The Centennial State

Colorado earned its nickname through timing. The state was admitted to the Union on August first, eighteen seventy-six, just twenty-eight days after the nation marked the one hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. That made Colorado the thirty-eighth state, and that timing earned it the name the Centennial State.

Getting there took longer than anyone expected. Congress had organized the Colorado Territory in February of eighteen sixty-one, carved out of pieces of Kansas, Nebraska, Utah, and New Mexico territories in the wake of the Pikes Peak gold rush. The first wave of prospectors had flooded the region so quickly that some form of territorial government became unavoidable.

But statehood proved elusive. Attempts through the eighteen sixties were repeatedly blocked, partly over questions of who could vote and partly because Colorado's population fluctuated wildly with the mining booms. The silver and gold pulled from the mountains around Leadville, Central City, and Georgetown eventually tipped the scales.

By the mid-eighteen seventies, Colorado had both the population and the mineral wealth to make its case. President Ulysses Grant signed the proclamation making it official on August first, eighteen seventy-six. It had taken fifteen years and five attempts to get from territory to state.

The mountain wealth that drove the rush became the foundation of everything that followed.