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Most big cities enjoy a natural reason for being where they are. New York, Boston, Baltimore and San Francisco have good harbors. New Orleans sits at the mouth of America's major river. Coal surrounded Pittsburgh, and so on through the geography book.
But Denver is a curious exception because there is nothing about the confluence of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River which made a major city inevitable at that site.
Before 1858, it was among the most obscure locations in the West. It did not participate in the considerable Indian trade in the 1830's and 1840's; the closest trading was at Fort St. Vrain, 40 miles away. Bent's Fort, 140 miles southeast, and Fort Laramie, 120 miles northeast, were the trade and transportation centers.
The future Denver sat on no route that any sane freighter would use -- the Oregon Trail and the Santa Fe Trail both bypassed it by 150 miles north and south, to take smoother routes across the forbidding wall of the Rockies. The easiest access to the furs, and later ores, of the central mountains was from the south, up long-established trails from Taos.
During the early mining excitements in the mountains, though, it was inevitable that towns would appear where the Great Plains met the Rocky Mountains. The plains farmers needed cash, and the mountain miners needed food; there had to be a place for them to do business. Shipments of manufactured goods from the East had to be broken down for distribution somewhere, and the products of Colorado had to be assembled somewhere for shipment to civilization.
Settlements sprouted to meet these needs. Over the ruins of an old trading post along the Arkansas, there was Pueblo. Colorado City, at the outlet of Ute Pass, served briefly as territorial capital. So also did Golden, astride the Clear Creek gateway to the mines.
Any of those places, and many others, could have become
what Denver is today, the commercial center of the Rocky
Mountain Empire.
So why are those early competitors now
mere backwaters in comparison to Denver? Why is Denver a
vital city, while Bent's Fort and Fort Laramie are of
interest mainly to history-minded tourists?
The difference is that Denver attracted some smart people who realized that the city could thrive and grow (and provide them with handsome returns on their real-estate investments) only if they built Denver into a transportation hub, even though Denver's natural setting worked against such developments.
Was there a natural transcontinental railroad route that ran 100 miles north in 1869? Sure, but Denver raised money to connect with that line by 1870, and made sure that its connections were better than those of arch-rival Golden. Was the Arkansas River the best natural eastern entrance to the mountains? Of course, but in 1927, Denver thwarted nature with the expensive Moffat Tunnel; Denver soon had its own direct line west, thereby insuring the decline of another rival, Pueblo.
From an engineering standpoint, there had to be many better transmountain routes than that which Interstate 70 follows -- but Denver put itself on the major highways. In the early days of aviation, as with railroading, Cheyenne had a tremendous natural site advantage over Denver -- but Denver built an airport and got the business away from Cheyenne.
In short, Denver serves needs that some city in the region had to serve, and there were many places that enjoyed substantial natural advantages over Denver. Denver became dominant only because Denver decided to.
From that perspective, Denver has no choice except to build a huge new airport if Denver wants to continue to do what it has always done best -- serve as the region's trade and transportation center.
That's the kind of endeavor that put Denver in front of its rivals by 1870, and has kept it in the lead ever since. As a rural resident, I'd rather see development dispersed, rather than concentrated in one polluted hollow that grabs every available regional resource, from water to smart kids.
But if you live in Denver, and you want Denver's future to be as vigorous as its past, with resumed growth and all the complications that entails, then you'd better support building a new airport, as quickly as possible.
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