This Day in Western Music (Denver Founded)

November 17, 1858—Crossing cottonwood sticks on a hill overlooking the South Platte River, William Larimer Jr. staked a claim on the east side of Cherry Creek, across from the existing settlement of Auraria. Like much of the way that the American West was founded, the creation of the city of Denver was marked as much by wishful thinking and dumb luck as by geographic logic.

Let’s start with the name. Larimer (his preferred prefix, “General,” came courtesy of the Pennsylvania State Militia) had come from Pittsburgh, where he’d made some serious money in the railroad business, out to eastern Kansas, hoping to make money off the gold fever sweeping the area by picking up and selling tracts of land. Wouldn’t it be great if he could get this spot named the seat of Arapahoe County? He’d even figured out a foolproof way of doing so—name it after James W. Denver, the territorial governor of Kansas.

A great idea. Too bad it ran into reality.

At the time Larimer was sizing up this rise of land, Gov. Denver was doing what one official after another probably wanted to do in the territory: washing his hands of a bad situation. Imagine today’s Iraq, only that instead of Islamic factions you had slaveholders vs. abolitionists, all fighting over the Lecompton Constitution, a device by which the slaveholders tried to foist the peculiar institution on an outraged free soil majority.

Denver had come to this territory originally as President James Buchanan’s commissioner of Indian affairs—certainly not an easy job in those times, but a real day at the beach compared with running interference between the President, the abolitionists and the slaveholders. At least 50 political killings (including a massacre organized by John Brown, later of Harpers Ferry fame) on both sides were documented. No wonder the territory became known as “Bleeding Kansas.”

In fact, slaveholders from Georgia had already appeared in this part of the territory before Larimer. The “Russell Party,” organized by a band of brothers from Georgia, had planted the settlement of Auraria only two weeks before. They didn’t stay long, however, leaving Larimer with the fame of being the founder of the great metropolis of the Rockies.

From 1870 to 1890, a network of railroads made Denver THE place to be in banking, minting, mining and supplies, not to mention agriculture. Larimer died in 1875, but early on he could sense which way the wind was blowing. He couldn’t even stop boosting the city to his wife and kids, writing them in Leavenworth: “It is well the Pilgrims landed upon Plymouth Rock and settled up that country before they saw this one or that would now remain unsettled. Everyone will soon be flocking to Denver for the most picturesque country in the world, with fine air, good water, and everything to make man happy and live to a good old age."

Fifty years after its founding, Denver was selected as the site of the 1908 Democratic National Convention. The Democrats didn’t win that contest, but they had better luck 100 years later, when the running mates they nominated in the same city, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, swept to victory.