3. RAIL CITY

The town conceived, born and raised in a mining boom began to look like a bust during the 1860s. Between 1860 and 1870, the town gained only 10 additional residents. The U. S. Census of 1870 counted 4,759 Denver residents, not the predicted 100,000.

Editor Bill Byers fumed about what he called "go-backers" in the Rocky Mountain News: "Because they cannot shovel out nuggets like they have been accustomed to dig potatoes, they raise the cry that it is all a humbug and take the back track for home where it is to be hoped that they will ever after remain."

Denver’s doldrums, as Byers pointed out, could only be relieved by railroad connections. The town’s isolated position 600 miles from the nearest urban centers along the Missouri River retarded growth.

Another champion of the railroad was former territorial governor William Gilpin, Colorado’s greatest orator, or, according to arch-rival Byers, the state’s biggest windbag. Gilpin proclaimed in 1869 that Denver was "preeminently cosmopolitan," for it lay at the crossroads where "the vast area of the Pacific fits itself to the basin of the Atlantic."

Of course, Gilpin generally saw the center of universe as wherever he happened to be. Denver, as he elaborated in his 1873 book, Mission of the North American People, lay along the isothermal zodiac that ran through Athens, Rome, Paris, London, and New York. Through Denver the "condensed commerce of mankind" was destined to flow.

John Evans

Governor Gilpin’s rhetoric not withstanding, Denver lay in the middle of nowhere, 600 miles from "the states" and the nearest sizeable city. Denver’s rail hopes remained dim until President Abraham Lincoln appointed John Evans to replace William Gilpin as territorial governor in 1862. Evans, who was born to a Quaker family on an Ohio farm in 1814, gravitated to the Ohio Valley boom town of Cincinnati. There he graduated from Lynn Medical College and moved west to Indianapolis, where in 1845 he spearheaded the establishment of one of America’s early insane asylums.

In 1847, Evans moved to the boom town of Chicago where he taught at Rush Medical College. He also began investing in Chicago real estate and railroads. Business interests led him into politics and he became a Chicago city councilman and early supporter of Abraham Lincoln. Evans proved to be a sharp businessman. He helped found the Chicago suburb of Evanston and its academic claim to fame—Northwestern University. He also helped promote the railroads that made Chicago the rail hub of America.

If anyone could bend the rails of transcontinental lines into Denver, it would be the new territorial governor. President Lincoln had appointed Evans a commissioner of the Union Pacific Railway, a position Evans would use to Denver’s advantage. Governor Evans found a close friend and ally in editor Byers, who had feuded with Governor Gilpin. These two, more than anyone else, were responsible for making Denver the metropolis of the Rockies.

If Byers was Denver’s number-one booster, Governor Evans became the city’s number-one builder. He erected railroads, churches, a university, and a fine home at 14th and Arapahoe Streets that attracted other home builders to Denver’s first fancy residential address—14th Street.

Some, including Mrs. Evans, wondered why the wealthy and respected Dr. Evans left the comforts of Chicago for the Colorado wilderness where he found Denver "really the only tolerable place." Certainly Evans, who had assets of $1.3 million according to the 1870 census, did not come west for the salary of $2,500 a year as territorial governor.

Perhaps Evans was motivated by the missionary idealism that led him to found Colorado Seminary in 1864. This pioneer college evolved into what is now the University of Denver on Evans Avenue. Evans also gave $100 toward the construction of any church. Churches, Evans felt, could civilize the raw, saloon-filled frontier crossroads which Isabella Bird found to be a spree city where "men go to spend the savings of months of hard work in the maddest dissipation."

Although Governor Evans assured Denverites that he would capture the iron horse, the hamlet of Golden organized Colorado’s first railroad. Golden lay fifteen miles to the west of Denver at the mouth of Clear Creek Canyon, Colorado’s richest mineral stream of the pioneer era. Golden promoters William A. H. Loveland and Henry M. Teller organized the Colorado Central in 1864. Working with Boston capitalists who had created the Golden City Town Company in 1859, Loveland and Teller hoped to make their town the rail hub of Colorado.

Loveland and Teller’s "Golden Crowd" also hoped to politically railroad the "Denver Crowd" led by Evans and Byers. After the first session of the territorial legislature found Colorado City (the predecessor town of Colorado Springs) uncomfortably crude in 1861, Golden seduced the legislators by offering them free accommodations in Loveland’s Hall in downtown Golden, as well as free firewood and iced libations. Not until 1867 did equally generous offers coax the legislators to move to Denver, where they have remained.

While Golden City courted the lawmakers, backers of Golden’s railroad courted the mining camps up Clear Creek Canyon. Central City, Black Hawk, Idaho Springs, Georgetown and other Clear Creek communities generally shared a mistrust of big, bad Denver. Many Coloradans considered the Mile High City a parasitical supply-and-spree town that drained wealth from its hard working hinterlands. The Central City Colorado Times cheered Golden’s efforts to build the Colorado Central up Clear Creek Canyon as "good news for mining districts, for there is but little of the Denver egotism about the Golden folks. We can hope for advantages from Golden City that Denver in her exclusiveness would never grant. Denver is like the snake, which perishing from the cold, was taken by the countryman out of pity into his bosom, but which upon being revived by his warmth, as a return for his kindness, bit him. So Denver in her selfishness would have the mines of Colorado—the very bowels of their existence—shift for themselves."

Despite these editorial jabs, Denver rushed into the railroad race. Making molehills out of the mountains west of Denver, Byers wrote of the two-mile-high mountain wall: "the country is fully described when we say hilly; but few elevations attaining the prominence of mountains, the valleys and slopes are rich in grasses, prolific in fruits and abounding with inexhaustible forests of pine, fir, and cedar timber, presenting a most vivid contrast to the barren and desert plains [of Wyoming]."

Union Pacific engineer Grenville M. Dodge came to a different conclusion about the "hilly" land west of Denver. He knew better after surveying a possible Berthoud Pass rail route in September 1866, when he and his men were nearly buried by a sudden blizzard. Only paper railroads, like paper steamboats, reached Denver in the 1860s.

Dodge and the Union Pacific decided that a route through Wyoming would be much faster and cheaper to build. Cruelly, the transcontinental railroad bypassed "The Queen City of the Mountains and Plains" in favor of Cheyenne and the gentler hills of Wyoming. "Denver," crowed the Cheyenne Daily Leader "was too far from Cheyenne ever to amount to much." Other rivals added: "Denver would soon be too dead to bury."

Many Denver pioneers began moving to Cheyenne, reckoning that the Union Pacific town would be the rail hub of the Rockies. As Denver’s population dwindled, civic leaders such as Byers and Evans grew alarmed. They joined with bankers David Moffat and Luther and Charles Kountze, and entrepreneur Walter Scott Cheesman to rescue the city with a lifeline of steel. Evans, relieved of his governorship after the Sand Creek Massacre, stayed in Denver although his dismissal also killed his hope that the governorship might lead to the U. S. Senate. Free of political responsibilities, Evans devoted his considerable abilities, experience, and energy to railroading the Rockies.

The Denver Pacific

To rescue the fading Colorado Capital, Evans, Byers and the Board of Trade persuaded voters to approve bond support for constructing the Denver Pacific Railroad. Citizens also donated labor to help grade the tracks and even cut trees and made railroad ties for the 106-mile line between Denver and Cheyenne.

Denverites celebrated the arrival of the Denver Pacific on June 24, 1870. At last, Denver lay on the nation’s railroad maps. The steel lifeline kept the town from blowing away, anchoring it for a railroad boom. Once the Denver Pacific arrived, other railroads built to Denver. After these iron horses galloped into town during the 1870s, gold, silver, coal and other pay dirt began to pay off. The reborn town constructed a spider web of rails to tap a vast Rocky Mountain hinterland of mining, farming, and ranching communities. Denver became the node of a vast railroad network stretching from Montana to New Mexico, from Utah to Kansas.

In subsequent years, dozens of other railroads steamed into Denver, making it the rail hub of the Rockies. By 1900, a hundred trains a day snorted in and out of Denver’s Union Station.

This rail network enabled Denver to establish its metropolitan sway over Coloradans. Gold and silver ores mined in the mountains rode the rails into Denver’s smelters. The giant Argo, Globe and Grant smelters became Denver’s biggest employers by the 1890s. Acrid, black smelter-smoke hung over the city, signaling its emergence as an industrial center.

After finishing the Denver Pacific, John Evans presided over the Denver, South Park and Pacific (DSP&P). This narrow gauge line, incorporated in 1872, followed the South Platte River into the Rockies. The DSP&P first stopped at Morrison, a scenic town located in the red sandstone foothills. There Evans joined the Scottish stonemason George Morrison in establishing the Morrison Stone, Lime and Townsite Company.

The South Park line crawled up South Platte Canyon and over Kenosha Pass to tap South Park’s goldfields. A spur line climbed over Boreas Pass to reach Breckenridge and Summit County’s mineral riches. The main line ran through Fairplay and down Trout Creek Pass to the Arkansas River. From the Arkansas, a branch headed north to tap Leadville and its mineral riches. The main line resumed its quest for the Pacific by digging the Alpine Tunnel, the first transportation bore under the Continental Divide. In 1883 the DSP&P ran out of steam in a mountain valley near Gunnison, 200 miles southwest of Denver. Like the Denver Pacific and all of Colorado’s other "Pacific" railroads, the DSP&P never came within a thousand miles of that ocean. Nevertheless, the South Park served the Mile High City well. To feed the city’s building boom, that road brought in Platte Valley lumber and granite, Morrison sandstone and lime, South Park gold ores, and Gunnison County coal.

Evans’ last great rail dream was the Denver & New Orleans Railroad, later renamed the Denver, Texas and Gulf. He established this standard-gauge line in 1881, hoping to give Denver a port on the Gulf of Mexico. On the way to New Orleans, the road nourished the towns of Parker, Franktown and Elizabeth. The latter town is named for Evans’ sister-in-law, Elizabeth G. Hubbard and is in Elbert County, which is named for Evans’ son-in-law—and Colorado territorial governor (1873-74)—Samuel H. Elbert. Elizabeth and Elbert County would remain sleepy rural areas until the 1990s, when Elbert became one of the fastest-growing counties in the country and a booming hotspot on Denver’s suburban frontier.

The Denver Tramway Company

Railroads caused Denver’s population boom, and street railways enabled Denver to grow physically outward onto the surrounding prairies. Just as John Evans had established railroads, he helped start the streetcar line which did much to shape Denver’s growth.

In 1886, John Evans and his son William Gray Evans incorporated the Denver Tramway Company (DTC) with William Byers, hotel keeper Henry C. Brown and businessman and library builder Roger Woodbury. The DTC secured an exclusive city franchise to build electric streetcar lines, thereby dooming the horse railways that built Denver’s first streetcar lines in the 1870s. By 1900, the DTC had driven rival cable car and horse railways out of business and monopolized Denver streetcar service. The Tramway installed a city-wide network of overhead electric trolleys for lines that reached every neighborhood in Denver. The DTC shot out East Colfax Avenue to Park Hill, Montclair and Aurora, out West Colfax and West 13th Avenue to Lakewood and Golden. One of the busiest lines went south on Broadway to Englewood and Littleton. Another DTC line headed west on 32nd Avenue to Wheat Ridge and Arvada. The Washington Avenue line served Globeville and Adams County.

The Denver Tramway Company became one of Denver’s biggest employers and an essential part of many people’s lives. Most, lacking horse and carriages, took streetcars to work, to shop and to play. Special tramway cars were rented out for weddings and honeymoons, while Funeral Cars A and B took many Denverites on their final rides—to Riverside and Fairmount Cemeteries.

The rapidly expanding DTC built a huge power plant at the confluence of the South Platte and Cherry Creek (today’s Forney Transportation Museum). After the death of John Evans, his son demolished the family house at 14th and Arapahoe to construct the Tramway headquarters in 1912. The complex included an office tower, classrooms to train streetcar conductors to be courteous and efficient, and car barns and shops.

John Evans railroad and streetcars transformed Denver into a fast growing city on rails. Evans capitalized on that growth. In 1872, to house his offices, he built the two-story Evans Block at 15th and Arapahoe Streets, a block from his home. In 1888, Evans constructed the eight-story, $100,000 Railroad Building at 1515 Larimer Street with a handsome facade of Morrison sandstone.

Growing alarmed at the unbridled, chaotic growth he had helped unleash, John Evans in 1894 proposed a park and parkway system to bring some badly needed greenery and visual relief to the urban hodge-podge. The city rejected the Evans plan, claiming it would be too expensive to acquire, build, and water these parks and parkways. Evans’ critics claimed that the parks were simply a scheme to increase ridership on his streetcars. Of the Evans master plan, only Park Avenue and improvements to City Park were implemented. Evans’ final dream for Denver would have to await another generation of progressive-era reformers more interested in city beautification.

Evans made money on his railroads and streetcars, fleecing Eastern and European capitalists in typical Gilded Age style. Although Indians and stockholders had good reason to think otherwise, most Denverites praised Evans for building up Denver in both the private and the public sectors. To the Indians, Governor Evans was an enemy and his railroads were deadly. The "iron snake" brought thousands of white settlers and army troops, as well as hide-hunters who almost exterminated the buffalo. Evans was also criticized by stockholders who lost money on his railroads, while the governor and other inside investors made money through the construction companies.

Both Indians and investors might well agree with Henry David Thoreau’s conclusion that: "We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us." As Harry Kelsey, Evans biographer, puts it, the man did not neglect his personal interests, while building a city that is his greatest monument.

The 1893 Depression

John Evans’ death in 1897 came at the end of Denver’s golden age, which ended abruptly with the Depression of 1893. The Evans family squeaked through the Depression but many other capitalists were not so lucky. The silver tycoon Horace Tabor lost his opera house, his Capitol Hill mansion, his office block, and one possession after another. He rented a room for his family in the Windsor Hotel, where he died bankrupt in 1899.

Denver’s response to the Depression was to diversify. Whereas the city had relied on supplying and smelting for the mining industry, it shifted to other businesses to weather the Depression. A boom town is easy to boost; reviving a dwindling city is much harder. Denver after 1893 began to lose population for the first time since the mid-1860s. An estimated 10,000 people left the city after the 1893 crash. Even the President of the Chamber of Commerce, mining magnate John F. Campion, admitted that "public spirit is as dead as Lot’s wife after she was turned to a pillar of salt."

To cheer up a depressed Denver, boosters proposed a municipal carnival inspired by Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Denver’s Festival of Mountain and Plain consisted of three days of parades and exhibits showcasing Colorado’s agricultural, industrial, mineral and mercantile enterprises for tourists and local customers.

At the first festival in 1895, impoverished businessmen and their wives marched in their finery, pretending to be rich as Midas. The parade became an annual event, not abandoned until 1912, when Denver finally seemed to be back on its feet.

Although the mining industry recovered with the 1890s Cripple Creek gold boom, mining would decline steadily during the 1900s. The rail network however, survived, allowing Coloradans to tap other sources of wealth.

Women’s Touch

While their husbands scrambled to find economic solutions to the terrible 1893 depression, women worried about the victims. A few handed out food to every beggar who knocked on the door and tried to find yard or house work for the unemployed. As the number of destitute increased, however, kind individuals could no longer handle the problem. They banded together to organize charitable institutions. Elizabeth Byers, wife of the newspaperman, had organized the Ladies Union Aid Society in 1860 to assist the hungry, sick, homeless and destitute. Margaret Gray Evans, wife of the governor, helped Mrs. Byers reorganize the Union Aid Society in 1872 as the Ladies Relief Society. This society also strove to provide food, shelter and clothing for the needy and in 1873 founded the Old Ladies Home, which still pursues its original mission in handsomely restored quarters at 4115 West 38th Avenue now known as The Argyle.

A growing number of private and church charities combined in 1887 to create the Charity Organization Society, an umbrella group to coordinate fund-raising for all social services. The Charity Organization Society evolved into The United Way. This Denver idea, spearheaded by women such as Frances Weisbart Jacobs, of consolidating fund-raising for charity has since been adopted by many other cities.

Hundreds of now-forgotten Catholic nuns gave their lives to hospitals, orphanages, schools and other institutions working to help all Denverites, especially those at the bottom of society. Doing typically heavenly work, the Sisters of Charity from Leavenworth arrived in Denver in 1872 to establish St. Joseph’s Hospital. When asked about the questionable location on Market Street, Denver’s red light district, Sister Superior Johanna Brunner replied "We’ll take the question out of the neighborhood." By setting up homes for orphans, working girls, and former prostitutes, the good sisters did much to lift up Denver’s fallen daughters. The sisters moved their hospital in 1876 to its current site on Franklin Street, where they still operate St. Joseph as the oldest and one of the best private hospitals in the state.

Frances Wisebart Jacobs, the wife of a Jewish merchant, made the Hebrew Benevolent Ladies Aid Society a godsend to Denver’s down and out. Jacobs also led in organizing the United Charity Organization, which more efficiently appealed to the city’s fat cats for funding which it then distributed to appropriate agencies. Jacobs helped to start a hospital for poor tuberculars, which opened its doors in 1892 with the slogan "None may enter who can pay—none can pay who enter." Originally called Frances Jacobs Hospital, it is now National Jewish Center for Immunology & Respiratory Medicine at East Colfax Avenue and Colorado Boulevard.

While aiding others, Jacobs neglected herself. In 1892, while nursing someone in a slummy section of town, she collapsed. Despite doctor’s orders to rest and recover, she was soon out tending the sick again, exacerbating her own health problems. She died a few months later at the age of 49. Denver’s "Mother of Charities" is one of the few women and non-politicians enshrined in stained glass at the Colorado State Capitol. Certainly she did more for the poor and sick than the much richer men who surround her in the Capitol rotunda.

Not only Denver residents, but the poor, disabled and homeless from elsewhere rode or stole rides on the rails into Denver. Thanks to compassionate Denver women, the poor profited from Denver’s willingness to cope with social problems. Mining, which had given birth to the city and promised to make many rich, left many sick and impoverished by the 1890s.

Agriculture

If Coloradans could not dig gold and silver, why not dig for crops? From the beginning, editor Byers promoted agriculture to give Denver economic roots that would survive mining busts. He personally filed an 1863 homestead claim along the South Platte River to Logan Street along Alameda Avenue. Here he built a frame house, 18 by 32 feet, with two doors and seven windows according to Federal Land Office Records. Byers had 35 acres under cultivation, a stable, a granary, an ice house, irrigation ditches, an orchard and a vineyard. All are gone today, although commemorated by a street name, Byers Place.

Byers experimented with various crops himself and urged others to do likewise, offering free seeds to anyone who would drop by his office. He also planted a lot of seeds in the pages of his paper, propagating agricultural possibilities and publicizing everything from the largest squash to the sweetest cherries.

Byers and Territorial Governor John Evans founded the Colorado Agricultural Society in 1863 and bought 40 acres east of Denver, in what is now City Park, as a fairground. The farm fair helped to showcase new crops, encourage experiments and reward diligent and creative farmers. The Colorado Agricultural Society held annual festivals that helped make Denver the major market city for Colorado’s ranchers and farmers. Denverites launched a determined crusade to produce as many goods and services as possible. Railroads hauled wheat and sugar beets, cattle, sheep and hogs into Denver, which emerged as a major food processing and distribution point. The aromas of stockyards, canneries, breweries and flour mills replaced acrid, dark smelter-smoke, as agricultural riches of the earth became more important to Denver than gold, silver and other precious minerals.

Denver was surrounded by ranches and farms that fed the hungry, fast growing city. Agricultural success stories abounded, although they never captured the popular fancy like silver and gold did. John Kernan Mullen, a young Irish immigrant, left school at age 14 to work in a flour mill and wound up with a multi-million dollar milling empire. Mullen’s Colorado Grain Elevator and Hungarian Flour empires owned wheat fields, grain elevators and flour mills throughout the Rockies.

Others helped make the city a center for processing food and leather goods. Henry Perky invented a machine to produce America’s first shredded wheat in his downtown Denver factory. Jesse Shwayder and his brothers opened a Denver trunk-manufacturing company that, under the trade name Samsonite, grew into what is now a worldwide giant. Charles Gates, an out-of-work mining engineer, and his brother John invented the world’s first V-belt. The Gates hired Buffalo Bill to ballyhoo their belts, tires and hoses, originally made of leather before Gates switched to rubber. Gates rode his rubber accessories for horseless carriages into prominence and wealth with the auto age.

Charles Boettcher and John F. Campion left the faltering silver city of Leadville for Denver, where they founded the Great Western Sugar Company to grow sugar beets. Stearns-Roger, a major engineering firm, switched from building smelters to erecting sugar beet factories.

To work Colorado’s fields, farms, and food processing factories, railroads brought in thousands of newcomers between the 1870s and the 1920s. Many of these were immigrants fleeing war-torn Europe, hoping for a new start in America’s highest state and its Mile High metropolis.

SOURCES:

Breck, Allen D. The Centennial History of the Jews of Colorado, 1859-1959. Denver: The University of Denver & Hirschfeld Press, 1960.

Converey, William. John Kernan Mullen. CU-Denver in-process M.A. History, Thesis 1997.

Karnes, Thomas L. William Gilpin: Western Nationalist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970.

Kelsey, Harry E. Jr., Frontier Capitalist: The Life of John Evans. Boulder: Colorado Historical Society & Pruett Publishing Co., 1969.

Lovelace, Walter B. and Walter S. Jesse Shwayder and the Golden Rule: First Fifty Years of Shwayder Bros., Inc., 1910-1960. Chicago: The Lakeside Press, 1960.

Noel, Thomas J. Colorado Catholicism and the Archdiocese of Denver, 1857-1989. Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1989.

Noel, Thomas J. "All Hail The Denver Pacific: Denver’s First Railroad," The Colorado Magazine , Spring, 1973 (L, 3), p. 91-116.

Perkin, Robert L. The First Years: An Informal History of Denver and the Rocky Mountain News,1859-1959. N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959.

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