig * node.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/content/node--image--article-detail-image.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-encyclopedia-image--image.html.twig * field--node--field-encyclopedia-image.html.twig * field--node--image.html.twig * field--field-encyclopedia-image.html.twig * field--image.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-encyclopedia-image field--type-image field--label-hidden field__item"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image_formatter' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> <a href="/image/national-guard-soldiers"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image_style' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-style.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <img loading="lazy" src="/sites/default/files/styles/wide/public/September%202013%20Floods%20Media%203_0.jpg?itok=rnpjxY6K" width="1090" height="724" alt="" typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-wide" /> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-style.html.twig' --> </a> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="carousel-caption d-none d-md-block"> <h5><a href="/image/national-guard-soldiers" rel="bookmark"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--image.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--image.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">National Guard Soldiers</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> </a></h5> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--image.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig * field--node--image.html.twig * field--body.html.twig x field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p>Soldiers with the Colorado National Guard respond to floods in Boulder County on September 12, 2013. The Colorado National Guard was activated to provide assistance to people affected by massive flooding along Colorado's Front Range.</p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/content/node--image--article-detail-image.html.twig' --> </div> </div> <button class="carousel-control-prev" type="button" data-bs-target="#carouselEncyclopediaArticle" data-bs-slide="prev"> <span class="carousel-control-prev-icon" aria-hidden="true"></span> <span class="visually-hidden">Previous</span> </button> <button class="carousel-control-next" type="button" data-bs-target="#carouselEncyclopediaArticle" data-bs-slide="next"> <span class="carousel-control-next-icon" aria-hidden="true"></span> <span class="visually-hidden">Next</span> </button> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--field-article-image--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> <span lang="" about="/users/yongli" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">yongli</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'time' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> <time datetime="2020-06-09T14:45:08-06:00" title="Tuesday, June 9, 2020 - 14:45" class="datetime">Tue, 06/09/2020 - 14:45</time> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'addtoany_standard' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * addtoany-standard--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * addtoany-standard--node.html.twig x addtoany-standard.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <span class="a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_32 addtoany_list" data-a2a-url="http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/september-2013-floods" data-a2a-title="September 2013 Floods"><a class="a2a_dd addtoany_share" href="https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=http%3A%2F%2Fcoloradoencyclopedia.org%2Farticle%2Fseptember-2013-floods&amp;title=September%202013%20Floods"></a><a class="a2a_button_facebook"></a><a class="a2a_button_twitter"></a><a class="a2a_button_email"></a></span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item" id="id-body"><p>In September 2013, Colorado’s <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/front-range"><strong>Front Range</strong></a><strong>, </strong>from <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/fort-collins"><strong>Fort Collins</strong></a> south to <a href="/article/colorado-springs"><strong>Colorado Springs</strong></a>, experienced some of the most dramatic and devastating <a href="/article/flooding-colorado"><strong>flood</strong></a><a href="/article/flooding-colorado"><strong>s</strong> </a>in state history. In the hardest-hit areas, the rainfall beginning September 9 and ending September 16 matched or exceeded annual averages. Across the region, swollen creeks and rivers jumped their banks, destroying houses, bridges, and roads, and stranding individuals and communities. The floods ultimately killed eight people and caused more than $4 billion in damages across seventeen counties.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Between Mountain and Plain</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>Along the Front Range, home to a majority of Colorado’s population, destructive flooding is not new. Centuries before the arrival of Anglo-American immigrants, American Indians seasonally hunted, foraged, and grazed horses along the nutrient-rich bottomlands of Colorado’s rivers and creeks. When whites arrived on the Front Range during the <a href="/article/colorado-gold-rush"><strong>Colorado Gold Rush</strong></a> (1858–59), Native peoples warned of the region’s tendency to flood, but the newcomers often ignored these warnings—perhaps because they thought of the area as a “<a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/%E2%80%9Cgreat-american-desert%E2%80%9D"><strong>Great American Desert</strong></a>.” They sought to overcome the region’s inconsistent rainfall by farming nutrient-rich, <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/irrigation-colorado"><strong>irrigable</strong></a> floodplains in such places as <a href="/article/greeley"><strong>Greeley</strong></a>, <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/longmont"><strong>Longmont</strong></a>, and Fort Collins. Heavy snowmelt, powerful cloudbursts, and stalled storms, however, periodically punished such intrusions.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>The area’s location as a transition zone between the rolling <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/colorado%E2%80%99s-great-plains"><strong>Great Plains</strong></a> and the jagged peaks of the <a href="/article/rocky-mountains"><strong>Rockies</strong></a> explains the potential for extreme rains. During spring and summer months, moisture-rich air from the Gulf of Mexico comes across the Great Plains and abruptly runs into the Rocky Mountains. As the mountains push the moisture-rich air upward, storm clouds occasionally form and then rupture over the Eastern Slope of the Rockies. These downpours are usually highly localized, short, and intense, dumping inches of rain over a small area in a matter of hours. In the case of most deadly floods on the Front Range, such as the <strong>Big Thompson Flood of 1976</strong> and the <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/spring-creek-flood-1997"><strong>Spring Creek Flood of 1997</strong></a>, heavy rainfall drained into creeks and rivers, overwhelming their carrying capacity and flooding cities and surrounding areas.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>In some ways, the 2013 floods fit into similar Front Range flood patterns. As in 1976 and 1997, west-moving moisture coalesced into storm clouds, fell as rain, and overwhelmed east-running waterways. In other ways, 2013 was unique. The devastating fires of 2012, especially the <a href="/article/high-park-fire"><strong>High Park Fire</strong></a> west of Fort Collins and the <a href="/article/waldo-canyon-fire"><strong>Waldo Canyon Fire</strong></a> near Colorado Springs, cleared the landscape of vegetation that slows and absorbs excess water. Additionally, while cloudbursts were responsible for previous floods, the rainstorms that flooded the Front Range in September 2013 dumped rain not just over a few miles, but from Colorado Spring to Fort Collins, and the storms lasted not hours but days.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>From Merciful Rain to Raging Rivers</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>The rain began across eastern Colorado on September 9, 2013, as a slow-moving, low-pressure system settled over the southwest, pulling moist air from the Pacific Ocean and the west coast of the Gulf of Mexico toward the Front Range. Rain was initially a welcome respite for the region’s residents, who had seen an unusually warm first week of September, a drought-plagued summer, and a series of recent <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/wildfire-colorado"><strong>forest fires</strong></a>. However, relief turned to worry as rain continued through September 10 and the low-pressure system stayed put, pulling more moisture toward the Front Range. With no immediate end in sight, the National Weather Service issued flash flood warnings in <a href="/article/boulder-county"><strong>Boulder</strong></a>, <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/el-paso-county"><strong>El Paso</strong></a>, and <a href="/article/larimer-county"><strong>Larimer</strong></a> counties on September 11.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>On the night of September 11, torrential rainfall pounded the fire-scarred, oversaturated foothills. In Boulder, the <strong>University of Colorado</strong> began its first wave of evacuations and the city activated sirens along Boulder Creek, urging those in earshot to find higher ground. Throughout the night, rockslides, debris flows, and the surging St. Vrain, <strong>Big Thompson,</strong> and <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/cache-la-poudre-river"><strong>Cache la Poudre</strong></a> rivers destroyed sections of US Highway 34, US Highway 36, Colorado Highway 14, and numerous county roads, stranding many mountain and foothill communities. The unrelenting downpour continued through September 12, forcing thousands living along the floodplains from <strong>Estes Park</strong>, Fort Collins, and <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/downtown-loveland-historic-district"><strong>Loveland</strong></a>, south to <strong>Lyons</strong>, Boulder, and Jamestown, to evacuate.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>When the rain briefly relented on September 13, army, national guard, and private helicopters began evacuating those stranded in mountain communities. After authorizing the use of <strong>Colorado National Guard</strong> helicopters in Boulder County the morning of the September 13, Governor <a href="/article/john-hickenlooper"><strong>John Hickenlooper</strong></a> signed an executive order declaring a disaster emergency across fourteen Front Range counties, providing resources for search-and-rescue operations and immediate highway repair. Through an emergency declaration on September 12, then a major disaster declaration two days later, President Barack Obama released federal funding to supplement the local and state response.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Overflowing waterways fueled by sustained precipitation also caused destruction east of the foothills. On the plains, floodwater rushing east forced evacuations, damaged agricultural land, overwhelmed wastewater facilities, and flooded oil wells. As in the foothills, swollen tributaries of the <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/south-platte-river"><strong>South Platte</strong></a><a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/south-platte-river"><strong> River</strong></a>—along with the South Platte itself—wiped out bridges, undercut roads, and tore buildings off their foundations. In the early hours of September 13, the Big Thompson River spilled over and temporarily closed <strong>Interstate 25</strong>. Just hours later in Weld County, the South Platte and the Cache la Poudre Rivers began to flood low-lying neighborhoods in Evans and Greeley, forcing evacuations.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Farther east, in <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/morgan-county"><strong>Morgan County</strong></a>, the surging South Platte, usually running two feet high in September, reached thirteen feet high on the evening of September 14, damaging infrastructure and forcing evacuations. By the time the storm finally relented on September 16, the week of rain—totaling twenty inches in Boulder, nine in Estes Park, six in Loveland, and six in Fort Collins—had reshaped natural areas and river channels all the way to the state border, destroying nearly 2,000 houses, damaging 28,000 dwellings, and killing 8 people. Pouring into western Nebraska, the South Platte remained at a moderate flood stage through September 23.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Aftermath</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>On Monday, September 16, as the storm cleared and helicopters continued to evacuate those stranded, students returned to classes at the University of Colorado. In the following days, grade schools in Larimer County reopened, road crews opened mountain roadways to flood-isolated towns, and response teams restored access to potable water and electricity from Evans to Estes Park. These steps toward recovery highlighted the resiliency of the afflicted communities and the experience and capability of responders, emergency planners, and disaster-relief crews. Decades of increasingly proactive zoning, modernized warning systems, and floodplain management helped minimize loss and streamline emergency response. Still, no town or city along the Front Range and the South Platte was fully prepared for that week of extreme rainfall, as illustrated by the expensive, prolonged recovery, the flooding of uninsured houses, and the tragic loss of life.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>After sheriff’s offices accounted for missing persons, relief organizations provided shelter for the displaced, and road crews reached previously stranded communities, efforts shifted to long-term reconstruction. Relying on reimbursements from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Federal Highway Administration, federal block grants, and state disaster funds, the Front Range began multiyear road reconstruction and neighborhood redevelopment projects. Slowed by the complicated contracts and price vetting that came with federal assistance, some of the hardest-hit mountain roadways did not reopen until 2016. US Highway 34—connecting Loveland, Estes Park, and <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/rocky-mountain-national-park"><strong>Rocky Mountain National Park</strong></a>—did not reopen until 2018. When it did, the reconstructed highway exemplified the region-wide response to the flooding: it reopened within its traditional corridor, the Big Thompson Canyon, but now followed a slightly different path to minimize washouts in the event of another storm.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>With future flooding a primary concern, municipalities across the Front Range sought to rebuild in a manner that better prepared them for the next storm. Engineers designed roadways to better deflect and avoid floodwater, and city planners turned hard-hit, low-lying neighborhoods and mobile-home parks into greenspaces, sometimes to the detriment of those who relied on the now-vanished affordable housing. The enormity of the rainfall’s destruction, along with the difficulties that came with government shutdowns, accessing federal funds, congressional alterations to FEMA aid guidelines, and the varied needs of those affected by the floods ensured that the road to recovery was anything but straight.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Flooding in the Future</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>Population growth, urban expansion, and increasingly volatile weather patterns associated with climate change mean that flooding will remain a pressing issue on the Front Range in the future. Scientists have not concluded that the abnormal rainfall from September 9 to 16, 2013, was the direct result of climate change, but aspects of the flood’s development—an abundance of moisture-rich air and increased storm volatility, both stemming from warmer temperatures—suggest that instances of heavy rainfall may increase across the region in the coming decades.</p>&#13; </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-author--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-author.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-author.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-author field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-author"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-author">Author</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-author"><a href="/author/purdy-tristan" hreflang="und">Purdy, Tristan</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-keyword--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-keyword.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-keyword.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-keyword field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-keyword"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-keyword">Keywords</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/september-2013-floods" hreflang="en">september 2013 floods</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/front-range-floods" hreflang="en">front range floods</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/larimer-county" hreflang="en">larimer county</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/boulder-county" hreflang="en">boulder county</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/weld-county" hreflang="en">weld county</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/flooding-colorado" hreflang="en">flooding in colorado</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/flood-history" hreflang="en">flood history</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/2013" hreflang="en">2013</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/loveland" hreflang="en">loveland</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/boulder" hreflang="en">boulder</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/fort-collins" hreflang="en">fort collins</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/greeley" hreflang="en">greeley</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/estes-park" hreflang="en">Estes Park</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/longmont" hreflang="en">longmont</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * links--node.html.twig x links--inline.html.twig * links--node.html.twig * links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-references-html--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-references-html.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-references-html.html.twig * field--text-long.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-references-html field--type-text-long field--label-above" id="id-field-references-html"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-references-html">References</div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-references-html"><p>John Aguilar, “<a href="https://www.denverpost.com/2018/09/09/colorado-floods-2013-recovery/">‘We're About to Wake Up’: Victims of Colorado's 2013 Flood Look to End of Recovery</a>,” <em>The</em> <em>Denver Post</em>, September 9, 2018.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>John Aguilar and Charlie Brennan, “<a href="https://www.dailycamera.com/2013/09/21/eight-days-1000-year-rain-100-year-flood/">Eight Days, 1,000-Year Rain, 100-Year Flood</a>,” <em>Daily Camera </em>(Boulder), September 21, 2013.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Ruth M. Alexander, “<a href="https://mountainscholar.org/bitstream/handle/10217/167378/2013ColoradoFloodOralHistoryFinalReport.pdf?sequence=1&amp;isAllowed=y">2013 Northern Colorado Flood Oral History Project: Final Report</a>” (Fort Collins: Northern Colorado Flood Oral History Collection, Water Resources Archive, Colorado State University Libraries, 2015).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Kathleen A. Brosnan, <em>Uniting Mountain and Plain: Cities, Law, and Environmental Change Along the Front Range</em> (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Terri Cook, “<a href="https://www.earthmagazine.org/article/disaster-strikes-along-colorados-front-range">Disaster Strikes Along Colorado’s Front Range</a>,” <em>EARTH Magazine</em>, January 20, 2014.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Michael deYoanna, “<a href="https://www.coloradoindependent.com/2019/09/19/parked-mobile-home-dwellers-left-behind-after-2013-colorado-floods/">Parked: Mobile-Home Dwellers Left Behind After 2013 Colorado Floods</a>,” <em>Colorado Independent, </em>September 19, 2019.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Nolan J. Doesken, Roger A. Pielke, Sr., and Odilia A. P. Bliss, “<a href="https://climate.colostate.edu/climate_long.html">Climate of Colorado</a>,” Colorado Climate Center (Fort Collins: Colorado State University, 2003).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Dan England, “<a href="https://www.greeleytribune.com/2013/09/28/something-wicked-this-way-came-flood-brings-devastation-but-weld-endures/">Something Wicked This Way Came: Flood Brings Devastation but Weld Endures</a>,” <em>Greeley Tribune</em>, September 28, 2013.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Robert Follansbee and Leon R. Sawyer, <a href="https://pubs.usgs.gov/wsp/0997/report.pdf"><em>Floods in Colorado</em></a>, US Geological Survey Water Supply Paper 997 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1948).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Jenni Grubbs, “<a href="https://www.fortmorgantimes.com/2013/09/23/morgan-county-roads-bridges-see-damage-from-flood-2/">Morgan County Roads, Bridges See Damage From Flood</a>,” <em>Fort Morgan Times, </em>September 23, 2013.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Wallace R. Hansen, John Chronic, and John Matelock, <a href="https://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/1019/report.pdf"><em>Climatography of the Front Range Urban Corridor and Vicinity, Colorado</em></a><em>, </em>US Geological Survey Professional Paper 1019 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1978).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Sarah Hines, “<a href="https://www.fs.fed.us/rm/science-application-integration/docs/science-you-can-use/2014-03.pdf">Our Relationship With a Dynamic Landscape: Understanding the 2013 Northern Colorado Flood</a>,” <em>Science You Can Use Bulletin</em> (March/April 2014).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Robert A. Kimbrough and Robert R. Holmes, Jr., <a href="https://dx.doi.org/10.3133/sir20155119"><em>Flooding in the South Platte River and Fountain Creek Basins in Eastern Colorado, September 9–18, 2013</em></a><em>, </em>US Geological Survey Scientific Investigations Report 2015-5119 (Virginia, 2015).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Danielle Langevin and Tessa Sullivan, “<a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/spring-creek-flood-1997">Spring Creek Flood of 1997</a>,” <em>Colorado Encyclopedia</em>, last modified October 24, 2019.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Patricia N. Limerick and Jason Hanson, <em>A Ditch in Time: The City, the West and Wate</em>r (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2012).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Jacy Marmaduke, “<a href="https://www.coloradoan.com/story/news/2019/05/03/big-thompson-flood-fema-hasnt-funded-road-bridge-repairs/3651296002/">6 Years After Big Thompson Flood, FEMA Hasn’t Paid Up: Lack of Reimbursement Has Delayed Road Repairs</a>,” <em>Coloradoan</em> (Fort Collins), May 6, 2019.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>National Weather Service, “<a href="https://www.weather.gov/lbf/southplatte_platte_flooding_2013#NebraskaFlooding">South Platte/Platte River Flooding of 2013</a>.”</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Office of the Governor, “<a href="https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/archives/governor-hickenlooper-executive-orders">Executive Order D 2013-026 Declaring a Disaster Emergency Due to the Flooding in Adams, Arapahoe, Broomfield, Boulder, Denver, El Paso, Fremont, Jefferson, Larimer, Logan, Morgan, Pueblo, Washington, and Weld Counties (Front Range Flooding)</a>,” September 13, 2013.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Geoff Plumlee, “<a href="https://www.earthmagazine.org/article/when-water-gravity-and-geology-collide-firsthand-observations-impacts-2013-colorado-floods">When Water, Gravity and Geology Collide: Firsthand Observations of the Impacts of the 2013 Colorado floods</a>,” <em>EARTH Magazine, </em>January 21, 2014.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Katie Schimel, “<a href="https://www.hcn.org/issues/47.17/how-2013s-front-range-floods-changed-the-face-of-the-region">How 2013’s Front Range Floods Changed the Face of the Region</a>,” <em>High Country News, </em>October 12, 2015.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>“<a href="https://www.reporterherald.com/2018/09/08/the-2013-flood-a-timeline/">The 2013 Flood: A Timeline</a>,” <em>Loveland (CO) Reporter-Herald</em>, September 8, 2018.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Daniel Tyler, <em>Silver Fox of the Rockies: Delphus E. Carpenter and Western Water Compacts </em>(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Louis W. Uccellini, <a href="),%20https:/prd-wret.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium/production/s3fs-public/atoms/files/NWS_CO_FSA.pdf"><em>The Record Front Range and Eastern Colorado Floods of September 11–17, 2013</em></a><em>,</em> US Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Service Assessment (Silver Spring, MD, June 2014).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>US Department of Homeland Security, “<a href="https://www.fema.gov/news-release/2013/09/15/fema-continues-support-response-colorado-flooding">FEMA Continues to Support Response to Colorado Flooding</a>,” September 15, 2013.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>US Department of Homeland Security, “<a href="https://www.fema.gov/news-release/2013/09/12/president-obama-signs-colorado-emergency-declaration">President Obama Signs Colorado Emergency Declaration</a>,” September 12, 2013.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Monte Whaley, “<a href="https://www.denverpost.com/2014/09/13/flood-damaged-colorado-roads-are-getting-a-makeover/">Flood-Damaged Colorado Roads Are Getting a Makeover</a>,” <em>The</em> <em>Denver Post, </em>September 13, 2014.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Will Wright, “<a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/flooding-colorado">Flooding in Colorado</a>,” <em>Colorado Encyclopedia,</em> last modified October 23, 2019.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>William Wyckoff, <em>Creating Colorado: The Making of a Western American Landscape, 1860–1940 </em>(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).</p>&#13; </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-additional-information-htm--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-additional-information-htm.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-additional-information-htm.html.twig * field--text-long.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-additional-information-htm field--type-text-long field--label-above" id="id-field-additional-information-htm"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-additional-information-htm">Additional Information</div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-additional-information-htm"><p>Robert Crifasi, <em>A Land Made From Water: Appropriation and the Evolution of Colorado's Landscape, Ditches, and Water Institutions </em>(Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2015).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Darla Sue Dollman, <em>Colorado’s Deadliest Floods </em>(Charleston, SC: History Press, 2017).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Jared Orsi, <em>Hazardous Metropolis: Flooding and Urban Ecology in Los Angele</em>s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Ted Steinberg<em>, Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America</em> (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).</p>&#13; </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> Tue, 09 Jun 2020 20:45:08 +0000 yongli 3272 at http://coloradoencyclopedia.org Nathan Meeker http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/nathan-meeker <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Nathan Meeker</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: x field--node--field-article-image--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-article-image.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-article-image.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--field-article-image--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div id="carouselEncyclopediaArticle" class="carousel slide" data-bs-ride="true"> <div class="carousel-inner"> <div class="carousel-item active"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * node--3321--article-detail-image.html.twig * node--3321.html.twig x node--image--article-detail-image.html.twig * node--image.html.twig * node--article-detail-image.html.twig * node.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/content/node--image--article-detail-image.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-encyclopedia-image--image.html.twig * field--node--field-encyclopedia-image.html.twig * field--node--image.html.twig * field--field-encyclopedia-image.html.twig * field--image.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-encyclopedia-image field--type-image field--label-hidden field__item"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image_formatter' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> <a href="/image/nathan-meekers-home"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image_style' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-style.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <img loading="lazy" src="/sites/default/files/styles/wide/public/Nathan-Meeker-Media-2_0.jpg?itok=kTc8jWgm" width="900" height="621" alt="" typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-wide" /> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-style.html.twig' --> </a> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="carousel-caption d-none d-md-block"> <h5><a href="/image/nathan-meekers-home" rel="bookmark"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--image.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--image.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Nathan Meeker&#039;s Home</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> </a></h5> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--image.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig * field--node--image.html.twig * field--body.html.twig x field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p>After founding the city of Greeley in 1870, Nathan Meeker built himself a stately two-story house on Ninth Avenue. After his death in 1879, the home was purchased by Greeley residents and converted into the city's first history museum. Today it houses the Meeker Home Museum.</p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/content/node--image--article-detail-image.html.twig' --> </div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--field-article-image--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> <span lang="" about="/users/yongli" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">yongli</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'time' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> <time datetime="2020-01-15T14:44:30-07:00" title="Wednesday, January 15, 2020 - 14:44" class="datetime">Wed, 01/15/2020 - 14:44</time> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'addtoany_standard' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * addtoany-standard--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * addtoany-standard--node.html.twig x addtoany-standard.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <span class="a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_32 addtoany_list" data-a2a-url="http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/nathan-meeker" data-a2a-title="Nathan Meeker"><a class="a2a_dd addtoany_share" href="https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=http%3A%2F%2Fcoloradoencyclopedia.org%2Farticle%2Fnathan-meeker&amp;title=Nathan%20Meeker"></a><a class="a2a_button_facebook"></a><a class="a2a_button_twitter"></a><a class="a2a_button_email"></a></span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item" id="id-body"><p>Nathan&nbsp;Cook Meeker (1817–1879) was an agriculturalist, newspaper editor, and Indian agent. He founded the <strong>Union Colony</strong> at present-day <a href="/article/greeley"><strong>Greeley</strong></a> as well as the city’s oldest newspaper, the <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/greeley-tribune-building"><strong><em>Greeley Tribune</em></strong></a>. In 1878 he was appointed <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/indian-agencies-and-agents"><strong>Indian agent</strong></a> of the <a href="/article/white-river-ute-indian-agency"><strong>White River Agency</strong></a> in northwest Colorado. He was killed at the agency in September 1879 after his poor treatment of the <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/search/google/ute"><strong>Utes</strong></a> provoked a <a href="/article/meeker-incident"><strong>revolt</strong></a>. The small community of <a href="/article/meeker-0"><strong>Meeker</strong></a> in <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/rio-blanco-county"><strong>Rio Blanco County</strong></a> bears his name.</p> <h2>Early Life</h2> <p>Nathan Meeker was born on July 12, 1817, in Euclid, Ohio, the third child of Enoch and Lurana Meeker. After a childhood spent working on his family’s farm, Meeker developed a passion for writing. Beginning at age seventeen, he worked for newspapers in New Orleans, Cleveland, and Louisville, Kentucky.</p> <p>Meeker was an avid reader despite having only a grade-school education. He read Greek classics, the Bible, poetry, and political theory. He was also a productive writer, keeping a diary and authoring poems, articles, short stories, and novels. His newspaper articles often focused on agriculture. Like some other nineteenth-century authors, Meeker had an opium habit.</p> <h2>Interests, Career, and Family</h2> <p>The works of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson introduced the young, ambitious Meeker to the idea of the utopian community. Enthralled by the idea of gradually perfecting the human experience, Meeker studied attempts at utopian communities in Oneida, New York, and in Mormon Utah. The utopia became a central part of his religious philosophy, which focused on applying God’s gift of free will toward self- and community improvement. He rejected war and capital punishment and embraced temperance.</p> <p>As he endeavored to “do something of significance before I die,” Meeker came across French philosopher Charles Fournier’s theory of cooperative agriculture in the pages of <strong>Horace Greeley</strong>’s <em>New York Tribune</em>. Soon, he joined Greeley, Emerson, and others in establishing collective agricultural communities across the Midwest during the 1840s.</p> <p>In 1844 he married <strong>Arvilla Smith</strong>, a childhood friend from Euclid, Ohio. The pair would have five children: Ralph, George, Rozene, Mary, and <strong>Josephine</strong>.</p> <p>After the failure of his utopian community in Braceville, Ohio, Meeker tried to launch his literary career with the help of Horace Greeley. Meeker’s relationship with Greeley continued into the 1850s, when Greeley helped Meeker publish a novel about an English missionary expedition to the Sandwich Islands (present-day Hawai’i). In the novel, Meeker’s English captain attempts to “civilize” the island’s native population, with disastrous results—an uncanny foreshadowing of Meeker’s own fate.</p> <p>The novel sold poorly, and Meeker relocated his family to a farm in southern Illinois. After a brief period of success, the family was again short of money, so Meeker went back to writing agricultural articles for the <em>Cleveland Plain Dealer</em> and <em>New York Tribune</em>. Impressed by Meeker’s writing, Greeley hired him in 1861 as the <em>Tribune</em>’s <a href="/article/civil-war-colorado"><strong>Civil War</strong></a> correspondent in southern Illinois. After the war ended in 1865, Greeley made Meeker the <em>Tribune</em>’s agricultural editor, and the Meekers moved to New Jersey.</p> <h2>Union Colony</h2> <p>Greeley, the consummate booster, was obsessed with the West and its prospects for settlement and agriculture. In 1869 Greeley sent Meeker to <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/colorado-territory"><strong>Colorado Territory</strong></a> to write a series of articles, and on the way Meeker met railroad mogul <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/william-jackson-palmer"><strong>William Jackson Palmer</strong></a> and <strong><em>Rocky Mountain News</em></strong> editor <a href="/article/william-n-byers"><strong>William N. Byers</strong></a>. They told Meeker of their plans to build railroads and communities around <a href="/article/denver"><strong>Denver</strong></a>, and Meeker began thinking of Colorado as the place where he might finally build his agrarian utopia.</p> <p>In New York, Greeley and Meeker drafted the charter for an agricultural community called the Union Colony. Through Byers, Meeker purchased land near the confluence of the <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/south-platte-river"><strong>South Platte</strong></a> and <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/cache-la-poudre-river"><strong>Cache la Poudre</strong></a> Rivers. In 1870 Meeker and the first group of colonists arrived at their new townsite; the colonists wanted to name the community after Meeker, but he demurred and instead suggested Greeley, in honor of his editor and financier.</p> <p>The Union Colony got off to a rough start, with the arid climate and unbroken land proving to be stubborn obstacles. Financial solvency was constantly an issue for the colony and for Meeker himself. In 1870 Meeker borrowed $1,500 from Greeley to found the <em>Greeley Tribune</em>. Although he delighted in publishing the paper, he was unable to repay the debt by the time Greeley died, and Greeley’s daughters eventually sued Meeker for the unpaid sum of $1,000. Compounding his hardship, Meeker’s son George died of tuberculosis in 1877. Grieving and again in financial trouble, Meeker looked for employment elsewhere.</p> <h2>Indian Agent</h2> <p>As Meeker racked up debt at Union Colony, the federal government was having a difficult time finding a permanent Indian agent for the White River Indian Agency in northwest Colorado. Established soon after the <a href="/article/ute-treaty-1868"><strong>Ute Treaty of 1868</strong></a>, the agency’s primary purpose was to distribute rations and other <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/indian-annuities"><strong>annuities</strong></a> to the Parianuche and Yampa Ute bands, then known as the White River Utes. On account of federal negligence, the annuities often arrived late or not at all, prompting the Utes to reject agents’ efforts to encourage farming and instead continue their seasonal hunts, both on and off the reservation.</p> <p>Down on his luck, Meeker saw the salaried Indian agent job as one of several positions that might help him repay his debts and salvage his reputation. With a recommendation from Colorado senator <a href="http://www.coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/henry-teller"><strong>Henry Teller</strong></a>, among others, President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed Meeker to head the White River Agency in 1878. Meeker had no experience with American Indians and knew little of the Utes beyond stereotypes when he arrived at the White River Agency in early 1879.</p> <p>Appointed in part because of his agricultural experience, Meeker’s first order was to move the agency’s buildings onto land more suitable for farming and <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/irrigation-colorado"><strong>irrigation</strong></a>—land that happened to be a Ute horse pasture. For the Utes, it was the first of many grievances against their new agent.</p> <p>While the Utes resisted farming and left the reservation to hunt, Meeker wrote articles that contradicted his belief that all people could be “reformed”—the Utes, he grumbled, were too set in their ways, imbued with an inferior intelligence and character. His frustration soon turned to cruelty, as at one point he withheld the Utes’ rations as punishment for their refusal to follow his teachings. He declared, in direct opposition to the 1868 treaty, that the reservation did not belong to the Utes but to the government; he ordered pasture after pasture to be plowed into farm fields. Where other agents might have taken a more lenient approach in exchange for cooperation, the stubborn Meeker would accept nothing but total compliance.</p> <h2>Meeker Incident</h2> <p>Meeker’s heavy-handedness began to wear on local Ute leaders, especially <strong>Johnson</strong> and <strong>Douglass</strong>. After Meeker arrived, both were willing to try a bit of farming, but as the agent’s conduct toward them worsened they grew increasingly frustrated. During one argument late in the summer of 1879, Johnson shoved Meeker and hurt the agent’s arm. Fearing for his life, Meeker wrote for federal troops to come to the agency and protect him.</p> <p>As US cavalry under Major Thomas Thornburgh advanced toward the agency, the Utes warned Meeker that troops entering the reservation would be taken as an act of war. Meeker relayed the Utes’ warning to Thornburgh, but the major had already decided to proceed to the agency. On September 29, 1879, Ute warriors pinned down Thornburgh’s cavalry at Milk Creek. When Utes at the agency learned that troops had entered the reservation, they set fire to the buildings and killed all white male employees, including Meeker.</p> <p>Army reinforcements finally relieved the US cavalry at Milk Creek on October 5, forcing the Utes’ surrender. The soldiers proceeded to the agency, where they found the burned buildings and the mutilated bodies of Meeker and his staff. Meeker’s head had been bludgeoned and impaled.</p> <p>It is perhaps a cruel irony that Meeker met a fate similar to the one he wrote for his literary character Captain Armstrong, who was run off by the native islanders he hoped to convert and “civilize.” But it is also apparent that Meeker did not take his own story to heart, as he failed to appreciate the folly of his actions at the Indian agency.</p> <p>Meeker’s body was recovered and now lies buried in Greeley’s Linn Grove Cemetery.</p> <h2>Legacy</h2> <p>In 1929 Greeley residents bought Nathan Meeker’s former home at 1324 Ninth Avenue and converted it into the Meeker Home Museum. Outside of Greeley, where he is still celebrated for his role in the city’s development, Meeker is largely remembered as an overzealous Indian agent who caused his own demise. His ambition, self-belief, and determination made him a successful entrepreneur and journalist as well as an ideal government agent; however, it was those same qualities that inspired the arrogance and willful ignorance that got him killed.</p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-author--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-author.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-author.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-author field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-author"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-author">Author</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-author"><a href="/author/encyclopedia-staff" hreflang="und">Encyclopedia Staff</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-keyword--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-keyword.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-keyword.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-keyword field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-keyword"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-keyword">Keywords</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/nathan-meeker" hreflang="en">nathan meeker</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/meeker" hreflang="en">meeker</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/white-river" hreflang="en">white river</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/white-river-agency" hreflang="en">white river agency</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/meeker-massacre" hreflang="en">meeker massacre</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/horace-greeley" hreflang="en">Horace Greeley</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/union-colony" hreflang="en">union colony</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/greeley" hreflang="en">greeley</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/agriculture" hreflang="en">agriculture</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/indian-agent" hreflang="en">Indian Agent</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/ute" hreflang="en">ute</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/ute-history" hreflang="en">ute history</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/rio-blanco-county" hreflang="en">rio blanco county</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/weld-county" hreflang="en">weld county</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * links--node.html.twig x links--inline.html.twig * links--node.html.twig * links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-references-html--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-references-html.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-references-html.html.twig * field--text-long.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-references-html field--type-text-long field--label-above" id="id-field-references-html"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-references-html">References</div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-references-html"><p>Peter R. Decker, <em>“The Utes Must Go!”: American Expansion and the Removal of a People </em>(Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2004).</p> <p>Mike Peters, “<a href="https://www.greeleytribune.com/2002/11/25/the-obituary-of-nathan-meeker-written-as-it-would-appear-today/">The Obituary of Nathan Meeker: Written as It Would Appear Today</a>,” <em>Greeley Tribune</em>, November 25, 2002.</p> <p>Emily Wenger, “<a href="https://www.greeleytribune.com/2019/06/06/meeker-home-museum-hosting-free-event-in-celebration-of-nathan-meekers-birthday/">Meeker Home Museum Hosting Free Event in Celebration of Nathan Meeker’s birthday</a>,” <em>Greeley Tribune</em>, June 6, 2019.</p> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-additional-information-htm--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-additional-information-htm.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-additional-information-htm.html.twig * field--text-long.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-additional-information-htm field--type-text-long field--label-above" id="id-field-additional-information-htm"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-additional-information-htm">Additional Information</div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-additional-information-htm"><p>Sondra G. Jones, <em>Being and Becoming Ute: The Story of an American Indian People </em>(Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019).</p> <p><a href="https://greeleymuseums.com/locations/meeker-home/">Meeker Home Museum</a></p> <p>Sandy Shimko, “<a href="https://www.theheraldtimes.com/letter-%E2%80%98meeker-incident%E2%80%99-waters-down-history/meeker/">Letter: ‘Meeker Incident’ Waters Down History</a>,” <em>Times Herald </em>(Meeker, CO), October 9, 2009.</p> <p>Robert Silbernagel, <em>Troubled Trails: The Meeker Affair and the Expulsion of Utes From Colorado </em>(Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2011).</p> <p>Virginia McConnell Simmons, <em>The Ute Indians of Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico </em>(Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2000).</p> <p>Southern Ute Tribe, “<a href="https://www.southernute-nsn.gov/history/chronology/">Chronology</a>,” n.d.</p> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> Wed, 15 Jan 2020 21:44:30 +0000 yongli 3114 at http://coloradoencyclopedia.org Greeley http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/greeley <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Greeley</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: x field--node--field-article-image--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-article-image.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-article-image.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--field-article-image--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div id="carouselEncyclopediaArticle" class="carousel slide" data-bs-ride="true"> <div class="carousel-inner"> <div class="carousel-item active"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * node--2953--article-detail-image.html.twig * node--2953.html.twig x node--image--article-detail-image.html.twig * node--image.html.twig * node--article-detail-image.html.twig * node.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/content/node--image--article-detail-image.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-encyclopedia-image--image.html.twig * field--node--field-encyclopedia-image.html.twig * field--node--image.html.twig * field--field-encyclopedia-image.html.twig * field--image.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-encyclopedia-image field--type-image field--label-hidden field__item"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image_formatter' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> <a href="/image/greeley-welcome-sign-us-highway-34"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image_style' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-style.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <img loading="lazy" src="/sites/default/files/styles/wide/public/1200px-Greeley%2C_Colorado_0.jpg?itok=S0DC6RwM" width="1090" height="722" alt="" typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-wide" /> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-style.html.twig' --> </a> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="carousel-caption d-none d-md-block"> <h5><a href="/image/greeley-welcome-sign-us-highway-34" rel="bookmark"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--image.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--image.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Greeley Welcome Sign, US Highway 34</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> </a></h5> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--image.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig * field--node--image.html.twig * field--body.html.twig x field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p>Established in 1869 as an agricultural colony, the city of Greeley evolved into a bustling hub on Colorado's northeast plains. It is currently the twelfth-largest city in the state and serves as the <a href="/article/weld-county"><strong>Weld County</strong></a> seat.</p>&#13; </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/content/node--image--article-detail-image.html.twig' --> </div> <div class="carousel-item"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * node--2954--article-detail-image.html.twig * node--2954.html.twig x node--image--article-detail-image.html.twig * node--image.html.twig * node--article-detail-image.html.twig * node.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/content/node--image--article-detail-image.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-encyclopedia-image--image.html.twig * field--node--field-encyclopedia-image.html.twig * field--node--image.html.twig * field--field-encyclopedia-image.html.twig * field--image.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-encyclopedia-image field--type-image field--label-hidden field__item"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image_formatter' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> <a href="/image/greeley-city-hall"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image_style' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-style.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <img loading="lazy" src="/sites/default/files/styles/wide/public/1200px-Greeley_Colorado_City_Hall.jpeg?itok=gkvV0UVq" width="1090" height="818" alt="" typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-wide" /> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-style.html.twig' --> </a> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="carousel-caption d-none d-md-block"> <h5><a href="/image/greeley-city-hall" rel="bookmark"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--image.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--image.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Greeley City Hall</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> </a></h5> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--image.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig * field--node--image.html.twig * field--body.html.twig x field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p>The city of Greeley opened its new city hall, called city center, on September 4, 2018. This photo shows the old, uniquely circular city hall building&nbsp;in 2009.</p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/content/node--image--article-detail-image.html.twig' --> </div> <div class="carousel-item"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * node--2955--article-detail-image.html.twig * node--2955.html.twig x node--image--article-detail-image.html.twig * node--image.html.twig * node--article-detail-image.html.twig * node.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/content/node--image--article-detail-image.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-encyclopedia-image--image.html.twig * field--node--field-encyclopedia-image.html.twig * field--node--image.html.twig * field--field-encyclopedia-image.html.twig * field--image.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-encyclopedia-image field--type-image field--label-hidden field__item"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image_formatter' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> <a href="/image/horace-greeley"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image_style' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-style.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <img loading="lazy" src="/sites/default/files/styles/wide/public/Horace-Greeley-Baker.jpeg_0.jpeg?itok=dU5aTOxj" width="633" height="900" alt="" typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-wide" /> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-style.html.twig' --> </a> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="carousel-caption d-none d-md-block"> <h5><a href="/image/horace-greeley" rel="bookmark"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--image.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--image.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Horace Greeley</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> </a></h5> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--image.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig * field--node--image.html.twig * field--body.html.twig x field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p>The city of Greeley is named for <strong>Horace Greeley</strong>, editor of the <em>New York Tribune</em>&nbsp;and a prominent booster of western settlement in the mid-nineteenth century.</p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 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field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> <span lang="" about="/users/yongli" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">yongli</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'time' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> <time datetime="2018-06-19T13:33:35-06:00" title="Tuesday, June 19, 2018 - 13:33" class="datetime">Tue, 06/19/2018 - 13:33</time> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'addtoany_standard' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * addtoany-standard--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * addtoany-standard--node.html.twig x addtoany-standard.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <span class="a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_32 addtoany_list" data-a2a-url="http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/greeley" data-a2a-title="Greeley"><a class="a2a_dd addtoany_share" href="https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=http%3A%2F%2Fcoloradoencyclopedia.org%2Farticle%2Fgreeley&amp;title=Greeley"></a><a class="a2a_button_facebook"></a><a class="a2a_button_twitter"></a><a class="a2a_button_email"></a></span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item" id="id-body"><p>Greeley is a growing community of 100,000 people along the <a href="/article/front-range"><strong>Front Range</strong></a> in northeastern Colorado. Founded as an agricultural colony in 1870, the city has an economic, political, and cultural reach that extends far beyond its municipal borders. Greeley is the county seat of <a href="/article/weld-county"><strong>Weld County</strong></a>, one of the state’s richest agricultural regions and one of the most prolific zones for oil and natural gas development.</p> <p>Greeley and its residents have long tied their hopes and fortunes to the production of commodities consumed both locally and in distant global markets. The city’s founders played a major role in the creation of <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/water-law"><strong>water law in Colorado</strong></a> and across the American West. Local beef barons pioneered business concepts in Greeley that have influenced meat production worldwide, and the agricultural industries in and around Greeley continue to serve as a magnet for immigrant and refugee workers from as far as Latin America, East Africa, and Southeast Asia. Early residents of Greeley also established Colorado’s first teaching college, now called the <strong>University of Northern Colorado</strong>. It has trained, and continues to train, more educators than any other school in the state.</p> <h2>Agricultural Heritage</h2> <p>The City of Greeley began in 1870 as a colony of 480 would-be agriculturalists, each with enough money to survive for a year and a desire to build a utopian community based on <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/irrigation-colorado"><strong>irrigation</strong></a>, faith, family, and temperance. The colonists moved as a group into <strong>Arapaho</strong> and <strong>Cheyenne</strong> territory, spurred by the conviction that the future <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/homestead"><strong>homestead</strong></a> movement would favor communal over individualistic settlement. <a href="/article/nathaniel-meeker"><strong>Nathaniel Meeker</strong></a>, a journalist for <strong>Horace Greeley</strong>’s <em>The New-York Tribune</em>, bought the land for the Union Colony near the confluence of the <a href="/article/south-platte-river"><strong>South Platte</strong></a> and <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/cache-la-poudre-river"><strong>Cache la Poudre</strong></a> Rivers. The city was eventually named “Greeley” after the <em>Tribune’s </em>owner, a famous western booster known for popularizing the phrase, “Go West, young man.”&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>Aware that they would have to reroute river <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/water-colorado"><strong>water</strong></a> to grow anything in Colorado’s semi-arid <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/colorado-climate"><strong>climate</strong></a>, the Union Colonists dug <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/irrigation-colorado"><strong>irrigation</strong></a> ditches immediately upon their arrival. Carving the canals was not easy, but by 1888 the colonists had built three major ditches capable of irrigating 90,000 acres of land.</p> <p>In the dry summer of 1874, when the Cache la Poudre River did not have enough water to supply the irrigators in Greeley and more recent arrivals in upstream <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/fort-collins"><strong>Fort Collins</strong></a>, members of local ditch companies began discussions that would lead to the establishment of formal <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/water-law"><strong>water law</strong></a> in Colorado. Greeley’s irrigators believed they had earned the right to their water supply because they had first diverted it. Their rationale eventually became legal precedent. Five years after the 1874 water meetings, the state legislature codified Colorado’s prior appropriation doctrine, which assigns water rights based on a “first in time, first in right” approach. Several other Western states adopted the doctrine as they wrote their own water laws in later years.</p> <p>Agriculture has been a mainstay in Greeley’s economy since the founding of the Union Colony, despite periodic booms and busts. For example, Northern Colorado farmers suffered heavy losses during the <a href="/article/dust-bowl"><strong>Dust Bowl</strong></a> years of the mid-1930s, but in the decades before and after they benefitted significantly from the increased demand and expanded market access brought by <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/colorado-world-war-i"><strong>World War I</strong></a> and <strong>World War</strong> <strong>II</strong>. Farmers primarily grew potatoes and <a href="/article/sugar-beet-industry"><strong>sugar beets</strong></a> in the early days of Greeley agriculture, until blight reduced potato yields and corn-based sweeteners began to out-compete sugar beets starting in the 1940s. Today, farmers around Greeley grow baby carrots, onions, sugar beets, potatoes, alfalfa, feed corn, wheat, barley, dry beans, and oats. Weld County is the richest agricultural county east of the Rocky Mountains and leads the state in the value of agricultural products sold.</p> <p>These days, Greeley’s top agricultural products are not crops, but livestock—an economic legacy of the Monfort family, who pioneered the concept of the large-scale livestock feedlot. Shortly after World War I, father and son Warren and Kenneth Monfort began keeping their cattle in a pen and feeding them surplus crops; this way, they could both fatten them up faster and make them available year-round instead of only at fall round-up time. After World War II, when demand for beef climbed, the Monforts expanded their family cattle farm into a multi-billion-dollar international corporation—<strong>Monfort of Colorado, Inc.</strong>—that raised, slaughtered, packaged, and distributed beef. By taking over nearly all of the butchering and transportation logistics involved in meatpacking, the Monforts cut out middlemen almost entirely. The “boxed beef” model they pioneered is now an industry standard. By the time Kenneth Monfort sold the family business to ConAgra for $365 million in 1987, it was one of Greeley’s largest employers and one of the world’s biggest beef operations. Since 2007 the Greeley meatpacking facility has been owned and operated by the Brazilian firm <strong>JBS</strong>, which made its US headquarters there.</p> <h2>Immigrant Labor</h2> <p>Greeley’s agricultural industries have been powered by immigrant labor since their inception. The boom in sugar beets in at the turn of the twentieth century spurred the construction of large sugar plants in Greeley and surrounding communities, which in turn boosted local beet production and demand for laborers in the beet fields. The <strong>Great Western Sugar Company</strong> recruited German workers from Russia, and Japanese workers from the Pacific Coast. Some of these migrant workers saved their earnings and purchased their own farmland in the area. By the 1920s, workers from Mexico and Latin America provided another important source of labor for sugar beet production.</p> <p>Immigrants—documented and undocumented—continue to play a central role in Greeley’s agricultural economy. The meatpacking industry relies heavily on immigrant labor to fill eight-hour standing shifts on the killing floor, where employees perform gory work and navigate safety hazards. Meatpacking’s current dependence on immigrant labor is not without controversy or conflict. On December 12, 2006, federal immigration agents raided Swift &amp; Co.’s meatpacking plant in Greeley, along with company plants in five other Western cities. At the time, it was the largest immigration raid ever carried out in the United States. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents arrested 1,297 undocumented workers, including 273 from the Greeley plant, and sent them to detention and deportation centers in other states. The immigrant community in Greeley is still adjusting to life after the raids. More than 200 children in Greeley came home that day to find one or both parents gone.</p> <p>In 2007 JBS, the new owners of the meatpacking plant, went on a hiring spree to make up for the workers lost from the raid and to reinstitute a second shift at the plant. JBS increased its workforce from 2,000 in 2007 to 5,000 in 2010, making it the largest employer in Weld County. When JBS’s initial efforts failed to recruit enough new hires, the company began recruiting refugees who have been granted political asylum in the United States, including Somalians and Burmese. In 2010 JBS estimated that refugee workers made up 15 percent of its workforce. According to the 2010 census, Greeley’s ethnic make-up was 59 percent white, 36 percent Hispanic or Latino, and 5 percent a mix of Black or African American, Asian, and American Indian.</p> <p>Like the new Westerners before them, these most recent arrivals are bringing novel cultural dimensions to Greeley. In addition to Greeley’s many tortillerias and the Mexican American Studies Club at the University of Northern Colorado, there is now an East African Halal market downtown and a Somali-speaking teller at the Wells Fargo bank. At JBS, the union handbook is being printed in English, Spanish, Burmese, and Somali, and prayer breaks are now granted during Muslim holidays.</p> <h2>Energy Development</h2> <p>In 1870 Greeley’s founders very purposefully located their new community near one highly important resource: water. What they could not have known was that they accidentally placed their community atop another set of resources crucial to the future: oil and natural gas. The area around Greeley, known by energy producers as the <strong>Wattenberg Field</strong>, is Colorado’s most prolific region of hydrocarbon production. More than 20,000 oil and natural gas wells have been drilled in the area since the 1970s. The field is currently experiencing a new boom in production thanks to the combination of two extractive techniques—<strong>horizontal drilling</strong> and <strong>hydraulic fracturing</strong> (often referred to as “fracking” for short) —that have made it possible to extract oil and natural gas from geologic formations that previously would not release their fossil fuels. Horizontal drilling accesses more oil and gas underground by putting the well in contact with oil-and-gas-laden rock for up to two miles, while hydraulic fracturing unlocks more oil and gas by cracking open that rock with fluids injected into the well at high pressure. In early 2013, wells in the Wattenberg Field were producing 120,000 barrels of oil per day, or about three quarters of the state’s overall oil production.</p> <p>Historically, most oil and natural gas wells in the area were located in farmers’ fields, miles from Greeley’s population center. Today, a growing number of wells are being drilled in the midst of suburban and exurban residential areas, stoking concerns about safety, public health, and environmental damage among some residents. In 2012 and 2013, the Front Range cities of <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/longmont"><strong>Longmont</strong></a> and <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/fort-collins"><strong>Fort Collins</strong></a> attempted to enact drilling bans within their city limits. Greeley’s residents made a similar effort by citizen-initiated ballot measure decades earlier in 1985, but Greeley’s local ordinance was overturned by the Colorado Supreme Court in a 1992 case because it conflicted with the state’s governance of oil and natural gas extraction. In the decades since, Greeley’s planners and leaders have worked to find ways to coexist with oil and natural gas extraction. That process of compromise continues today, as local officials expect Greeley’s current total of about 400 wells within city limits to grow to 1,600 in the coming years.</p> <h2>Planning for the Future</h2> <p>Weld County is currently among the fastest-growing counties in the state of Colorado. Population growth in Greeley and the surrounding area has resulted in a renegotiation of the relationship between agriculture, suburban development, energy extraction, and water resources. Real estate companies are purchasing agricultural lands for residential development. Cities are purchasing agricultural lands for the water rights tied to them, a process nicknamed “agricultural buy and dry.” And energy companies are purchasing agricultural lands in order to build concentrated hubs for oil and natural gas operations. Not only are these changes emblematic of shifting land use patterns in Northern Colorado, but they make Greeley and Weld County exemplary of many issues facing the twenty-first century American West.</p> <p>Some of this dynamism has been expressed through political experimentation. During the 2013 elections, for example, Weld County joined ten neighboring northeastern Colorado counties in an attempt to secede from the state because of rural residents’ opposition to Colorado’s energy, agriculture, and gun regulations. The “51<sup>st</sup> state” measure did not pass, but the vote testified to differences of opinion between urban and rural voters in the county, with 66 percent of Greeley residents opposing the idea compared to 52 percent of voters in the rest of Weld County.&nbsp;</p> <p>As Greeley and Weld County residents chart their path into the future, expect them to continue to exert influence beyond their jurisdictional boundaries. In addition to occupying the confluence of two of Colorado’s major rivers, this vibrant and diverse community is positioned at the junction of some of Colorado’s most prominent economic, political, and cultural currents.&nbsp;</p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-author--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-author.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-author.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-author field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-author"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-author">Author</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-author"><a href="/author/adrianne-kroepsch" hreflang="und">Adrianne Kroepsch</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-keyword--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-keyword.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-keyword.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-keyword field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-keyword"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-keyword">Keywords</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/front-range" hreflang="en">front range</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/university-northern-colorado" hreflang="en">University of Northern Colorado</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/nathaniel-meeker" hreflang="en">nathaniel meeker</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/south-platte-river" hreflang="en">south platte river</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/cache-la-poudre-river" hreflang="en">cache la poudre river</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/weld-county" hreflang="en">weld county</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/monfort-colorado" hreflang="en">Monfort of Colorado</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/inc" hreflang="en">Inc.</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/feedlots" hreflang="en">feedlots</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/horace-greeley" hreflang="en">Horace Greeley</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/fort-collins" hreflang="en">fort collins</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/dust-bowl" hreflang="en">dust bowl</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/great-western-sugar-company" hreflang="en">great western sugar company</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/jbs" hreflang="en">JBS</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/wattenberg-field" hreflang="en">Wattenberg Field</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/hydraulic-fracturing" hreflang="en">hydraulic fracturing</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/lundvall-bros" hreflang="en">Lundvall Bros.</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/inc-v-voss" hreflang="en">Inc. v. Voss</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/colorado-oil-and-gas-conservation-commission" hreflang="en">Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/agricultural-buy-and-dry" hreflang="en">agricultural buy and dry</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * links--node.html.twig x links--inline.html.twig * links--node.html.twig * links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-references-html--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-references-html.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-references-html.html.twig * field--text-long.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-references-html field--type-text-long field--label-above" id="id-field-references-html"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-references-html">References</div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-references-html"><p>Colorado Foundation for Water Education, “<a href="https://www.watereducationcolorado.org/cfwe-education/water-is/climate-and-drought/2-uncategorised/587-irrigation-and-the-union-colony">Irrigation and the Union Colony</a>,” n.d.</p> <p>Colorado Foundation for Water Education, “<a href="https://www.watereducationcolorado.org/headwaters-archive-blank/287-headwaters-magazine/fall-2013-the-energy-issue/627-do-oil-and-water-mix">Do Oil and Water Mix</a>,” <em>Headwaters Magazine</em>, The Energy Issue, 2013.</p> <p>Coleman Cornelius, “<a href="https://extras.denverpost.com/business/biz0203b.htm">Beef Baron Monfort dies at 71</a>,” <em>The Denver Post</em>, February 3, 2001.</p> <p>Bruce Finley, “<a href="https://www.denverpost.com/2009/06/28/somali-refugees-take-up-new-roots-in-greeley/">Somali refugees take up new roots in Greeley</a>,” <em>The Denver Post</em>, June 29, 2009.</p> <p>Greeley History Museum, “<a href="http://www.greeleyhistory.org/pages/agriculture.html">Agriculture</a>,” n.d.</p> <p>Joslyn Green, “<a href="https://www.hcn.org/issues/41.18/the-newest-westerners">Refugees Unsettle the West: Meatpacking, Ramadan, and Other Cultural Collisions in Colorado</a>,” <em>High Country News</em>, October 26, 2009.</p> <p>Brian Gruley and Lucia Kassai, “<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-09-19/brazilian-meatpacker-jbs-wrangles-the-u-dot-s-dot-beef-industry">Brazilian Meatpacker JBS Wrangles the US Beef Industry</a>,” <em>Businessweek</em>, September 19, 2013.</p> <p>Sara Murray, “<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/on-the-killing-floor-clues-to-the-impact-of-immigration-on-jobs-1377140498">On the Killing Floor, Clues to the Impact of Immigration on Jobs</a>,” <em>Wall Street Journal</em>, August 21, 2013.</p> <p>Stephen Raabe, “<a href="https://www.denverpost.com/2010/09/17/meatpacker-jbs-beefs-up-employment-in-weld-county/">Meatpacker JBS Beefs up Employment in Weld County</a>,” <em>The Denver Post</em>, September 19, 2010.</p> <p>United States Census Bureau, “<a href="https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045217">Greeley, CO, State &amp; County Quick Facts</a>.”</p> <p>University of Northern Colorado, “<a href="http://www.unco.edu/about_unc">About UNC</a>,” n.d.</p> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-additional-information-htm--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-additional-information-htm.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-additional-information-htm.html.twig * field--text-long.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-additional-information-htm field--type-text-long field--label-above" id="id-field-additional-information-htm"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-additional-information-htm">Additional Information</div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-additional-information-htm"><p>David Boyd, <em>A history: Greeley and the Union Colony of Colorado</em> (Greeley, CO: Greeley Tribune Press, 1890).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Thomas Fuller, “‘<a href="https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/imh/article/download/12064/17836/0">Go West, young man!’—An Elusive Slogan</a>,” <em>Indiana Magazine of History</em> 100 (September 2004).</p>&#13; &#13; <p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/CityofGreeley">City of Greeley YouTube Channel</a></p>&#13; &#13; <p>Nathan Heffel, “<a href="https://www.kunc.org/business/2013-07-30/greeley-unexpected-tries-to-change-decades-held-perceptions">Greeley: Unexpected Tries to Change Decades Held Perceptions</a>,” <em>KUNC Radio</em>, July 30, 2013.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Eric Rennaker, James Kimberling, Deborah Romero, “<a href="http://www.greeleyhistory.org/pages/all_american_city.html">Greeley: An All American City</a>,” University of Northern Colorado, Upward Bound Program, 2011.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Lee Scamehorn, <em>High Altitude Energy: A History of Fossil Fuels in Colorado </em>(Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2002).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Eric Schlosser, <em>Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal</em> (New York: Mariner Books, 2001).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Daniel Tyler, <em>The Last Water Hole in the West: The Colorado-Big Thompson Project and the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District</em> (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1992.)</p>&#13; </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> Tue, 19 Jun 2018 19:33:35 +0000 yongli 2941 at http://coloradoencyclopedia.org Dearfield http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/dearfield <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Dearfield</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: x field--node--field-article-image--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-article-image.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-article-image.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--field-article-image--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div id="carouselEncyclopediaArticle" class="carousel slide" data-bs-ride="true"> <div class="carousel-inner"> <div class="carousel-item active"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * node--2661--article-detail-image.html.twig * node--2661.html.twig x node--image--article-detail-image.html.twig * node--image.html.twig * node--article-detail-image.html.twig * node.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/content/node--image--article-detail-image.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-encyclopedia-image--image.html.twig * field--node--field-encyclopedia-image.html.twig * field--node--image.html.twig * field--field-encyclopedia-image.html.twig * field--image.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-encyclopedia-image field--type-image field--label-hidden field__item"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image_formatter' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> <a href="/image/oliver-toussaint-jackson-dearfield"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image_style' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-style.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <img loading="lazy" src="/sites/default/files/styles/wide/public/Dearfield-Media-1.jpg?itok=UNH88L4x" width="1000" height="1306" alt="" typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-wide" /> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-style.html.twig' --> </a> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="carousel-caption d-none d-md-block"> <h5><a href="/image/oliver-toussaint-jackson-dearfield" rel="bookmark"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--image.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--image.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Oliver Toussaint Jackson at Dearfield</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> </a></h5> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--image.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig * field--node--image.html.twig * field--body.html.twig x field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p>Oliver Toussaint Jackson was the driving force behind the establishment of the black agricultural colony of Dearfield in <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/weld-county"><strong>Weld County</strong></a> in 1910. </p>&#13; </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/content/node--image--article-detail-image.html.twig' --> </div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--field-article-image--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> <span lang="" about="/users/yongli" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">yongli</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'time' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> <time datetime="2017-06-02T13:05:15-06:00" title="Friday, June 2, 2017 - 13:05" class="datetime">Fri, 06/02/2017 - 13:05</time> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'addtoany_standard' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * addtoany-standard--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * addtoany-standard--node.html.twig x addtoany-standard.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <span class="a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_32 addtoany_list" data-a2a-url="http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/dearfield" data-a2a-title="Dearfield"><a class="a2a_dd addtoany_share" href="https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=http%3A%2F%2Fcoloradoencyclopedia.org%2Farticle%2Fdearfield&amp;title=Dearfield"></a><a class="a2a_button_facebook"></a><a class="a2a_button_twitter"></a><a class="a2a_button_email"></a></span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item" id="id-body"><p>Established on May 5, 1910, by a young entrepreneur named <strong><a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/oliver-toussaint-jackson">Oliver Toussaint Jackson</a></strong>, Dearfield was an agricultural colony for Black people about twenty-five miles southeast of <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/greeley"><strong>Greeley</strong></a>. For two decades nearly 700 Black people worked to transform the rolling desert hills into a thriving farm community. The <strong>Great Depression</strong> and a major drought drove most of these farmers away, leaving only Jackson and his niece by the 1940s. Today Dearfield is a ghost town with only a handful of buildings remaining, but the <strong>Black American West Museum </strong>and other groups are working to improve preservation and historical interpretation at the site.</p> <h2>Origins</h2> <p>Oliver Toussaint Jackson, or O. T. Jackson as he was commonly known, came to Colorado in 1887 from Oxford, Ohio. He began his career at the age of fourteen in the catering and restaurant business, a skill he successfully employed in <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/denver">Denver</a> and <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/boulder">Boulder</a>. Inspired by Booker T. Washington’s<em> Up from Slavery </em>(1901), Jackson dreamed of a place where people like him could farm and become self-sufficient.</p> <p>In 1906 Jackson began looking for a location that would accommodate 200 black families. He soon met his first hurdle. “I found it difficult to get the people in the land office to pay very much attention to a negro,” he said. To remedy that, he became active in politics and was soon appointed messenger in the office of Governor<strong> John Shafroth</strong>. Shafroth helped Jackson select land in <a href="/article/weld-county">Weld County</a>, where he filed a desert claim of 320 acres. Jackson once explained the choice by noting that the land was only five miles from a railroad station and seventy miles from Denver, which he thought would assure a market for the colony’s produce. He would model the colony after the <strong>Union Colony</strong>, an agricultural community founded in 1870 near present-day Greeley.</p> <p>Unfortunately for Jackson, no black organization equal to the Greeley Union Colony was willing to support his group’s effort. He first proposed the colony venture to the Colorado Negro Business League, an offshoot of Booker T. Washington’s National Negro Business League. The league was supportive of the idea and even called Jackson’s colony project its “first begotten child.” But when Washington did not endorse the plan, the local group dropped the idea. (Washington said that he simply could not back every project needing help.)</p> <p>Jackson proceeded alone, without the support of black leadership. The black monied interests and other black bourgeoisie did not support him, in part for political reasons. Many of those in the new black leadership were affiliated with the party of Lincoln, while Jackson supported Democratic candidates and worked for a Democratic governor. Jackson was a hard man for Denver’s black leadership to fathom. He did not align himself behind a partisan leader but instead tried to apply the popular “back to the land” and colony ideas of the day, while seeking support from anyone who could help.</p> <p>Jackson expressed his dream at a special meeting of the stockholders and subscribers of the Negro Townsite and Land Company on December 8, 1909. Jackson, president of the organization, told the group that “if a community of representative families can be located in a farming community it would be laying a foundation for the future of a race.” The idea of “race duty” was self-evident in his life’s work. He believed in the duty of the more advantaged to help create an opportunity which would “lift up weaker ones of their race.”</p> <p>The name Dearfield, suggested by black Denver physician Dr. J. H. Westbrook, was chosen at a meeting in late 1910 to express how dear the land would be to the colony’s residents. Seven other black men filed for land that year, and in 1911 Dearfield boasted seven families.</p> <h2>Early Struggles and Brief Prosperity</h2> <p>In his description of Dearfield’s first year, O. T. Jackson wrote that “[t]he new settlers at Dearfield were as poor as people could be when they took up their homesteads. . . . Some were in tents, some in dugouts and some just had a cave in the hillside.” Residents planted small garden crops of corn, melons, pumpkins, squash, beans, and hay, and raised chickens, ducks, and turkey. “That winter,” Jackson wrote, “only two of us had wooden houses, and the suffering was intense. We had scarcely any wood to burn. Buffalo chips and <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/sagebrush"><strong>sagebrush</strong></a> was our chief fuel.” The only other fuel was driftwood from the Platte River, which the settlers carried back to Dearfield on their heads.</p> <p>Only about seven of the original sixty settlers were farmers, according to Jackson. He also admitted that they became successful “without capital or any appreciable knowledge of dry farming.” They did, however, receive assistance from the state agricultural college and the county superintendent and sent delegates to the farmers’ congress at Greeley and <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/fort-collins"><strong>Fort Collins</strong></a>.</p> <p>In his letters and promotional pieces, it is often difficult to distinguish between what really existed at Dearfield and what were merely Jackson’s hopes for the future. His vision included a soap factory, a fifty-room hotel, a grain elevator, a creamery, a bank, and a packing and provision company. He also stated that a white philanthropist in Colorado offered to build a large sanatorium to be supported by black charitable organizations, churches, lodges, and insurance organizations. None of this was ever realized.</p> <p>Dearfield persevered, however, and by 1914 the community was beginning to show signs of prosperity. That year residents were also helped by a large snowstorm that left precipitation on the ground until the following spring. The colony’s population grew to 111 in 1915, and residents filed for <strong><a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/homestead">homesteads</a></strong> on 8,400 of the 20,000 available acres in Weld County. Residents planted oats, barley, alfalfa, corn, beans, potatoes, sugar beets, watermelons, cantaloupes, pumpkins, and squash on 595 cultivated acres. The settlement also began hosting weekend dances for visitors from Denver, which both raised revenue for the colony and established connections with Denver’s <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/five-points"><strong>Black community</strong></a>.</p> <p><a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/colorado-world-war-i"><strong>World War I</strong></a> provided a reliable market for Dearfield’s crops, but in 1918 the war ended and the inflated market fell. Like others at the time, Dearfield farmers were caught up in the temporary prosperity and had acquired mortgages, new machinery, and debts. As for Jackson, he switched gears from pushing farming to selling lots for houses in the settlement.</p> <h2>Decline</h2> <p>As the wartime prices fell, more than 400,000 farmers nationwide lost their farms. Dearfield, together with many other marginal farming communities, was hit hard. Jackson claimed that the drop in prices after World War I started the downward spiral of Dearfield’s prosperity.</p> <p>In 1921 the settlement consisted of 700 people, a school, and two churches, with an aggregate land value of $750,000. The livestock and poultry was valued at $200,000 and annual production was in the range of $125,000. However, only the most tenacious farmers survived the hard times of the 1920s. Those who managed to stick to the land through the early Great Depression years were plagued by a drought that lasted from 1931 to 1939. The 1940 census listed the population of Dearfield as only twelve, and if the census is correct, only twenty black farmers existed in all of Colorado.</p> <p>Even a driven man like O. T. Jackson could not withstand the constant barrage of hard luck. As people left, he sold the buildings for precious lumber. Some folks in the 1930s sold out for five dollars per house. Jackson kept the filling station and the lunch counter open until he became ill in 1946. He searched for a young black man to keep his dream alive, but could find neither a successor nor a willing buyer for the property. Jackson held the property until his death in 1948. His niece, Jenny, remained at Dearfield until she died in 1973.</p> <h2>Today</h2> <p>Today, Dearfield is a ghost town, although several organizations are working to restore its six original buildings and develop the area as a historic site. In addition to the buildings, two ruins at the site roughly date from 1911 to the early 1940s. The present-day gas station/store is located directly south of the highway, along with the historic lunchroom. Another building that once housed a blacksmith’s shop and garage sits directly south of the lunchroom. Behind these two buildings rests a small wooden structure on a crumbling foundation, once rented out as a hunter’s cabin.</p> <p>The remaining historical structures and ruins may be reached via a rough road that was once Dearfield’s Washington Avenue. East of the road rests a false-front building referred to as a hotel, also believed to be Jackson’s residence in his later years. South of the hotel are the ruins of a granary. West of the road lie the ruins of a grocery store that was later converted into a residence. Farther west stand the structural remains of a small cabin owned by Squire Brockman, a well-known fiddle player and one of Dearfield’s last residents in the 1940s.</p> <p>In 1995 Dearfield was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1999 <strong>Colorado Preservation, Inc.</strong> named it one of the state’s “Most Endangered Places” and started to work with Denver’s Black American West Museum and <strong>Colorado State University</strong>’s Architectural Preservation Institute to preserve what remained of the site. The organizations received funding from the state legislature and the <strong>State Historical Fund,</strong> and partnered with AmeriCorps to clean and stabilize Dearfield’s buildings. By the time Dearfield celebrated its 100th anniversary in September 2010, three of the six remaining buildings had been stabilized. In addition, the Black American West Museum has slowly accumulated property in the area with the goal of developing the site for historical interpretation.</p> <p><strong>Adapted from Karen Waddell, “Dearfield . . . A Dream Deferred,” <em>Colorado Heritage</em> no. 2 (1988).</strong></p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-keyword--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-keyword.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-keyword.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-keyword field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-keyword"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-keyword">Keywords</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/oliver-toussaint-jackson" hreflang="en">Oliver Toussaint Jackson</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/weld-county" hreflang="en">weld county</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/agriculture" hreflang="en">agriculture</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/black-american-west-museum" hreflang="en">Black American West Museum</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/all-black-settlements" hreflang="en">all-black settlements</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * links--node.html.twig x links--inline.html.twig * links--node.html.twig * links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-additional-information-htm--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-additional-information-htm.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-additional-information-htm.html.twig * field--text-long.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-additional-information-htm field--type-text-long field--label-above" id="id-field-additional-information-htm"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-additional-information-htm">Additional Information</div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-additional-information-htm"><p>Colorado Preservation, “<a href="https://coloradopreservation.org/programs/endangered-places/endangered-places-archives/dearfield-colony/">Dearfield Colony</a>,” Endangered Places Archive, n.d.</p> <p>Douglas Flamming, <em>African Americans in the West</em> (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2009).</p> <p>George Junne, Jr., Ostia Ofoaku, Rhonda Corman, and Rob Reinsvold, “Dearfield, Colorado: Black Farming Success in the Jim Crow Era,” in <em>Enduring Legacies: Ethnic Histories and Cultures of Colorado</em>, ed. Arturo Aldama (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2011).</p> <p>William Loren Katz, <em>The Black West: A Documentary and Pictorial History of the African American Role in the Westward Expansion of the United States</em> (New York: Broadway Books, 2005).</p> <p>Melvin Edward Norris Jr., <em>Dearfield, Colorado—The Evolution of a Rural Black Settlement: An Historical Geography of Black Colonization on the Great Plains</em> (PhD dissertation, University of Colorado–Boulder, 1980).</p> <p>Quintard Taylor, <em>In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528–1990</em> (New York: Norton, 1998).</p> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> Fri, 02 Jun 2017 19:05:15 +0000 yongli 2658 at http://coloradoencyclopedia.org Front Range http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/front-range <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Front Range</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> <span lang="" about="/users/yongli" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">yongli</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'time' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> <time datetime="2017-01-23T16:06:17-07:00" title="Monday, January 23, 2017 - 16:06" class="datetime">Mon, 01/23/2017 - 16:06</time> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'addtoany_standard' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * addtoany-standard--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * addtoany-standard--node.html.twig x addtoany-standard.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <span class="a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_32 addtoany_list" data-a2a-url="http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/front-range" data-a2a-title="Front Range"><a class="a2a_dd addtoany_share" href="https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=http%3A%2F%2Fcoloradoencyclopedia.org%2Farticle%2Ffront-range&amp;title=Front%20Range"></a><a class="a2a_button_facebook"></a><a class="a2a_button_twitter"></a><a class="a2a_button_email"></a></span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item" id="id-body"><p>The Front Range is a corridor of the <a href="/article/rocky-mountains"><strong>Rocky Mountains</strong></a> and surrounding land stretching 200 miles from the Wyoming border on the north to the<a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/arkansas-river"> <strong>Arkansas River</strong></a> on the south. The western border of the Front Range consists of a collection of high mountain ranges, from the Medicine Bow and Laramie Mountains in the north to the <a href="/article/pikes-peak"><strong>Pikes Peak</strong></a> massif in the south. The western border of the Front Range consists of an assortment of mountain ranges, including a group of peaks between <a href="/article/georgetown%E2%80%93silver-plume-historic-district"><strong>Georgetown</strong></a> and <strong>Silverthorne</strong>, as well as the <strong>Indian Peaks</strong>, <strong>Mummy Range</strong>, Laramie Mountains, Medicine Bow Mountains, Kenosha Mountains, Tarryall Mountains, Rampart Range, and Pikes Peak. The region’s eastern boundaries are somewhat less clear, generally consisting of the foothills of the mountains and the western edge of the <a href="/article/colorado’s-great-plains"><strong>Great Plains</strong></a>.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>The Front Range has a long history of human migration and habitation, as it offers access to the resources of both mountains and plains, as well as shelter from the extreme weather of both environments. Today, the corridor has a population of 4.5 million and is the site of Colorado’s largest cities, including <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/fort-collins"><strong>Fort Collins</strong></a>, <a href="/article/boulder"><strong>Boulder</strong></a>, <a href="/article/denver"><strong>Denver</strong></a>, and <strong><a href="/article/colorado-springs">Colorado Springs</a>.</strong></p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Early Inhabitants</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>Stone tools and other artifacts found at the <a href="/article/lindenmeier-folsom-site"><strong>Lindenmeier</strong></a> archaeological site in northern <a href="/article/larimer-county"><strong>Larimer County</strong></a> indicate the presence of indigenous hunter-gatherers along the Front Range as early as 12,300 years ago. On the eastern slope of Pikes Peak, archaeologists have found evidence of human occupation dating to 5,000 years ago, and some etchings in the rocks at <strong>Garden of the Gods</strong> date back at least 1,000 years.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>By AD 1500, the Front Range was home to the Nuche (<a href="/article/northern-ute-people-uintah-and-ouray-reservation"><strong>Ute</strong></a><strong> </strong>people), who spent the summers hunting in the high country and wintered in camps at the base of the mountains. After the Ute obtained horses in the mid-seventeenth century, some bands began hunting buffalo on the plains. In the early nineteenth century the Utes along the Front Range were joined by the <strong>Arapaho</strong> and <strong>Cheyenne</strong>, two peoples who had been pushed out of their homeland in the upper Midwest. The Arapaho ranged farther into the mountains than the Cheyenne and became enemies of the Ute as the two groups competed for game and other resources in the high mountain valleys. Other indigenous groups that frequented the Front Range plains in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries included the <strong>Jicarilla Apache</strong>, <strong>Comanche</strong>, <strong>Kiowa</strong>, and <strong>Lakota</strong>.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>These people’s identities are inextricably linked to the geography and ecology of the Front Range. Pikes Peak, for instance, figures prominently in the Ute creation story in which the Creator built their nation around the mountain. The band that most commonly frequented the area around Pikes Peak knew the mountain as “Tava,” or “sun mountain,” and called themselves the “Tabeguache,” the “People of Sun Mountain.”</p>&#13; &#13; <p>The Arapaho shared with the Ute a reverence for the mountains of the Front Range. They knew Pikes Peak as “heey-otoyoo’,” or “long mountain,” and at least one Arapaho hunter made a habit of ascending <a href="/article/longs-peak"><strong>Longs Peak</strong></a> in today’s <a href="/article/rocky-mountain-national-park"><strong>Rocky Mountain National Park</strong></a> to hunt eagles. Meanwhile, the identity and spirituality of both the Cheyenne and Arapaho were tied to the plains, the realm of the all-important <a href="/article/bison"><strong>bison</strong></a> and horse.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Early American Era</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>Early American explorers such as Lieutenant <a href="/article/zebulon-montgomery-pike"><strong>Zebulon Pike</strong></a> in 1806–7 and Major <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/stephen-h-long"><strong>Stephen Long</strong></a> in 1820 saw the Front Range as part of the so-called <a href="/article"><strong>Great American Desert</strong></a> and unfit for farming. What Pike and Long had seen was a land baked by sun, with too little moisture to sustain the agricultural way of life they were familiar with in the east.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>From the summit of Pikes Peak in 1893, <strong>Katharine Lee Bates</strong> saw the region differently. She was so impressed by the view that she penned the words to “America the Beautiful.” The 20,000 square miles of Front Range before her had indeed changed in seventy-five years since Major Long had seen it. Farmers had come to seed the “amber waves of grain” and irrigated agriculture had supplanted <a href="/article/beaver"><strong>beaver</strong></a> and bison pelt hunting primary industry on the “fruited plain.”</p>&#13; &#13; <p>When <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/precious-metal-mining-colorado"><strong>gold</strong></a> was discovered on Ralston, Dry, and Clear Creeks in 1859, the region’s economy and history were forever altered. Thousands of would-be miners swarmed into the Front Range, propelling Denver’s growth and sparking the emergence of towns such as Boulder, <strong>Idaho Springs</strong>, <a href="/article/central-city%E2%80%93black-hawk-historic-district"><strong>Central City</strong></a>, and <a href="/article/central-city%E2%80%93black-hawk-historic-district"><strong>Black Hawk</strong></a>. The gold boom was short lived, but miners and the men who supplied them were here to stay.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Agriculture</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>To support the mining boom, Front Range towns imported tools, clothing, and building materials from Midwestern cities such as St. Louis and Chicago. But food was more difficult to import, so farmers followed the gold seekers to Colorado to work the land along the streams of the Front Range.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Growing crops in Colorado was not easy. The Front Range offered plenty of sunshine and warm winter Chinook winds, but the growing season was short, rainfall was scarce, and unpredictable spring blizzards wiped out many harvests. Though it was difficult, farming along the Front Range had its rewards. Miners were hungry, railroad crews needed provisions, and land was plentiful thanks to a campaign that relocated the Ute, Cheyenne, and Arapaho to surrounding states. Propaganda from Colorado’s earliest boosters maintained that <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/irrigation-colorado"><strong>irrigation</strong></a> was “not a burden but a pleasure” and that <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/water-colorado"><strong>water</strong></a> constantly flowed from the mountains to the plains, furnishing a reliable supply of nutrient-rich soil. Later generations would find that this was mostly untrue—the water supply was hardly limitless—but in the early days of settlement the propaganda made life on the Front Range seem downright Edenic. Believing the area to be free from “Hay Asthma,” where one could be cured of chronic bronchitis and “<a href="/article/tuberculosis-colorado"><strong>tubercular</strong></a> or scrofulous consumption,” land-hungry easterners suffering from the repeated economic recessions of the nineteenth century poured into Colorado seeking a healthful and productive place to live.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>But the real stimulus to irrigated agriculture came from those who believed that cooperative agricultural societies in the west could be a profitable and harmonious alternative to the industrial competition and aggressive individualism of the east. Although he knew relatively little of the west, <a href="/article/nathaniel-meeker"><strong>Nathan Meeker</strong></a>, the agricultural editor of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, led a committee to Colorado in search of a site for a farming community in 1869. They found a 12,000-acre parcel on the <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/cache-la-poudre-river"><strong>Cache la Poudre River</strong></a>, four miles upstream from its junction with the <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/south-platte-river"><strong>South Platte</strong></a>. Before the year was out, ground had been broken on the <strong>Union Colony</strong>, the beginnings of present-day <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/greeley"><strong>Greeley</strong></a>. Towns such as <strong>Arvada</strong>, Boulder, <a href="/article/city-and-county-broomfield"><strong>Broomfield</strong></a>, and <strong>Wheat Ridge </strong>all developed along a similar model—growing crops to feed miners—in the mid- to late nineteenth century. In 1870 the Colorado territorial legislature designated Fort Collins as the site of the Agricultural College (now <strong>Colorado State University</strong>), which researched and helped implement best practices for irrigation and crop production across the state.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>As overhunting led to a sharp decline in the buffalo herds during the late nineteenth century, rangy longhorn cattle began to fill the empty space on the plains. Driven up from Texas in herds of 2,000 to 3,000 along the Goodnight-Loving Trail, the cattle were sold to Indian reservations, mining communities, and railroad crews or driven east to markets in Kansas City or Chicago. The era of large-scale, free-range ranching along the Front Range was short lived, however; a severe summer drought in 1886 was followed by early<a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/snow"><strong> snows</strong></a> and freezing temperatures that decimated the cattle herds, paving the way for much of the former grazing land to be fenced off and sold into private ownership.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Gold, Steel, and Beets</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>By the early twentieth century, three major developments injected new life into the Front Range economy, broadening the region’s financial and industrial base: a new gold rush at <a href="/article/cripple-creek"><strong>Cripple Creek</strong></a>, <a href="/article/colorado-fuel-iron"><strong>Colorado Fuel &amp; Iron</strong></a>’s <strong>steel mill </strong>in <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/pueblo"><strong>Pueblo</strong></a>, and the rise of the <a href="/article/sugar-beet-industry"><strong>sugar beet industry</strong>.</a></p>&#13; &#13; <p>The gold discoveries in the Cripple Creek and <a href="/article/victor"><strong>Victor</strong></a> areas in 1890 came at just the right time. The great silver boom of the 1870s and 1880s was snuffed out when the nation returned to the gold standard in 1893, but Cripple Creek was a gold strike, and its mines were the single most important reason for Colorado’s rapid emergence from economic depression. The money that poured into Colorado Springs from the mines on the other side of Pikes Peak financed the <a href="/article/broadmoor"><strong>Broadmoor Hotel</strong></a>’s construction and covered the dome of the <a href="/article/colorado-state-capitol"><strong>capitol</strong></a> building in Denver with gold leaf. It also created millionaires who went on to build department stores, railroads, tunnels, and other industries and infrastructure in the state.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>To the south, <a href="/article/colorado-fuel-iron"><strong>Colorado Fuel and Iron</strong></a> (CF&amp;I) turned Pueblo into the “Pittsburgh of the West.” Through employment in its mines and mills, the company attracted thousands of immigrants to Colorado and permanently altered the social milieu of the southern end of the Front Range.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>While the Cripple Creek mines and CF&amp;I placed their faith in the seemingly endless mineral wealth of the Rockies, the Great Western Sugar Company gambled on a crop that was unfamiliar to most Colorado farmers in the early twentieth century. Sugar beet agriculture had not been a great success in <a href="/article/grand-junction"><strong>Grand Junction</strong></a>, where Great Western built its first factory in 1899, but the altitude, soil, and mild winters of the Front Range seemed ideally suited to this crop. Front Range farmers were eager to plant beets because they were a cash crop whose market price was guaranteed at the time of planting. In 1909 farmers harvested 108,000 acres of beets; ten years later they harvested 166,000 acres. In just one decade, Colorado had become the largest producer of sugar beets in the nation.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>However, converting fields from cereal grains to water-intensive beets and other vegetable crops put a strain on the available water supply. From 1925 to 1933, many of these crops received less than half the water they required, and sizable acreages received no water at all. When a drought hit in the 1930s, Great Western Sugar became one of the principal proponents of the <a href="/article/colorado–big-thompson-project"><strong>Colorado–Big Thompson</strong> <strong>project</strong></a> (C-BT) a transmountain water diversion project that imported water from Colorado’s <strong><a href="/article/western-slope">Western Slope</a> </strong>by pumping it under the <strong><a href="/article/great-divide">Continental Divide</a>. </strong>When it was completed in the mid-1950s, the C-BT not only allowed farmers to continue growing water-intensive crops along the Front Range but also increased the supply of drinking water for the region’s expanding urban population.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Twentieth Century</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>The 1920s and 1930s were hard times for the Front Range and the state as a whole. The <strong>Great Depression</strong> and the <a href="/article/dust-bowl"><strong>Dust Bowl</strong></a> decimated the region’s agricultural industry, and thousands of farmers and ranchers were forced to abandon their homes and fields. In the late 1930s, <a href="/article/new-deal-colorado"><strong>New Deal</strong></a> programs addressed problems of unemployment, overused land, schools, airports, roads, and other public facilities. But it was not until World War II that the Front Range experienced its next economic boom. This time, assistance came from the Department of Defense.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>World War II launched Colorado into the industrial age. The <a href="/article/denver-ordnance-plant"><strong>Denver Ordnance Plant</strong></a>, <strong>Rocky Mountain Arsenal</strong>, <a href="/article/rocky-mountain-fleet"><strong>Denver Shipyard</strong></a>, and <strong>Lowry Air Field </strong>were all established in Colorado by the Department of Defense as part of the war effort. Front Range universities received funds for training soldiers in language and intelligence specialties.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Following the war, the Front Range received national attention during the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953–61), partly because the president and his wife spent a lot of time in Colorado and partly because federal funds continued to pour into the area. The <a href="/article/norad"><strong>North American Air Defense Command (NORAD)</strong></a> built its missile detection center in the bowels of <a href="/article/cheyenne-mountain"><strong>Cheyenne Mountain</strong></a> near Colorado Springs, while Denver became the regional home of a variety of federal agencies. Meanwhile, Denver’s position as a regional transportation hub brought <a href="/article/interstate-70"><strong>Interstate 70</strong></a> and <strong>Interstate 25</strong> together just north of the city’s rapidly expanding downtown.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Population Pressure</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>By 1960, Colorado was the ninth fastest-growing state in the nation with the fourth-largest population increase since 1950. Ninety percent of the gain was confined to the Front Range between Pueblo and Fort Collins, while many counties on the Western Slope continued to lose population. A backlash to the progrowth doctrine of the mid-twentieth century occurred in the 1970s. Recognizing the steep environment costs of progrowth policies, antigrowth coalitions came together to shut down Colorado’s bid to host the <a href="/article/1976-winter-olympics"><strong>1976 Winter Olympics</strong></a> in protest.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>By 1989 more than 2.3 million people called the Front Range home. Securing an adequate water supply for such a quickly growing population had always been a major concern, but under President Jimmy Carter (1977–81), federal money for water projects was almost entirely cut off. Colorado was on its own and was unprepared to pay the full cost of the diversion, storage, and treatment projects that seemed necessary to support sustained population growth and a booming agricultural economy.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>The biggest problem the Front Range faced at the time was that most of the state’s water fell in the form of snow on the other side of the Continental Divide. Diversion projects that drew water from the Western Slope successfully secured enough water to sustain the Front Range, but they also led to animosity between those living on the west and east side of the Continental Divide. Those living on the western side believed the Front Range was sucking up all of their water. Tensions still run high over the issue of how much water should be diverted from the Western Slope to the Front Range, resulting in fierce debates between farmers, environmentalists, recreationalists, and city and county officials over how to manage such a critical and scarce resource.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Toward the Future</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>The Metro Denver area continues to expand, and communities such as Broomfield and Thornton have purchased water rights from farmers to meet their growing urban needs. As farmers evaluate options for the future, local communities may have to come up with plans to prevent the remaining prime agricultural land along the Front Range from drying up.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Some Coloradans are less than enthusiastic about spending taxpayer money to promote tourism, but people who are familiar with state finances know that it is a multibillion-dollar industry that is increasingly becoming the lifeblood of many communities. In 2014, for instance, the tourism industry set records by attracting 71.3 million visitors who spent a total of $18.6 billion in Colorado. Since 2014, revenue associated with the state’s legalization of recreational <a href="/article/cannabis-marijuana"><strong>marijuana</strong></a> has also helped the tourism economy, especially in Denver.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>As the Front Range continues to grow, questions remain about how to secure an adequate water supply and how to address the unequal distribution of economic growth in the state. As Colorado faces the challenges of a changing <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/colorado-climate"><strong>climate</strong></a> and an uncertain future, residents will need to figure out how to forge a more solid sense of unity and cooperation. Still, with the state’s reputation for producing hearty, pragmatic citizens, Colorado’s future shines almost as brightly as its capitol’s gilded dome in the summer sun.</p>&#13; &#13; <p><em>This article is an abbreviated and updated version of the author’s essay “The Colorado Front Range to 1990,” distributed in 2006 as part of <strong>Colorado Humanities</strong>’ “Five States of Colorado” educational resource kit.</em></p>&#13; </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-author--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-author.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-author.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-author field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-author"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-author">Author</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-author"><a href="/author/tyler-daniel" hreflang="und">Tyler, Daniel</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-keyword--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-keyword.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-keyword.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-keyword field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-keyword"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-keyword">Keywords</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/boulder" hreflang="en">boulder</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/colorado-springs" hreflang="en">colorado springs</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/ranching" hreflang="en">ranching</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/farming" hreflang="en">farming</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/colorado-big-thompson-project" hreflang="en">colorado-big thompson project</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/south-platte-river" hreflang="en">south platte river</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/weld-county" hreflang="en">weld county</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/larimer-county" hreflang="en">larimer county</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/boulder-county" hreflang="en">boulder county</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/broomfield" hreflang="en">broomfield</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/el-paso-county" hreflang="en">el paso county</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/castle-rock" hreflang="en">Castle Rock</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/douglas-county" hreflang="en">Douglas County</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/cache-la-poudre-river" hreflang="en">cache la poudre river</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * links--node.html.twig x links--inline.html.twig * links--node.html.twig * links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-references-html--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-references-html.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-references-html.html.twig * field--text-long.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-references-html field--type-text-long field--label-above" id="id-field-references-html"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-references-html">References</div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-references-html"><p>Carl Abbott, Stephen J. Leonard, and David McComb, <em>Colorado: A History of the Centennial State </em>5th ed. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2013).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>“After the Crisis,” <em>Coloradoan </em>(Fort Collins, CO), February 28­–29 and March 1–3, 1988.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Jason Blevins, “Colorado Tourism Numbers Set Record in 2014,” <em>The Denver Post</em>, June 23, 2015.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>“Denver Could Drink Deep from Wells,” <em>Rocky Mountain News</em>, December 5, 1987.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>“Front Range Futures,” December 1981.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Mel Griffiths and Lynnell Rubright, <em>Colorado </em>(Boulder: Westview Press, 1983).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Letter, Charles Hansen to D. W. Aupperle, July 29, 1937, Northern Colorado Water Users Association folder, Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District Archives, Loveland, Colorado.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Letter, March 11, 1936, Frank Delaney to Dan Hughes, Delaney Papers, Norlin Library, University of Colorado.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Letter, F. J. Bancroft, M.D., to the Territorial Board of Immigration, November 15, 1873, in <em>A Colorado Reader</em>, ed. Carl Ubbelohde (Boulder: Pruett Press, 1962).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Western Slope Protective Association, “Minutes,” March 20, 1935 (Glenwood Springs: Colorado River Conservation District Archives).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Gleaves Whitney, <em>Colorado Front Range: A Landscape Divided </em>(Boulder: Johnson Books, 1983).</p>&#13; </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-additional-information-htm--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-additional-information-htm.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-additional-information-htm.html.twig * field--text-long.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-additional-information-htm field--type-text-long field--label-above" id="id-field-additional-information-htm"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-additional-information-htm">Additional Information</div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-additional-information-htm"><p>Kathleen A. Brosnan, <em>Uniting Mountain and Plain: Cities, Law, and Environmental Change along the Front Range </em>(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Colorado.com, “<a href="https://www.colorado.com/region/denver-cities-rockies">Front Range</a>.”</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Ben Fogelberg, <em>Walking into Colorado’s Past: 50 Front Range History Hikes </em>(Boulder, CO: Westcliffe Publishing, 2006).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Patricia N. Limerick and Jason Hanson, <em>A Ditch in Time: The City, the West and Water </em>(Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2012).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Thomas T. Veblen and Diane C. Lorenz, <em>The Colorado Front Range: A Century of Ecological Change </em>(Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1991).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Elliott West, <em>The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado </em>(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Ellen Wohl, <em>Virtual Rivers: Lessons from the Mountain Rivers of the Colorado Front Range</em> (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).</p>&#13; </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> Mon, 23 Jan 2017 23:06:17 +0000 yongli 2208 at http://coloradoencyclopedia.org Painter Family http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/painter-family <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Painter Family</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: x field--node--field-article-image--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-article-image.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-article-image.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--field-article-image--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div id="carouselEncyclopediaArticle" class="carousel slide" data-bs-ride="true"> <div class="carousel-inner"> <div class="carousel-item active"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * node--2192--article-detail-image.html.twig * node--2192.html.twig x node--image--article-detail-image.html.twig * node--image.html.twig * node--article-detail-image.html.twig * node.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/content/node--image--article-detail-image.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-encyclopedia-image--image.html.twig * field--node--field-encyclopedia-image.html.twig * field--node--image.html.twig * field--field-encyclopedia-image.html.twig * field--image.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-encyclopedia-image field--type-image field--label-hidden field__item"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image_formatter' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> <a href="/image/hereford-heifer-0"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image_style' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-style.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <img loading="lazy" src="/sites/default/files/styles/wide/public/Painter-Family-Media-1_1.jpg?itok=mUAvxy03" width="1000" height="687" alt="" typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-wide" /> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-style.html.twig' --> </a> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="carousel-caption d-none d-md-block"> <h5><a href="/image/hereford-heifer-0" rel="bookmark"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--image.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--image.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Hereford Heifer</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> </a></h5> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--image.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig * field--node--image.html.twig * field--body.html.twig x field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p>Snow falls as a Hereford Heifer eats hay on a ranch just west of Fowler, in January 2007. The Painter family successfully raised and bred Hereford cattle in the early twentieth century, defying the grim prospects that most ranchers faced at the time.</p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/content/node--image--article-detail-image.html.twig' --> </div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--field-article-image--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> <span lang="" about="/users/yongli" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">yongli</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'time' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> <time datetime="2017-01-23T11:00:17-07:00" title="Monday, January 23, 2017 - 11:00" class="datetime">Mon, 01/23/2017 - 11:00</time> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'addtoany_standard' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * addtoany-standard--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * addtoany-standard--node.html.twig x addtoany-standard.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <span class="a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_32 addtoany_list" data-a2a-url="http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/painter-family" data-a2a-title="Painter Family"><a class="a2a_dd addtoany_share" href="https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=http%3A%2F%2Fcoloradoencyclopedia.org%2Farticle%2Fpainter-family&amp;title=Painter%20Family"></a><a class="a2a_button_facebook"></a><a class="a2a_button_twitter"></a><a class="a2a_button_email"></a></span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item" id="id-body"><p>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 successfully introduced several new species of cattle that were better adapted to both the changing markets and the changing landscape. The Painters were some of the wealthiest early occupants of <a href="/article/weld-county"><strong>Weld County</strong></a>, and the published diaries of Mary Davis Painter have cemented the family’s place in the historical narrative.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Arrival in Colorado</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>In 1881 John Edmund Painter and his brother, Joseph, came to Colorado from England after listening to their uncle talk about his adventures working with a geological survey team in the American west. Later, brothers Edgar and William, accompanied by their mother, Emily, joined them. By the time Mary started her diary, her father, John, and her uncles had been ranching on Colorado’s eastern plains for more than twenty years.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>The Painter brothers began with little and struggled to establish themselves as ranchers. In the early days, John and Joseph spent winter nights inside a small board-and-batten house on their southern Weld County <a href="/article/homestead"><strong>homestead</strong></a> near present-day Roggen, burning cow dung in the stove to cook and stay warm. John Herschel Parsons, an early partner of the Painter brothers, recalled that “during blizzards, fine <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/snow"><strong>snow</strong></a> would sift through every crack in the windward side and pile up in heaps on the floor.” After weatherproofing the home with their wagon cover, they cooked meals of wild pronghorn, fried flapjacks, and coffee. They devoured their meals, wrote Parsons, not realizing at the time that they were living and acting in “a great drama that was soon to be finished.”</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>The End of Open-Range Ranching</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>That drama, an open-range cattle bonanza that lasted from just after the Civil War until the mid-1880s, was played out on one unimaginably vast pasture extending from Texas to Montana and from the advancing line of agricultural settlement in Kansas and Nebraska west to the <strong>Rocky Mountains</strong>. Cattle owners profited from a strong demand for beef from urban consumers, the military, and mining camps. Set loose to graze on the public domain, cattle thrived in the ecological niche emptied of the bison. In Colorado, the first entrepreneurs—some of them freighters or failed prospectors—established ranches on prairie pastures recently occupied by <strong>Cheyenne</strong> and <strong>Arapaho</strong> Indians, who were removed to a reservation in Oklahoma in the late 1860s. Large outfits from Texas drove herds of longhorns north, fattened the animals on the nutritious native grasses, and then shipped them east via railroad. Rising profits encouraged corporate investment, much of it from Great Britain. Intermingled herds dutifully multiplied on the open range. By 1880, about 4 million cattle roamed Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. Cowboys sorted them out twice a year at district roundups, branding new calves in the spring and selecting slaughterhouse-bound beasts in the fall. The industry made some men rich, such as northern Colorado’s “Cattle King” <strong>John Iliff</strong>.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Would-be farmers, lured by the <a href="/article/homestead"><strong>Homestead Act</strong></a>’s 160-acre-per-family allowance, plowed up great swaths of the prairie and closed it off with barbed-wire fences. Cooperative associations dug ditches to irrigate crops, further impeding the movement of cattle. Northwest of the Painter ranches, members of the <strong>Union Colony</strong> established what they hoped would become an agrarian utopia centered on <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/greeley"><strong>Greeley</strong></a> and promptly enclosed their entire corporate holdings with a single fence. “This is not so much a question in regard to fences,” wrote colony founder and <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/greeley-tribune-building"><strong><em>Greeley Tribune</em></strong></a> editor <a href="/article/nathaniel-meeker"><strong>Nathan Meeker</strong></a>, “as in regard to order and decency, for our town and colony will be disgraced by cattle running at large through our streets.” Gradually, Colorado’s northeastern plains, already overstocked with cattle, did not seem open anymore.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Just three years after the Painters claimed their homestead, an unusually harsh winter decimated what was left of the open-range system. Sometime during the first week of January 1886—twenty-one years before Mary Painter wrote the first week’s entries in her diary—a blizzard froze eastern Colorado and much of the plains region, killing off undernourished and weak cattle by the thousands. The <em>Rocky Mountain News</em> reprinted stories from Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, and Texas that assessed the debacle. Entire herds, driven by “a nipping norther,” froze in piles along fences, some still standing. One reporter found hundreds of cattle with Platte River brands piled up dead on the north bank of the <strong>Arkansas River</strong>, over 100 miles from the ranch. Somehow, most of the Painters’ cattle survived.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>Adaptation and Prosperity</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>Even though the brothers still had their herd, John Painter recognized the newspaper stories for what they were: the final act of the open-range drama. Men and animals had to adapt to new conditions. After that winter, some of the British “remittance men”—second or third sons of landed English gentry who lived on generous allowances—went home. As historian Lee Brown writes in <em>The American West</em>, only the “men with the bark on” stayed. The Painters may have been British, but they were self-made and determined to succeed on the changing frontier.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>As the character of the land and people changed and the open-range era came to a close, the Painters prospered. John and Joseph married Alice and Florence Musgrave, sisters visiting Colorado with the Painter matriarch, Emily MacKenzie Painter. John and Alice bought a ranch several miles north of the original homestead, naming it “Lakeside” for the seven man-made lakes on the property. At its pinnacle, the ranch encompassed 60,000 acres of rolling dry prairie and supported 1,000 purebred Hereford cattle. Uncle Joseph (called Edward) and Florence moved to <a href="/article/denver"><strong>Denver</strong></a>, where Joseph engaged in the wholesale coal business with some success. Later he returned to Weld County, purchased the Stone Ranch near Masters, and served as a Weld County commissioner. Uncle William married Grace Mitchell Clark in 1900, also moved to Denver, then returned to the ranch after the birth of his son Stafford to manage the original Painter brothers stock company. Uncle Edgar, living and working with William, remained a bachelor.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>In her diary, Mary recorded the activities of her aunts and uncles, but mostly kept track of her father, mother, sister Emily, and brothers James and Austin. They lived in a triangular region of largely treeless grazing land between the <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/south-platte-river"><strong>South Platte River</strong></a> on the north and Burlington &amp; Missouri Railroad and the small town of Roggen on the south. Today, this area is bordered by US Highway 34 and Interstate 76, with the towns of Roggen, Masters, and Wiggins marking the corners of the triangle. Mary’s father and Joseph also maintained homes in Denver and traveled often between city and country by train.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>While the Painters established homes and grew roots in Weld County, the landscape itself changed. Increased settlement by farmers and overgrazing of the public range led to the development of smaller ranches fenced with barbed wire. Shorthorns, the dominant cattle breed of the day, had problems surviving on the increasingly devastated grassland or in especially harsh winters without supplemental feed. John Painter envisioned a different breed with a hardy constitution, capable of living off the sparse grass of Colorado’s high plains. He found what he was looking for in the red-bodied, white-faced Hereford. Like other cattle breeders with British roots, Painter had an eye for good animals. The word “thoroughbred,” which appears frequently in Mary’s diary, was used in the Painter family in reference to all purebred animal life. There is little doubt that John and his brothers learned to appreciate and breed good animals from their father, who had been a well-respected horse breeder in England.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>The “Painter Type”</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>Mary noted the establishment of her family’s now-famous cattle herd in her diary. In 1906, her father purchased seventy-five registered, or purebred, Herefords from the Gudgell and Simpson operation at Independence, Missouri. The Painters made several successful showings throughout the country with these animals, but they sought further improvements. On January 30, 1907, Mary remarked on the ranch’s additional purchases of purebred cattle by writing, “Papa and Austin went to Roggen to get the therobreds [<em>sic</em>].” On February 1 she added, “Papa, Albert [a ranch hand], and Austin weand therbred [<em>sic</em>]. An announcement in the <em>Greeley Tribune</em> the same day reported that “J.E. Painter has shipped in a carload of thoroughbred Herefords which he purchased in Denver.” Mary’s diary and the corroborating newspaper article make it clear that John Painter tried to improve his recently purchased herd with new and better bloodlines within a year of his original purchase.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Several years later, John looked to his native country for a bull with a wide back and loins to correct the one genetic failing of the noble whiteface. Like felines, Herefords had large forequarters and slim hindquarters. Because of this, “cat-hammed” Herefords produced less beef. Mansell Boy, a bull acquired in 1914, corrected the problem by siring a subset of Herefords known throughout North and South America as the “Painter Type.” Mary wrote little about cattle-breeding methods or the names of specific bulls. She complained once that while the “men and Papa and boys fixed cattle us girls did all the house work. Why?” At first glance, this remark seems to show a girl’s frustration at being left out of what might have been considered men’s work at the time. Indeed, several entries begin with “us girls painted” or “us girls looked at dolls” and end with “boys worked.” However, as her diary entries show, Mary did her share of ranch work, and had plenty of fun in the process.</p>&#13; &#13; <h2>The Painters Leave Ranching</h2>&#13; &#13; <p>In 1938 Austin, James, Mary, and Emily sold the entire Painter herd at auction. The dispersal received nationwide attention within the ranching industry and earned the Painter clan a small fortune. The <em>American Hereford Journal</em> devoted three articles to the subject, while the <em>Denver Daily Record Stockman</em> recalled John Painter’s legacy as a leader in Hereford breeding and range conservation. Though the year marked the end of the famous Painter Type, descendants of the herd influenced the breed for several more generations. Despite the dispersal, Painter’s legacy remains strong in northeastern Colorado.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>His children, especially Mary, made sure that happened by supporting animal- and youth-oriented causes with their own money and with their father’s estate. In the early 1970s, Mary and her husband donated money to establish the John E. Painter Unit for the Greeley Boys Club. Mary died in 1983. Although her father’s accomplishments have received most of the attention from newspaper writers and historians, her diary nonetheless reminds its contemporary readers that despite their relative fortune and fame, the Painters lived a simple life. In Mary’s world, the weather was always “fare” or “fine” and John Painter, known to some as a cattle king, was just “Papa.”</p>&#13; &#13; <p><strong>Adapted from Ben Fogelberg, “‘Papa bought some cattle’: The Diary of Mary Davis Painter,” <em>Colorado Heritage Magazine</em>, 23, no. 3 (2003).</strong></p>&#13; </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-keyword--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-keyword.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-keyword.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-keyword field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-keyword"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-keyword">Keywords</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/painter" hreflang="en">Painter</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/painter-type" hreflang="en">Painter Type</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/hereford" hreflang="en">Hereford</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/painter-family" hreflang="en">Painter Family</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/mary-davis-painter" hreflang="en">mary davis painter</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/ranching-colorado" hreflang="en">ranching in colorado</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/weld-county" hreflang="en">weld county</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * links--node.html.twig x links--inline.html.twig * links--node.html.twig * links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-additional-information-htm--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-additional-information-htm.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-additional-information-htm.html.twig * field--text-long.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-additional-information-htm field--type-text-long field--label-above" id="id-field-additional-information-htm"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-additional-information-htm">Additional Information</div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-additional-information-htm"><p>John K. Matsushima and William D. Farr, <em>A Journey Back: A History of Cattle Feeding in Colorado and the United States</em> (Colorado Springs: Cattlemen’s Communications, 1995).</p>&#13; &#13; <p>Ora Brooks Peake, <em>The Colorado Range Cattle Industry</em> (Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark, 1937).</p>&#13; </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> Mon, 23 Jan 2017 18:00:17 +0000 yongli 2193 at http://coloradoencyclopedia.org Oliver Toussaint Jackson http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/oliver-toussaint-jackson <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Oliver Toussaint Jackson</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> <span lang="" about="/users/yongli" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">yongli</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'time' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> <time datetime="2016-09-29T14:47:20-06:00" title="Thursday, September 29, 2016 - 14:47" class="datetime">Thu, 09/29/2016 - 14:47</time> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'addtoany_standard' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * addtoany-standard--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * addtoany-standard--node.html.twig x addtoany-standard.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <span class="a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_32 addtoany_list" data-a2a-url="http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/oliver-toussaint-jackson" data-a2a-title="Oliver Toussaint Jackson"><a class="a2a_dd addtoany_share" href="https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=http%3A%2F%2Fcoloradoencyclopedia.org%2Farticle%2Foliver-toussaint-jackson&amp;title=Oliver%20Toussaint%20Jackson"></a><a class="a2a_button_facebook"></a><a class="a2a_button_twitter"></a><a class="a2a_button_email"></a></span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item" id="id-body"><p>Oliver Toussaint “O. T.” Jackson (1862–1948) was an entrepreneur and prominent member of black communities in <a href="/article/denver"><strong>Denver</strong></a> and <a href="/article/boulder"><strong>Boulder</strong></a> during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1910 he founded <a href="/article/dearfield"><strong>Dearfield</strong></a>, an-all black agricultural settlement some twenty-five miles southeast of <a href="/article/greeley"><strong>Greeley</strong></a>. Jackson firmly believed that successful blacks should work to help poorer blacks and that land ownership and agriculture were keys to a prosperous future for African Americans. Although Dearfield is a ghost town today, the community’s success from 1915 through the 1930s was a testament to Jackson’s leadership and solidified his place among Colorado’s notable visionaries of the twentieth century.</p> <h2>Early Life</h2> <p>Oliver Toussaint Jackson was born on April 6, 1862, in Oxford, Ohio, the son of former slaves Hezekiah and Caroline Jackson. They named him after Toussaint L’Ouverture, the maroon slave who successfully overthrew the French in Haiti in 1804. In 1887 O. T. Jackson moved from the Midwest to the Denver area, where he worked as a caterer.</p> <p>In 1889 he married Sarah “Sadie” Cook, aunt&nbsp;of the famous composer Will Marion Cook. By 1894 Jackson had made enough money to buy a farm outside Boulder, which he owned for sixteen years. He lived at 2228 Pine Street in Boulder and, in addition to his farm, he began operating the Stillman Café and Ice Cream Parlor on Thirteenth Street. In 1898 he became a staff manager at the<a href="/article/colorado-chautauqua"><strong> Chautauqua</strong></a> Dining Hall, supervising seventy people (and possibly owning the food concession). Jackson also owned and operated a restaurant at Fifty-fifth and Arapahoe Streets that became famous for its seafood. The eatery remained popular until it closed when Boulder went dry in 1907.</p> <p>Confusion exists about whether Jackson and his first wife divorced or if she died. In either case, he married Minerva J. Matlock, a schoolteacher from Missouri, on July 14, 1905. In 1908 Jackson returned to Denver, where he began a twenty-year career as a messenger for Colorado governors.</p> <h2>Dearfield</h2> <p>In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, some 20 percent of blacks in the United States worked in agriculture, but few owned the land they worked on. Inspired by Booker T. Washington’s <em>Up From Slavery </em>(1901), Jackson believed that farming their own fields would empower black Coloradans, and he tried to start an all-black agricultural colony. The state land office, however, often ignored his requests because he was black. Jackson eventually secured the help of Governor <strong>John F. Shafroth</strong>, for whom he worked as a messenger, and obtained land for his colony. In 1909, after considering three tracts of <a href="/article/homestead"><strong>homestead</strong></a> land in <a href="/article/larimer-county"><strong>Larimer</strong></a>, <a href="/article/elbert-county"><strong>Elbert</strong></a>, and <a href="/article/weld-county"><strong>Weld</strong></a> Counties, Jackson selected a 320-acre tract in Weld County near present-day Orchard. Like other agricultural communities along the <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/front-range"><strong>Front Range</strong></a>, Jackson’s would be modeled after the <strong>Union Colony</strong>, founded in 1870. But unlike the Union Colony, which was backed by wealthy newspaperman Horace Greeley, Jackson’s colony did not garner financial support from prominent black organizations, so he was left to realize his dream on his own.</p> <p>In December 1909, Jackson formed the Negro Townsite and Land Company to develop the colony. That year, Dr. Joseph H.P. Westbrook of Denver, one of the colony’s first settlers and most ardent supporters, remarked that the colony “will be very dear to us,” thus bestowing a name, Dearfield, on the new community. Dearfield was officially established in 1910.</p> <p>Jackson’s family and the rest of Dearfield’s early settlers had many problems. Some were so poor they could not afford to ship their possessions from Denver, so they walked part of the distance. Among this group only two families could afford to erect a twelve-by-fourteen-foot building with a fence. The other five families had to live in tents or in holes dug in a hillside. Sometimes the men had to work on other farms to earn spending money while their wives and children worked the land. There were also continual shortages of fuel—many residents burned buffalo chips to keep warm—and water.</p> <p>Over time, however, the colony prospered. Residents raised a variety of crops and livestock, including corn, melons, squash, hay, sugar beets, alfalfa, ducks, chickens, and turkey. A surge in prices for agricultural products during World War I helped the community, and by 1921 Dearfield’s land was valued at $750,000 and supported a population of 700. But despite the determination of Jackson and the rest of Dearfield’s residents, the <strong>Great Depression</strong> and <a href="/article/dust-bowl"><strong>Dust Bowl</strong></a> of the 1930s decimated the colony. By 1940 only twelve residents remained.</p> <p>As people left, Jackson sold Dearfield’s buildings for lumber because it was so scarce. Some folks in the 1930s sold out for five dollars a house. Even before he became ill in 1946, Jackson had been searching for a young black man to keep his dream alive. He told a returning World War II serviceman who had lived with the Jacksons as a boy that “he could have the whole thing” if he would come out to Dearfield and run the place for him. The young man’s new bride did not want any part of it, so he declined.</p> <h2>Later Life</h2> <p>Jackson’s wife Minerva died in 1942. When he could not find any willing buyers for the property, in 1943 he asked his nieces, Jenny Jackson and Daisy Edwards, to come to Dearfield. Daisy came for a short time, while Jenny stayed to nurse her uncle in his last years.</p> <p>Illness and age had overtaken Jackson’s messianic zeal. In 1946, at the age of eighty-four, he again tried to sell Dearfield with an advertisement in the <em>Greeley Tribune</em>. He had no takers. The land remained in Jackson’s possession until his death in a Greeley hospital on February 8, 1948. He had lived in Dearfield for thirty-eight years. His dutiful niece Jenny, who had cared for him the last five years of his life, remained alone in Dearfield for more than twenty years until her death in 1973.</p> <p>The Dearfield site was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1995. Today, several preservation organizations, including Denver’s <strong>Black American West Museum</strong>, are working to restore the site’s six original buildings and develop Dearfield into an interpretive historical site.</p> <p><strong>Adapted from Karen Waddell, “Dearfield . . . A Dream Deferred,” <em>Colorado Heritage</em> no. 2 (1988).</strong></p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-keyword--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-keyword.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-keyword.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-keyword field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-keyword"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-keyword">Keywords</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/ot-jackson" hreflang="en">o.t. jackson</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/oliver-toussaint-jackson" hreflang="en">Oliver Toussaint Jackson</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/dearfield" hreflang="en">Dearfield</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/african-american-history" hreflang="en">african american history</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/black-history" hreflang="en">black history</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/all-black-settlements" hreflang="en">all-black settlements</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/agriculture" hreflang="en">agriculture</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/farming" hreflang="en">farming</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/agricultural-colony" hreflang="en">agricultural colony</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/dearfield-colorado" hreflang="en">dearfield colorado</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/dearfield-history" hreflang="en">dearfield history</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/boulder" hreflang="en">boulder</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/stillman-cafe" hreflang="en">stillman cafe</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/sadie-cook" hreflang="en">sadie cook</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/john-f-shafroth" hreflang="en">john f. shafroth</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/weld-county" hreflang="en">weld county</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/negro-townsite-and-land-company" hreflang="en">negro townsite and land company</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/black-american-west-museum" hreflang="en">Black American West Museum</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * links--node.html.twig x links--inline.html.twig * links--node.html.twig * links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-additional-information-htm--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-additional-information-htm.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-additional-information-htm.html.twig * field--text-long.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-additional-information-htm field--type-text-long field--label-above" id="id-field-additional-information-htm"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-additional-information-htm">Additional Information</div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-additional-information-htm"><p>George Junne, Jr., Ostia Ofoaku, Rhonda Corman, and Rob Reinsvold, “Dearfield, Colorado: Black Farming Success in the Jim Crow Era,” in <em>Enduring Legacies: Ethnic Histories and Cultures of Colorado</em>, ed. Arturo Aldama (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2011).</p> <p>William Loren Katz, <em>The Black West: A Documentary and Pictorial History of the African American Role in the Westward Expansion of the United States</em> (New York: Broadway Books, 2005).</p> <p>Melvin Edward Norris, Jr., <em>Dearfield, Colorado—The Evolution of a Rural Black Settlement: An Historical Geography of Black Colonization on the Great Plains</em> (PhD dissertation, University of Colorado–Boulder, 1980).</p> <p>Quintard Taylor, <em>In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528-1990 </em>(New York: W.W. Norton, 1998).</p> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> Thu, 29 Sep 2016 20:47:20 +0000 yongli 1887 at http://coloradoencyclopedia.org Weld County http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/weld-county <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Weld County</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: x field--node--field-article-image--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-article-image.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-article-image.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--field-article-image--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div id="carouselEncyclopediaArticle" class="carousel slide" data-bs-ride="true"> <div class="carousel-inner"> <div class="carousel-item active"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * node--1107--article-detail-image.html.twig * node--1107.html.twig x node--image--article-detail-image.html.twig * node--image.html.twig * node--article-detail-image.html.twig * node.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/content/node--image--article-detail-image.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-encyclopedia-image--image.html.twig * field--node--field-encyclopedia-image.html.twig * field--node--image.html.twig * field--field-encyclopedia-image.html.twig * field--image.html.twig x field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-encyclopedia-image field--type-image field--label-hidden field__item"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image_formatter' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> <a href="/image/weld-county"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image_style' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-style.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'image' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <img loading="lazy" src="/sites/default/files/styles/wide/public/640px-Map_of_Colorado_highlighting_Weld_County.svg__0.png?itok=2mjb4iCP" width="640" height="463" alt="" typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-wide" /> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-style.html.twig' --> </a> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/image-formatter.html.twig' --> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field.html.twig' --> <div class="carousel-caption d-none d-md-block"> <h5><a href="/image/weld-county" rel="bookmark"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--title--image.html.twig x field--node--title.html.twig * field--node--image.html.twig * field--title.html.twig * field--string.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Weld County</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--title.html.twig' --> </a></h5> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--image.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig * field--node--image.html.twig * field--body.html.twig x field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p>One of Colorado's original seventeen counties, Weld County covers 4,017 square miles in northeastern Colorado and is home to more than 250,000 people.</p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig' --> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/content/node--image--article-detail-image.html.twig' --> </div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--field-article-image--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--uid--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--uid.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--uid.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'username' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> <span lang="" about="/users/yongli" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">yongli</span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/user/username.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--uid.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--created--encyclopedia-article.html.twig x field--node--created.html.twig * field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field--created.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'time' --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> <time datetime="2015-12-29T10:51:58-07:00" title="Tuesday, December 29, 2015 - 10:51" class="datetime">Tue, 12/29/2015 - 10:51</time> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/time.html.twig' --> </span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/field/field--node--created.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'addtoany_standard' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * addtoany-standard--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * addtoany-standard--node.html.twig x addtoany-standard.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <span class="a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_32 addtoany_list" data-a2a-url="http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/weld-county" data-a2a-title="Weld County"><a class="a2a_dd addtoany_share" href="https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=http%3A%2F%2Fcoloradoencyclopedia.org%2Farticle%2Fweld-county&amp;title=Weld%20County"></a><a class="a2a_button_facebook"></a><a class="a2a_button_twitter"></a><a class="a2a_button_email"></a></span> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'modules/contrib/addtoany/templates/addtoany-standard.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--body--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--body.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--body.html.twig * field--text-with-summary.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item" id="id-body"><p>Weld County is the largest county in northeastern Colorado, covering 4,017 square miles of the <a href="/article/colorado’s-great-plains"><strong>Great Plains</strong></a> and the <a href="/article/south-platte-river"><strong>South Platte River</strong></a> valley. One of the original seventeen counties in the <a href="/article/colorado-territory"><strong>Colorado Territory</strong></a>, it is named for Louis Ledyard Weld, the first territorial secretary. The county is bordered to the north by the states of Wyoming and Nebraska, to the east by <a href="/article/logan-county"><strong>Logan</strong></a> and <a href="/article/morgan-county"><strong>Morgan</strong></a> Counties, to the south by <a href="/article/adams-county"><strong>Adams</strong></a> and <a href="/article/city-and-county-broomfield"><strong>Broomfield</strong></a> Counties, and to the west by <a href="/article/boulder-county"><strong>Boulder</strong></a> and <strong><a href="/article/larimer-county">Larimer</a> </strong>Counties. The county seat of <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/greeley"><strong>Greeley</strong></a> lies near the confluence of the South Platte and <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/cache-la-poudre-river"><strong>Cache la Poudre</strong></a> Rivers, at the intersection of US Routes 34 and 85. Greeley is known for its farming and ranching community and is home to the University of Northern Colorado.</p> <p>A major agricultural county, Weld has a population of 252,825. More than a third of the population resides in Greeley, while the rest is spread out amongst smaller towns such as <strong>Fort Lupton </strong>and the county’s numerous farms and ranches. <strong>Interstate 25 </strong>runs through the western part of the county, while the <a href="/article/pawnee-national-grassland"><strong>Pawnee National Grassland</strong></a>&nbsp;occupies the sparsely populated land to the north and northeast.</p> <h2>Native Americans</h2> <p>The South Platte valley allowed many Plains Indian groups to hunt and trade with each other in what is now Colorado. After obtaining horses from the Spanish, the mountain-dwelling Utes began hunting bison in the Weld County area. Traveling south from Wyoming in the early 1700s, the <strong>Comanche</strong> also briefly inhabited the area before moving on to the <a href="/article/arkansas-river"><strong>Arkansas</strong></a> Valley. Pawnees also began to range into the Weld County area by 1719, prodded by their French trading partners to the east. The <strong>Cheyenne</strong> and <strong>Arapaho</strong> arrived in the early nineteenth century, driven from the upper Midwest by the Lakota. Like the Comanche farther south, the two groups relied on the power of the horse, the abundance of buffalo, and a robust trade network to survive and dominate Colorado’s northern plains. Soon after they arrived, the Arapaho and Cheyenne formed an alliance. They were among the first native groups to trade with whites in Colorado.</p> <h2>Europeans</h2> <p>The first European to enter the Weld County area was the Spaniard Don Pedro de Villasur in 1720, who sought to establish trade with Native Americans. Following the South Platte River out of its canyon near present-day <a href="/article/colorado-springs"><strong>Colorado Springs</strong></a>, he led forty-two Spanish soldiers, sixty Native American allies, a priest, an interpreter, and a few settlers past the mouth of the Cache la Poudre River and into western Nebraska. There, the expedition met a quick demise in a raid by Pawnees, apparently egged on by their French allies. After losing all but thirteen of his men, Villasur fled back to Mexico City.</p> <p>The French brothers Pierre and Paul Mallet traversed the area in 1739, following the South Platte into the Rockies on their way to Taos, New Mexico. They were the first to call the river “Platte,” French for “flat” or “platelike.” Judging by their presence elsewhere on the plains and along the <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/front-range"><strong>Front Range</strong></a>, French trappers and traders may have frequented the Weld County area in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century.</p> <h2>Americans</h2> <p>In 1820 the American explorer <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/stephen-h-long"><strong>Stephen H. Long</strong></a> and his expedition made a brief stop in the Weld County area. Long’s expedition was tasked with mapping the South Platte River, and in July he set up camp just south of where it meets the Cache la Poudre River near present-day Greeley. The expedition went on to explore the St. Vrain and Big Thompson Rivers to the west.</p> <p>In 1825 the seventy members of the William H. Ashley trapping party were the first whites to explore the Cache la Poudre river valley. The men were headed toward a rendezvous point along the Green River in Wyoming when a snowstorm stopped them for two weeks near present-day Greeley, giving rise to one of the stories about how the Cache la Poudre got its name - the party allegedly buried gunpowder and supplies near the river, naming it the “Cache la Poudre,” French for “powder cache.” The story is one of many unverified accounts of how the river got its name. In the ensuing decades, many of Ashley’s party would return to claim land in the Weld County area.</p> <h2>Trading Posts</h2> <p>The Long and Ashley expeditions, as well as the opening of the <a href="/article/santa-f%C3%A9-trail-0"><strong>Santa Fé Trail</strong></a> to Americans in 1821, paved the way for the establishment of<a href="/article/nineteenth-century-trading-posts"><strong> trading posts</strong></a> in the Weld County area. <a href="/article/louis-vasquez"><strong>Louis Vasquez</strong></a> from St. Louis built the first one in 1835 along the South Platte near present-day Platteville. In exchange for buffalo robes, Vasquez gave the Cheyenne and Arapaho blankets, kettles, guns, knives, ammunition, and other items. The success of <a href="/article/fort-vasquez"><strong>Fort Vasquez</strong></a> prompted the establishment of several competing forts over the next two years.</p> <p>In 1836<strong> Lancaster Lupton</strong>, a former army lieutenant who had served on the frontier and recently joined the <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/fur-trade-colorado"><strong>fur trade</strong></a>, established Fort Lupton along the South Platte River northeast of present-day <a href="/article/denver"><strong>Denver</strong></a>. Lupton married a Cheyenne woman named Tomasina, and the trading post prospered until 1844, when competition from other forts forced Lupton’s out of business. He and his wife spent five years in southern Colorado before heading to Arcata, California, in 1849 to join the gold rush.</p> <p>Not to be outdone by these two newcomers to the Colorado fur trade, the well-established Bent, St. Vrain and Company built Fort St. Vrain on the South Platte in 1836. Located just north of Fort Vasquez, Fort St. Vrain was operated until its closure in 1847 by Marcellin St. Vrain, <strong>Ceran St. </strong><strong>Vrain</strong>’s younger brother.</p> <p>The establishment of Forts Vasquez, Lupton, and St. Vrain on the South Platte placed significant pressure on the buffalo population, as the Cheyenne and Arapaho hunted more than they needed in order to meet traders’ demand for robes and their own desire for guns, tools, and ammunition. This early exploitation would prove a critical first step toward the buffalo’s demise, as it reduced the population just before a period of overhunting by the Comanche to the south and a fifteen-year dry spell that began in 1845.</p> <p>In 2012 the South Platte Valley Historical Society completed a rebuild of Lancaster Lupton’s fort, a project twenty-four years in the making. Rebuilding the fort was the impetus for the society’s formation in 1988, and the new fort is now the centerpiece of society’s 100-acre history park on the north side of Fort Lupton.</p> <h2>Treaties</h2> <p>After the traders came the gold seekers—first on their way to California after 1849, and then to the <a href="/article/front-range"><strong>Front Range</strong></a> after gold was found west of present-day Denver in 1858. In between those years, the <a href="/article/treaty-fort-laramie"><strong>Treaty of Fort Laramie</strong></a> (1851) and the Treaty of Fort Atkinson (1853) had supposedly guaranteed that Cheyenne and Arapaho lands north of the Arkansas would remain free of white settlers. Congress did not ratify the 1851 treaty, and it was not enforced during the <a href="/article/colorado-gold-rush"><strong>Colorado</strong> <strong>Gold Rush of 1858–59</strong></a>, when whites poured into Cheyenne and Arapaho territory.</p> <p>At this time a handful of whites, including famed Weld County cattleman <strong>John Wesley Iliff</strong>, decided to forego gold digging and set up ranches. These would-be ranchers, prospectors, and settlers streamed west along the South Platte, killing game, trampling grass, and consuming precious timber and other resources that Native Americans relied on. Facing starvation, the Cheyenne and Arapaho resumed raiding, which only increased tension with the United States.</p> <p>Newspaper editor and western booster <strong>Horace Greeley</strong> visited the Cache la Poudre valley in 1859 and became convinced that the area, once properly irrigated, would make excellent farmland. But the slaughter of peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho in the <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/sand-creek-massacre"><strong>Sand Creek Massacre </strong></a>of 1864 prompted an all-out war between Plains Indians and the US government. Greeley would have to wait until after the Cheyenne and Arapaho were removed to Oklahoma under the <strong><a href="/article/medicine-lodge-treaties">Medicine Lodge Treaty</a> </strong>(1867) to start his colony.</p> <h2>Early Communities</h2> <p>The first Territorial Legislature created Weld County in 1861. It initially occupied some 10,000 square miles, nearly the entire northeast quadrant of the new territory. By 1900 the county had shrunk close to its current size after the creation of <a href="/article/washington-county"><strong>Washington</strong></a>, Morgan, and Logan Counties in 1887 and <a href="/article/yuma-county"><strong>Yuma County</strong></a> in 1889. In 2001 the <a href="/article/city-and-county-broomfield"><strong>city and county of Broomfield </strong></a>split from Weld County.</p> <p>In December 1869, <a href="/article/nathan-meeker"><strong>Nathan C. Meeker</strong></a>, Greeley, and Robert A. Cameron organized the Union Colony Association. In New York, they recruited members to pool money to build a farming colony in Colorado. By the following spring, they had purchased some 12,000 miles of land along the Cache la Poudre from the Denver Pacific Railroad. In June 1870, just after the railroad completed a line from Cheyenne to Denver, Meeker and several hundred initial settlers founded the town of Greeley. With the help of the rail line, the colony managed to attract hundreds of new residents by the end of the month. Greeley was designated the county seat in 1877.</p> <p>Unlike the mining-centric towns that had sprung up to the west, Greeley had no saloons or liquor stores; its founders had imagined it as an orderly place where hardworking farm families could prosper in peace. The first <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/irrigation-colorado"><strong>irrigation</strong></a> ditch was finished by the end of the summer, and another was completed early the next year. The ditches were the first to be dug in the west for the sole purpose of agriculture, and they combined to irrigate some 60,000 acres. A drought in 1874 convinced Union Colony officials to create the first of many private irrigation companies in Colorado. Other states, most notably California, adopted this strategy.</p> <p>Meanwhile, in 1872 the McKissick brothers, veterans of a local militia that fought Native Americans in the mid-1860s, opened one of the state’s first coal mines in southwestern Weld County. By 1907 the brothers’ land belonged to Ohio brothers Jacob and David Firestone, who opened the Firestone coal mine. The town of <strong>Firestone</strong> sprang up around the mine in 1908, and five coal mines remained in operation there until 1947.</p> <p>With the goal of training teachers for the state’s public schools, the State Normal School opened in Greeley on October 6, 1890. Initially offering two-year degree programs, the school began offering four-year degrees around the turn of the century, and in 1911 changed its name to Colorado State Teachers College. The college changed names again with the addition of a graduate program in 1935, becoming the Colorado State College of Education (shortened to Colorado State College in 1957). In 1970 it received its current name, University of Northern Colorado, to reflect more than thirty years of continued growth.</p> <h2>Farming and Ranching</h2> <p>By the turn of the century, farming and ranching spurred Weld County’s population to grow to 16,808. The expansion of irrigation networks turned potatoes and alfalfa into cash crops, while more than 90,000 sheep joined the cattle herds of the ranching industry. But the major cash crop of the early twentieth century was the <a href="/article/sugar-beet-industry"><strong>sugar beet</strong></a>. Changes in the American diet led to increased demand for cooking and table sugar, but Weld County farmers were initially reluctant to plant sugar beets because there was no facility nearby that could process the crop and extract the sugar. This changed in 1901, when the Great Western Sugar Beet Company opened processing plants in Eaton and Greeley. Another processing plant opened in Windsor in 1904.</p> <p>Sugar beet cultivation required intensive manual labor, and farmers consistently experienced labor shortages. In the early years of the industry, farmers hired Japanese and German Russian laborers, but many of them eventually moved on to start farms of their own. The German Russian labor pool was further diminished by immigration restrictions during <a href="/article/colorado-world-war-i"><strong>World War I</strong></a>. Meanwhile, hundreds of Mexican immigrants, many of whom had farming experience, were coming to Colorado in search of work. In Weld County these newcomers found seasonal jobs on beet farms; the Great Western Sugar Company, for example, built thirteen communities in Weld County and elsewhere across the plains to attract farm labor. Although many immigrants returned to Mexico after the harvest, some stayed, and many of their families formed the base of Latino communities in places such as Greeley and Fort Lupton.</p> <p>While Weld County farmers embraced the sugar beet boom, one local family fostered a revolution in ranching. The Monforts, one of the most prominent cattle-raising families in the nation, moved to Greeley in 1906. When Warren Monfort returned from service in World War I, he purchased some cattle to help his father’s struggling poultry farm. Instead of letting the cattle graze on the open range, he began feeding them with surplus crops. This innovative practice saved the family farm, and after several years of growth Monfort founded Monfort, Colorado, Inc. in 1930. Because he changed his cattle’s diet from grass to grain, and then to sugar beets, Monfort was also able to trade the open range for the feedlot. Feeding cattle in large pens close to the farm allowed him to provide fresh beef to consumers year-round. This method, combined with a rising demand for beef from the late 1940s, made his company extraordinarily successful: by 1950 his cattle herd numbered 8,000 and helped him earn a profit of $1 million.</p> <p>In 1960 Monfort’s company partnered with Capital Packing, Inc. to build a meat-packing plant in Greeley. After a slow start, Monfort bought Capital’s share and ramped up production; by cutting out the middlemen of the packers, Monfort again introduced a revolutionary practice to the beef industry. By the end of the decade, Monfort’s packing plant employed 931 people and had sold almost $162 million in beef. His feedlot held some 100,000 cattle, making it the largest in the world. In 1969 the company, now under the leadership of Warren’s son Kenneth, bought out another middleman, the Mapelli Brothers Food Distribution Company, an act that lowered production costs even further.</p> <p>After the company went public in 1970, Monfort’s Greeley feedlot had grown so large that residents began to complain about its acrid smell. The company responded by closing the Greeley lot and opening another in Kersey. Monfort lost a significant amount of money in the early 1980s due to tornados and labor disputes, but soon regained its profitability before it was bought out by ConAgra Foods in 1987. The Monfort family has since made major donations to Colorado universities, including $10.5 million to found the business school at the University of Northern Colorado in 1999 and a $5 million pledge to Colorado State University in 2002.</p> <h2>Energy Industry</h2> <p>Weld County sits atop the enormous Niobrara Shale formation, a subterranean rock formation containing oil and natural gas at depths between 3,000 and 14,000 feet. The county currently hosts approximately 20,000 oil and gas wells, more than any other county in the state. The energy industry is a huge contributor to the local economy; for example, since the beginning of the oil shale boom in 2010, Weld County employment has risen 21.5 percent. In 2011 the county collected $52 million in taxes from a single oil and gas producer. That money, like other revenue collected from the energy industry, has helped support Weld County schools, libraries, fire districts, and other services.</p> <p>Yet the economic benefits of oil drilling and hydraulic fracturing—in which a highly pressurized mix of water, sand, and chemicals is blasted into the ground to crack subterranean rock formations and release natural gas—come with concerns about the industry’s impact on public health and the environment.</p> <p>While environmental groups and citizens have reported a variety of negative side effects from the industry, the best-documented concerns—summarized in a 2014 report from the Natural Resources Defense Council—are leakage of cancer-causing chemicals such as benzene and air pollution caused by rigs and other heavy equipment. Additionally, in June 2015, a draft assessment of hydraulic fracturing’s potential effects on drinking water by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) concluded that “there are above and below ground mechanisms by which hydraulic fracturing activities have the potential to impact drinking water resources.” Weld County citizens’ concerns about the oil and gas industries were recorded in the county’s 2013 Community Health Survey; in 900 comments from more than 550 residents, “fracking/oil &amp; gas” and “environmental safety” were among the most commonly addressed topics.</p> <p>As it is elsewhere in Colorado and the nation, the conversation regarding hydraulic fracturing and the energy industry in Weld County remains highly polarized: energy companies and industry reps deny the harmful effects of extraction and claim that any kind of stringent regulation will hurt local economies, while environmentalists and others concerned about public health and the environment push for more transparency from companies and stricter regulations from the state and federal governments.</p> <h2>Natural Features and Disasters</h2> <p>After the disastrous <a href="/article/dust-bowl"><strong>Dust Bowl</strong></a> of the 1930s, which resulted in the degradation of thousands of acres of grasslands across the central United States, Congress took action to restore and preserve large sections of native prairie. The Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act of 1937 allowed the federal government to purchase and restore damaged land, and in 1960 the government created seventeen national grasslands, including the Pawnee National Grassland (PNG) in northern Weld County. The grassland is named for the Pawnee people, a group of Plains Indians who frequented the eastern Colorado plains from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century.</p> <p>The PNG covers 193,060 acres of short-grass prairie. The area is home to Colorado’s <a href="/article/state-bird"><strong>state bird</strong></a>, the <strong>lark bunting</strong>, as well as hawks, falcons, and swallows, making it a premier destination for birdwatchers. The two Pawnee Buttes rise 300 feet above the grassland&nbsp;and can be accessed via hiking and horseback trails.</p> <p>Within the boundaries of the grassland, some eighty-eight ranchers still graze about 8,000 head of cattle on private lands; the ranchers also have grazing rights on the grassland&nbsp;but must adhere to <a href="https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/us-forest-service-colorado"><strong>US Forest Service</strong></a> regulations.</p> <p>After several days of heavy rain beginning on September 9, 2013, Weld County was one of fourteen Colorado counties to experience historically destructive <a href="/article/flooding-colorado"><strong>flooding</strong></a>. Within Weld County alone, flood waters from the South Platte, Cache la Poudre, and other rivers damaged more than 3,000 homes and 122 bridges, washed out 654 miles of roads, and inundated 2,377 parcels of farmland. Immediately after the floods, Governor <a href="/article/john-hickenlooper"><strong>John Hickenlooper</strong></a> declared a state of emergency and funneled $6 million in state funds to pay for flood response and recovery.</p> <p>Recovery efforts were still going on when the Cache la Poudre flooded again in June 2014. Although shorter lasting and less destructive than those in 2013, the 2014 floods still damaged about two dozen homes and businesses in Greeley.</p> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-author--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-author.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-author.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-author field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-author"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-author">Author</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-author"><a href="/author/encyclopedia-staff" hreflang="und">Encyclopedia Staff</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-keyword--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-keyword.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-keyword.html.twig * field--entity-reference.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-keyword field--type-entity-reference field--label-above" id="id-field-keyword"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-keyword">Keywords</div> <div class='field__items'> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/weld-county" hreflang="en">weld county</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/weld-county-history" hreflang="en">weld county history</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/fur-trade-colorado-0" hreflang="en">fur trade colorado</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/fort-vasquez" hreflang="en">fort vasquez</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/fort-st-vrain" hreflang="en">fort st. vrain</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/monfort-family" hreflang="en">monfort family</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/monfort-family-history" hreflang="en">monfort family history</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/cache-la-poudre-history" hreflang="en">cache la poudre history</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/greeley" hreflang="en">greeley</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/stephen-h-long" hreflang="en">stephen h. long</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/fort-lupton" hreflang="en">fort lupton</a></div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-keyword"><a href="/keyword/pawnee-national-grasslands" hreflang="en">pawnee national grasslands</a></div> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'links__node' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * links--node.html.twig x links--inline.html.twig * links--node.html.twig * links.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/contrib/bootstrap_barrio/templates/navigation/links--inline.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-references-html--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-references-html.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-references-html.html.twig * field--text-long.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-references-html field--type-text-long field--label-above" id="id-field-references-html"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-references-html">References</div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-references-html"><p>“<a href="https://www.weld.gov/">2013 Weld County Community Health Survey</a>,” Weld County Department of Public Health and Environment, May 26, 2015.</p> <p>Carl Abbott, Stephen Leonard, and David McComb, <em>Colorado: A History of the Centennial State </em>(Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1994).</p> <p>“<a href="https://www2.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-07/documents/hf_es_erd_jun2015.pdf">Assessment of the Potential Impacts of Hydraulic Fracturing for Oil and Gas on Drinking Water Resources: Executive Summary</a>,” Office of Research and Development, Environmental Protection Agency, June 2015.</p> <p>“<a href="http://greeleygov.com/museums/ShortHistory.aspx">A thumbnail history of Greeley</a>,” City of Greeley.</p> <p>Coleman Cornelius, “<a href="https://extras.denverpost.com/business/biz0203b.htm">Beef baron Monfort dies at 71</a>,” <em>Denver Post</em>, February 3, 2001.</p> <p>Sharon Dunn, “<a href="https://www.greeleytribune.com/2014/12/01/oil-gas-jobs-produce-labor-shortage-for-many-employers-in-weld-county/">Oil-gas jobs produce labor shortage for many employers in Weld County</a>,” <em>Greeley Tribune</em>, November 15, 2014.</p> <p>Pekka Hämäläinen, <em>The Comanche Empire </em>(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).</p> <p>“<a href="https://www.historycolorado.org/museums/history-fort">History of the Fort</a>,” Fort Vasquez Museum, History Colorado.</p> <p>“<a href="https://www.weldcounty150.org">History of Weld County Towns: Firestone</a>,” Weld County: Celebrating 150 Years, n.d.</p> <p>“<a href="https://www.weld.gov/">Industry</a>: About Weld,” <s>About Weld</s>, Weld County, n.d.</p> <p>Rheba Massey, "<a class="ext" href="https://history.poudrelibraries.org/archive/poudreriver.php">Was 'Cache La Poudre' the original name of the river that flows through Fort Collins? (link is external)</a>" Fort Collins History Connection, n.d.</p> <p>Carol Drake Mehls and Steven F. Mehls, “<a href="https://www.historycolorado.org/sites/default/files/files/OAHP/crforms_edumat/pdfs/612.pdf">Weld County, Colorado: Historic Agricultural Context</a>,” History Colorado, 1988, rev. 2006.</p> <p>“<a href="https://greeleymuseums.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Five-Rivers-2006.641.pdf">Monfort of Colorado: Guide to the Five Rivers Collection</a>, ” City of Greeley Museums, June 24, 2011.</p> <p>“<a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/the-new-fort-lupton-rises-on-the-banks-of-the-south-platte-river/">The New Fort Lupton Rises on the Banks of the South Platte River</a>,” <em>CBS Denver</em>, September 4, 2011.</p> <p>“<a href="https://www.weldcounty150.org">Old Weld County 1859–1887</a>,” Weld County: Celebrating 150 Years, n.d.</p> <p>“<a href="https://www.colorado.com/articles/quick-guide-colorados-pawnee-national-grassland">Quick Guide to Colorado’s Pawnee National Grassland</a>,” Colorado.com (Colorado Tourism), updated July 29, 2015.</p> <p>Corrie Sahling, “<a href="https://www.denverpost.com/2014/06/03/greeley-residents-deal-with-more-flooding/">Greeley residents deal with more flooding</a>,” <em>Denver Post</em>, June 3, 2014.</p> <p>Blair Shiff, “Weld County: Businesses decimated by Colorado flooding,” <em>9 News</em>, September 17, 2013.</p> <p>Carol Rein Shwayder, “Weld County Old and New: Cache La Poudre Corridor Study,” prepared for the City of Greeley (Greeley, CO: Unicorn Ventures, 1990).</p> <p>Tanja Srebotnjak and Miriam Rotkin-Ellman, “<a href="https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/fracking-air-pollution-IB.pdf">Fracking Fumes: Air Pollution from Hydraulic Fracturing Threatens Public Health and Communities</a>,” Natural Resources Defense Council, December 2014.</p> <p>&nbsp;“<a href="https://www.spvhs.org/">Rebuilding</a> the Past for the Future,” South Platte Valley Historical Society, n.d.</p> <p>University of Northern Colorado, “<a href="http://www.unco.edu/president/unc-history.aspx">A short history of UNC</a>.”</p> <p>“Weld County,” <em>Colorado County Histories Notebook </em>(Denver: History Colorado, 1989–2000).</p> <p>Elliot West, <em>Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado </em>(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998).</p> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <!-- THEME DEBUG --> <!-- THEME HOOK: 'field' --> <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * field--node--field-additional-information-htm--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--node--field-additional-information-htm.html.twig x field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig * field--field-additional-information-htm.html.twig * field--text-long.html.twig * field.html.twig --> <!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> <div class="field field--name-field-additional-information-htm field--type-text-long field--label-above" id="id-field-additional-information-htm"> <div class="field__label" id="id-field-additional-information-htm">Additional Information</div> <div class="field__item" id="id-field-additional-information-htm"><p>David Boyd, <em>A History: Greeley and the Union Colony of Colorado</em> (Greeley, CO: Greeley Tribune Press, 1890).</p> <p>Sarah J. Deutsch, <em>No Separate Refuge</em> (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).<a href="http://www.firestoneco.gov/">City of Firestone</a></p> <p><a href="http://greeleygov.com/">City of Greeley</a></p> <p>Arnold Hubert, <em>Resurrection of Fort Lupton </em>(Fort Lupton, CO: Self-published with Xlibris, 2011).</p> <p>Nancy Lynch, <em>Weld County Towns: The First 150 Years</em> (San Antonio, TX: Historical Publishing Network, 2011).</p> <p><a href="https://www.spvhs.org/">South Platte Valley Historical Society</a></p> <p><a href="http://www.unco.edu/">University of Northern Colorado</a></p> <p><a href="https://www.weld.gov/">Weld County</a></p> <p>Joshua Zaffos, “<a href="https://www.westword.com/news/the-blm-just-sold-more-leases-on-the-pawnee-and-environmentalists-say-thats-for-the-birds-6965224">The BLM Just Sold More Leases on the Pawnee—and Environmentalists Say That’s For the Birds</a>,” <em>Westword</em>, July 28, 2015.</p> </div> </div> <!-- END OUTPUT from 'themes/custom/encyclopedia/templates/field/field--node--encyclopedia-article.html.twig' --> Tue, 29 Dec 2015 17:51:58 +0000 yongli 1064 at http://coloradoencyclopedia.org