DENVER has historic background. Behind its own brief chronicles we note the outline of the story, full of the good work of strong men, of the exploration and civic conquest of the wide country between the Mississippi River and the Pacific coast. To ask of Denver's beginnings is to go back of 1858 and the hopeful Aurarians by the ford at the mouth of Cherry Creek, to government explorations, California gold seekers, Mormon emigrants, trappers and traders, and Spanish pioneers.

The incidents which lead up to Denver's origin took place here and there in a great mid-continental area so vast as to make those incidents seem at first sight isolated, unrelated to one another. But there is a simplicity of plan in that great country which, taken with the gold of the west coast and the migrant spirit of the early settlers of the Mississippi Valley, makes the early ventures across the plains seem natural enough and binds them to one another. Given the country and the factors mentioned, and a great central city, at once a focus and distributing point for all that lay across the plains, the Denver of to-day, was foreordained.

[ Sources of Territorial Acquisitionof Colorado.]

Westward of the Mississippi lie six hundred miles of plains, fertile and attractive on their eastern edge, a desert waste beyond, ending abruptly in rocky mountains. The mountains, dropping here and there into high and barren tablelands, roll on a thousand miles to the Pacific. From the Canadian to the Mexican boundary, plains and mountains thus dispose themselves and make the arena for the drama of the Anglo-Saxon conquest of the new West,—a conquest of a not too unwilling nature by energetic and efficient men. The scene was remote; the land, generous when once subdued, was repellent if not hostile in its aspect, and added to the barrier of a desert waste upon its border the deterrents and terrors of the unknown. The Indians who claimed the soil—chiefly Arapahoes and their allies near Denver, and their hereditary foes, the Utes, in the mountains—did all in their power to make a seemingly inhospitable nature yet more inhospitable. They were never large in number. They were foredoomed to defeat. Their presence in this vast area added more of romance than of difficulty and danger to the coming of the white man. Some of their travel-worn paths among the mountains, like the old Navajo trail of Southwest Colorado, may still be traced, can still arouse sympathetic interest in a people for whom the modern man could not wait, and despised as laggard. From Aztec Springs, across Lost Cañon, over the Dolores River near its big bend, out upon Dolores Plateau to Narraguinnep Spring and the borders of Disappointment Valley, and then on and on again, so runs the old Navajo trail; here a single foot-path up the cañon side, there deep triple and quadruple ruts worn by men, women, horses, and dragging teepee poles. With no signs of permanent habitation on its way, out of wild nature it comes, into wild nature it goes; significant of the passing of the people who made it and of the petty trace they left on the world about them.

The Spanish had carried their religion and their rule up into the southern margin of this great area long before the first settlements were made on Massachusetts Bay. Coronado pushed as far northeast as Kansas in 1541. The towns which the Spanish established, many of them three centuries and more ago, led to the brief romance of the old Santa Fé trail, and still give a peculiar flavor to the story of the southern border. But save for a few small towns whose lack of root in the soil is evidenced by the ruins of their churches—churches so far forgotten that our own historians have called them remains of prehistoric times—the Spanish invasion was an invasion always, not a settlement, not an appropriation of even the margin of the vast area we are considering.

[ DENVER, COLORADO.]

Lewis and Clark went northwest to the Columbia in 1803; Pike went up the Arkansas in 1806; and that young man's simple tale of the things he dared and the sights he saw in his march from the Mississippi to the lone fort he built on the banks of the Conejos in the San Luis Valley is charming and adventurous. He was the American pioneer of the future Colorado. Wandering trappers and hunters had preceded him; but none told what they had seen.

Long, with his expedition, in July, 1820, crossed the spot where Denver now stands. Long was an explorer, not a pioneer. Pioneers are prophets, and see the fences and barns that are to come. To Long all west of the Missouri,

"agreeably to the best intelligence that can be had ... is throughout uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for their subsistence.... This region, however," he says, "viewed as a frontier, may prove of infinite importance to the United States, inasmuch as it is calculated to serve as a barrier to prevent too great an extension of our population westward, and secure us against the machinations or incursions of an enemy, that might otherwise be disposed to annoy us in that quarter."

This opinion, widely circulated, perhaps helped to defer the day of actual occupation of that Great American Desert which, after Long's report, took possession, on our maps, of nearly all the country whose history is Denver's prehistoric days.