Colorado: The Centennial State

Colorado became the thirty-eighth state on August first, eighteen seventy-six, exactly one hundred years after the Declaration of Independence. That timing earned it a name that has lasted: the Centennial State. But Colorado's story is far older than a single century, and shaped by forces that have been at work far longer than any government.

The land covers an extraordinary range of elevation and terrain. Fifty-three peaks rise above fourteen thousand feet, more than any other state. The Colorado River begins in the mountains near Rocky Mountain National Park and drains westward through canyon country into the deserts of the Southwest. The eastern plains, rolling shortgrass prairie that stretches unbroken toward Kansas and Nebraska, could not look more different from the alpine tundra of the Continental Divide, which splits the state north to south along a ridge that separates rivers flowing to two different oceans.

People have lived here for at least twelve thousand years. The Ancestral Puebloans built cliff cities in the canyons of the southwest corner. The Ute people ranged the mountains and western plateaus for centuries. Spanish missionaries and explorers entered from the south in the fifteen hundreds. Mexican and New Mexican settlers were farming the San Luis Valley before the United States had any legal claim to the land.

Gold changed everything in eighteen fifty-nine. Silver followed. The Colorado Rockies produced mineral wealth on a scale that transformed not only the territory but the national economy. When the silver market collapsed in eighteen ninety-three, entire towns emptied almost overnight.

The twentieth century brought agriculture and ranching to the eastern plains, water engineering on a scale that rerouted rivers across the Continental Divide, and eventually the ski industry, which turned the ruins of mining economies into one of the most visited mountain landscapes in the world.

Colorado is a state of transitions: between desert and mountain, between indigenous homeland and settler territory, between extraction economy and recreation economy. The transitions have not always been peaceful. But the landscape they happened in is, by any measure, one of the most spectacular on the continent.