How Colorado Escaped Becoming Texas
I love history and feel we can definitely learn from the past. History tends to repeat itself. Newspapers across America have been recording history as it happened from the early days of Benjamin Franklin. Newspapers arrived in droves when gold was discovered in Cripple Creek, Black Hawk and Central City. The Weekly Register Call in Central City and Black Hawk is the oldest continuous Colorado newspaper started in 1862 following gold being discovered in Gregory Gulch in 1859. In a very short time, there were 25,000 gold seekers living in the Central City area and adjacent Nevadaville located 1.3 miles northwest of Central City; a historic ghost town today but still housing a successful Masonic Lodge, a handful of residents, and a few standing stone buildings and a historical jail cell. The old buildings reek of history. It is a great place to visit and see the old mine tailings and structures.
There are many historic newspapers still being published across Colorado, like the Silverton Standard Miner and The Leadville Herald-Democrat. Many of the oldest newspapers were started where gold was sought and discovered. The 1880s-time frame includes my family history with my grandfather Patrick Sweeney, who immigrated from Ireland in 1865, marrying Mary Frawley who arrived from Ireland to work in Meeker for a local banker and entrepreneur. They were both Irish Catholics and were married in the Meeker Methodist Church in 1887; the only church in the early pioneer ranching community. Their wedding writeup appeared in the pages of the local newspaper. The community was still reeling from the infamous Meeker Massacre that occurred in September 1879 when Nathan Meeker was killed by Ute Indians at his government Indian Agency. The Meeker Herald began publishing in 1885 and added the name The Meeker Herald-Times when merging with the Rangely Times in later years, creating only one newspaper in Rio Blanco County, a beautiful river valley where Teddy Roosevelt visited on big game hunts on the White River. I subscribe to the newspaper to follow news about old friends in the community and historic letters written by agent Meeker struggling in operating the lone Indian Agency.
“Looking Back” is printed weekly in The Weekly Register-Call as a recap of the early day mining history in now Gilpin County that was part of the Kansas Territory until Colorado’s statehood in 1876.
The latest edition of The Meeker Herald-Times has a fascinating story written by Ed Peck, a historian of some note, who writes a regular column for the newspaper. I found his column very intriguing about how portions of Western Colorado could have been part of Texas. In a nutshell, Ed describes how the Republic of Texas began declaring independence from Mexico proclaiming a huge boundary of land taking in all of New Mexico and a large portion of Western Colorado stretching to California. Spanish priests, in a small expedition in 1776, passed through the Rio Grande all the way to the White River and into now Utah, proclaiming any land that they walked on for the Spanish Crown.
In 1821 the Mexican revolution ousted Spain but didn’t change the boundary lines on a map. In 1836 The Republic of Texas drew new imaginary lines on the map. Texas soon realized that they didn’t have enough muscle or military to defend the new lands or the Mexican border. The Mexican government wanted to reconquer the lost lands and sent cavalry attacking American troops on April 25, 1845. The U.S. responded with a total invasion of central Mexico by land and sea. General Winfield Scott landed his troops in Veracruz and marched to Mexico City and laid siege. There is an American cemetery in Mexico City containing 759 brave American soldiers lost in the fight. Mexico then signed a treaty proclaiming the Rio Grande as the new border and accepting Texas as U.S. territory selling off the lands north of the Rio Grande to the U.S. The treaty was signed Feb. 2. 1848. Ironically, gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in California on Jan. 24, 1846, just days before the land was sold. The net gain to the U.S. was 525,000 square miles of land and enough gold to impress Europe. Eleven years later gold was discovered in Gregory Gulch (Central City) in the Kansas Territory before Colorado became a state. Many of these 49ers eventually ended up in Colorado mining camps during the gold boom. Indians lost their lands as American settlers poured into the acquired lands with the Homestead Act passed in the 1880s and the discovery of gold in the West.
My thanks to Ed Peck for his history appearing in one of my favorite newspapers, The Meeker Herald-Times. Fascinating mining history appears each week in Gilpin County’s historic Weekly Register-Call under “Looking Back” from pioneer newspaper binderies preserved by the Mayor of Black Hawk, David Spellman.
FOOTNOTE; Nathan Meeker was overseeing horse shoeing for the postal service at the White River Indian Agency in August of 1879, only a few weeks before the uprising occurred resulting in his death and one of the last Indian conflicts in Colorado history. The Ute Indians in the area were re-located to a reservation in Utah.