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The executive director of the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities, Jim Pierce, has announced a major discovery. We have not just one Colorado, but five: Metro Denver, the Front Range, the Western Slope, the Eastern Plains, and Southern Colorado. Each has its own economy and culture, and its residents are suspicious of and hostile toward the others.
This has always been true. Colorado's boundaries are artificial lines unrelated to geographic or cultural reality. The area was never dominated by one native tribe; the plateau-country Utes fought the high-plains Arapahoe for hunting rights to mountains. Also fighting each other here during the Shining Times were Jicarilla Apaches, Cheyenne, Kiowa and Comanche. Interestingly, their customary ranges coincide fairly closely with the Five Colorados.
Colorado was about as far south as the French
penetrated, which explains names like Laporte
and
Cache la Poudre,
and why big mountain valleys are
called parks. Colorado was the northern limit for the
Spanish, which explains why it's called Colorado. Colorado
filled up with New Englanders, which might explain why our
schoolbooks told us plenty about European explorers in
Massachusetts, and precious little about the men who opened
and explored our own land -- de Anza, Bent, St. Vrain,
Dominguez and Escalante, Pike, Long, Hayden, and many
others.
The parochial, xenophobic outlook that Pierce discovered runs on a much smaller scale throughout Colorado, as I've learned by living in four of his five Colorados (I did spend a year between Ault and Nunn in the Town of Pierce, which is windy and dusty, with water hard enough to shatter teeth. That should easily qualify Pierce for the Eastern Plains, but Humanities Director Pierce put it on the Front Range, so I've missed that Colorado.)
Although I say that I grew up in Greeley, that's not quite correct. Greeley was just the closest place that appears on most maps; our house was actually in Evans, a bedroom community where most residents worked in Greeley. Even so, we despised Greeley as a greedy metropolis that had stolen Evans' water and taken over our schools.
When I edited the newspaper in Kremmling, on the Western
Slope and on the west edge of Grand County, the local
leaders complained mightily of those damned east-enders
that try to run everything and act like Colorado's nothing
but a big playground when we have to struggle just to make
a living.
At first I thought they were upset about Eastern
Slopers, especially the Denverites who diverted our water,
abandoned puppies in our mountains, and took our firewood.
But the Kremmling town fathers were actually complaining
about the east-enders
in Granby, all of 27 miles
away.
Down here, local political issues often feature bickering between Salida and Buena Vista over such vital matters as the location of the fairgrounds, while many households are experiencing triple-digit unemployment. It makes you wonder if people argued over who got the most comfortable deck chair on the Titanic.
Everywhere in rural Colorado, people like to hate Denver, which seems totally insensitive to our problems. But I don't think that's true. The only reason there ever was a Denver was to sell picks, pans, pinto beans and plows to people scattered around Colorado. There are people in Denver smart enough to figure out that the city's economy is hurting now because people in rural Colorado don't have any money. They might not be able to do anything about it, but they're not insensitive; they know that Denver's interests are connected to the interests of rural Colorado.
The worrisome cities are those islands of transients, such as Colorado Springs and Aurora, filled with people who lived in Omaha last year and whose career will take them to Los Angeles next year; the only time they notice the rest of the state is when they're looking for more water. Their cities grow and gain political power.
Their interests will never be my interests, or the interests of anyone who stays in Colorado. But the way things are going, they will be the people running things in all five of the Colorados that they don't care about. The rest of us might quit bickering among ourselves and see if there's anything we can do to keep from being packed off to reservations.
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