Greeley and the Utopian Colony That Invented Western Irrigation

Greeley was not founded by prospectors or ranchers. It was founded by idealists who wanted to prove that a cooperative, alcohol-free farming community could thrive on the Colorado plains. The experiment was only partially successful, but the irrigation systems it built changed the entire American West.

In December of eighteen sixty-nine, Nathan Meeker, the agricultural editor of the New York Tribune, published a column calling for settlers to join him in establishing a high-minded colony in Colorado. More than three thousand people responded. Meeker was backed by his employer, the Tribune's legendary editor Horace Greeley, whose famous phrase about going west had already become a national motto. In the spring of eighteen seventy, about five hundred colonists arrived in the Cache la Poudre valley north of Denver, staked out their town, and named it for the man who had inspired them, even though Greeley himself never lived there.

The colony was strictly dry, a temperance community that would not sell alcohol under any circumstances. It stayed that way until nineteen sixty-nine, nearly a century later. More practically, the colonists built an extensive network of irrigation ditches in their first years, among the earliest large-scale irrigation projects in the United States, turning dry tableland into productive farmland and establishing water law precedents that still govern Colorado's rivers today.

Meeker himself did not die in Greeley. In eighteen seventy-eight he was appointed Indian agent at the White River Agency in western Colorado. His mismanagement of relations with the Ute people triggered the Meeker Massacre of eighteen seventy-nine, in which he and several agency employees were killed. The town he founded outlasted him by generations and today anchors a region that grows more agricultural product than most Colorado counties.