"PANEL 1: A HIGHWAY FOR THE AGES
Though less famous than the trails that brought American pioneers westward, the north- south route along the foot of the Rockies covers far greater distances in space and in time. This natural transportation corridor runs the length of the Americas and has carried ten thousand years' worth of traffic. Native peoples traveled it for centuries, Spanish explorers marched it during seventeenth- and eighteenth-century quests for territory and treasure, and U.S. pathfinders covered parts of the route during nineteenth-century expeditions. Colorado's first permanent settlers arrived on this trail from Mexico, filtering into the Arkansas River country beginning in the 1820s. By then the route was already a fixture of the North American landscape—truly a highway for the ages.
During the nineteenth century various names attached themselves to the ancient road. The segment between New Mexico and the Arkansas River became known as the Taos Trail. Farther north mountain men spoke of the Trapper's Trail; gold rushers, the Cherokee Trail; cattlemen, the Goodnight-Loving. Throughout its evolution from path to rail corridor, paved highway, and four-lane interstate, the route has remained fairly constant: from Santa Fe over Raton Pass into the Arkansas Valley, along Fountain and Cherry Creeks to the South Platte, then downstream to present-day Greeley, finally overland to Wyoming and points north. By whatever name, in whatever form, this ageless thoroughfare has always made for easy travel and useful connections.
Also found on this panel:
Drawing of two men alongside a creek
(Caption) The southernmost stretch of the Trappers' Trail followed Fountain Creek to the Arkansas River.
Colorado Historical Society
Photo of train
(Caption) The Denver & Rio Grande's tracks were laid over age-old trails.
Courtesy Denver Public Library, Western History Department
Photo of car
(Caption) An early motorist (circa 1919) travels the unpaved predecessor of today's interstate between Pueblo and Colorado Springs.
Courtesy Colorado Department of Transportation
Photo of bridge
(Caption) The first paved highway, like the modern interstate, stayed close to the tracks of the old railroad. Photograph taken circa 1926.
Colorado Historical Society
PANEL 2: PUEBLO
El Pueblo
El Pueblo never achieved great commercial success, but one could make a living there. Built in 1842 by traders George Simpson, Matthew Kinkead, Robert Fisher, Jim Beckwourth, and several others, El Pueblo stood at a long-established crossroads with well-traveled roads and rich bottomland. Located on the north bank of the Arkansas River -- the international boundary between Mexico and the United States -- the adobe fort was a cooperative venture which proffered guns, powder, beads, and trade cloth to customers on both sides of the border. With a peak population of about 150 men, women, and children, El Pueblo had the feel of a semi-permanent settlement. But its uneven reputation scared some customers away, and the proprietors, having hoped for better profits, all departed by 1848. After a deadly Ute attack in 1854, El Pueblo was abandoned for good.
The town of Pueblo emerged as a center of industry soon after its 1860 founding, developing one of the deepest industrial bases and richest ethnic fabrics in Colorado. Waves of Europeans came to work in the city's steel mills, smelters, and factories -- Germans, Irish, Italians, Hungarians, Poles, Czechs, Slovenians, Greeks, and Japanese among others. By 1900 more than half of Pueblo's residents were immigrants or first-generation Americans. Widely known as "the Pittsburgh of the West," it had much in common with northeastern factory towns, including periodic labor strife and bustling ethnic neighborhoods such as Goat Hill, St. Charles Mesa, and Peppersauce Bottoms. A 1921 flood left central Pueblo underwater, but the sturdy community rebuilt. Pueblo remains one of Colorado's great cities.
Also found on this panel:
Photo of Jim Beckwourth
(Caption) Famed African-American mountain man Jim Beckwourth resided at El Pueblo during the winter of 1842-43.
Colorado Historical Society
Photo of street scene
(Caption) Downtown Pueblo, circa 1900
Courtesy Denver Public Library, Western History Department
Photo of shantytown
(Caption) Smelter Hill was home to a succession of immigrant groups, including Italians and Mexicans. Adobe homes and conspicuous hornos (beehive shaped earthen ovens) signal Hispanic settlement, circa 1890.
Courtesy Denver Public Library, Western History Department
Photo of baseball team
(Caption) Japanese-American baseball team, 1928.
Courtesy Pueblo Library, Hassey Collection
PANEL 3: INDUSTRIAL FRONTIER
"[T]he natural resources of the State are so great and varied that capital irresistibly turned to the business of converting the raw materials so abundantly provided into finished products." — from Colorado Manufactures, 1904
Though it clashes with the myth of the rugged individualist, the truth is that the Colorado frontier was largely urban and industrial. Mills, ore refineries, packing houses, canneries, and assembly plants rose within a decade of the first gold strikes, and the region's bountiful resources and hungry markets powered the development of ever more sophisticated industries. By 1900 Colorado production lines were churning out metals, farm machinery, beer, sugar, and cigars, and the state's per capita manufacturing rate equaled that of Ohio. Over the next century aerospace and computer firms brought high technology to the Front Range. The romance of Colorado will always belong to the prospectors and cowboys, but most of the heavy lifting has taken place in the factories.
Colorado Fuel & Iron
Among Colorado's corporate citizens, few have been as important as Colorado Fuel and Iron. Created by merger in 1879, this industrial colossus soon ranked as the largest steel producer west of the Mississippi and one of the 10 largest in the world. CF&I's billowing smokestacks often darkened the skies over Pueblo, but those plumes of exhaust brought sunshine to the region's economy. By 1904 the company, now bankrolled by the Rockefeller and Gould families, was Colorado's largest employer (with 17,000 workers) and heaviest taxpayer. As a fully integrated steel and fuel producer CF&I controlled quarries, mines, smelters, railroads, workshops, land companies, and banks throughout the West. Along with these interests, CF&I's prodigious output of steel — everything from wire and rails to rivets and nails — and vast financial reserves constituted a framework for Colorado's growth, the girders and beams of development.
Also found on this panel:
Photo of men in factory
(Caption) Beet sugar factory, southeastern Colorado, 1902
Courtesy Denver Public Library, Western History Department
Photo of factory exterior
(Caption) Colorado Fuel & Iron, Minnequa Steel Plant
Colorado Historical Society
Photo of man at machine
(Caption) Wire mill at CF&I
Courtesy Denver Public Library, Western History Department
PANEL 4: TRAIL DAYS
"A good sized steer when it is fit for the butcher market will bring from $45.00 to $60.00. The same animal at its birth was worth but $5.00. He has run on the plains and cropped the grass from the public domain for four or five years, and now, with scarcely any expense to its owner, is worth forty dollars more than when he started....and that is why our cattlemen grow rich." — undated item, Breeder's Gazette
It was that simple: drive the $5 steer to the $50 market and pocket the difference. Easy money. In post-Civil War Texas, where cattle outnumbered people six to one, almost anyone could cobble together a presentable herd and prod it north. From the late 1860s through the end of the century, hundreds of thousands of Texas steers hit the trail annually. Roughly a quarter of them came through here, on the Goodnight-Loving Trail. Though rougher, drier, and more exposed than routes into Kansas, the Goodnight-Loving Trail provided access to unclaimed grasslands and growing consumer markets as well as railheads. Thanks largely to this hoof-beaten highway, Colorado's cattle population grew from a scattered handful in 1860 to more than a million by 1880.
Charles Goodnight
"Charles Goodnight approaches greatness more nearly than any other cowman of history." — J. Frank Dobie, Cow People
In pioneering the first cattle trail from Texas to Colorado, Charles Goodnight risked everything. He and partner Oliver Loving drove 2,000 longhorns over nearly one thousand miles of trackless prairie in 1866, enduring Indian raids, dust storms, and four waterless days in the Texas panhandle. Their reward: a $12,000 sale and the eternal gratitude of the nation's stockmen. Goodnight settled just west of here at Rock Canon Ranch, bringing 30,000 head into Colorado. An economic downturn in the late 1870s ruined him financially, and he returned to Texas to build a new cattle empire. But this inspirational figure left a rich legacy in Colorado's economy and lore.
Also found on this panel:
Drawing of cattle drive
(Caption) A trail herd of Texas Longhorns
Colorado Historical Society
Photo of chuck wagon
(Caption) A fixture of Western cattle drives, the chuck wagon is said to have been invented by Charles Goodnight.
Courtesy C. Bowen, Lamar, Colorado
Portrait of Goodnight
(Caption) Charles Goodnight
Colorado Historical Society
PANEL 5: PALMER’S CITY
“My vision for this place is that it should be made the most attractive place for homes in the West—a place for schools, colleges, literature, science, first-class newspapers, and everything that the above imply.” – William Jackson Palmer, December 1871
William Jackson Palmer established Colorado Springs in 1871 as a resort for “people of means and social standing.” His intentions were twofold: to appease his wife, Queen Mellen, a New York socialite who found the West badly lacking in refinement; and to attract investment capital for his expanding rail network. The settlement succeeded on both counts. With its scenic wonders, healthy climate, and opulent hotels, Colorado Springs grew popular with authors, painters, and persons of high breeding. It gained particular favor among the English, who settled in such great numbers the town was dubbed “Little London.” Though it owed its existence to Palmer’s Denver & Rio Grande, Colorado Springs wasn’t just another railroad town; it represented the crown jewel of a vast rail empire.
The Cripple Creek gold strike of 1890 changed Colorado Springs forever. Without warning, Palmer’s exclusive colony was overrun by men of crass ambition, their sweating animals and dusty boots soiling the genteel avenues to town. “Little London” became less retiring and more enterprising, more like a typical frontier community; by 1900 Tejon Street was line with mining concerns and the local population had tripled. As mining fever waned in the early twentieth century, tourism and tuberculosis sanatoriums kept Colorado Springs on the map. Fifty years later, another boom reshaped Colorado Springs: Fort Carson, the U.S. Air Force Academy, and the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD), all installed during and after World War II, made this a military hub. With the influx of jobs and federal money, Colorado Springs boomed anew, becoming one of the great cities of the Rockies.
Also found on this panel:
Photo of Gen. William Jackson Palmer
Colorado Historical Society
Photo of the Broadmoor
(Caption) The Broadmoor Hotel opened in 1918. The hotel’s architects also designed Grand Central Station, and the Ritz-Carlton, Vanderbilt, and Belmont hotels in New York City.
Colorado Historical Society" (from (
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