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For more than a century, Denver served as the hub for about 500,000 square miles of hinterland.
When your local bookstore made a special order, it went to a Denver wholesaler. The hardware store got its stock from a Denver jobber, as did the dry-goods store. Much of your grocer's produce came from the Denargo market.
In short, most of the commerce of the hinterlands passes through Denver at some point, and someone in Denver profits thereby. In the economy of the Rocky Mountain West, when the boondocks prospered -- silver in Leadville, gold in Cripple Creek, wheat in Morgan County -- so did Denver.
Denver's eminence in such matters was no accident. Some city had to serve as the regional capital, and Denver's early leaders figured it might as well be Denver.
Golden was the natural gateway to the first big mining strikes at Central City, but Denver managed to acquire both the state capitol and the good railroad connection. Getting to Leadville from just about any direction (i.e., going south from Laramie, or north from Santa Fe) is easier than getting there from Denver, but when Leadville boomed in 1878, Denver's leaders made sure that Leadville was well connected to Denver.
Denver's early leaders knew that the key to Denver's prosperity and dominant status was to make sure that the rural economy thrived, and that the trade went through Denver. When they (John Evans, David Moffat, Charles Boettcher, etc.) made money, they put their millions to work on enhancing that process.
They financed irrigation systems in the San Luis Valley and sugar mills along the Front Range. They built railroads, to insure that improbable spots like Silverton were firmly connected to Denver. Moffat exhausted his fortune to link the coal of northwestern Colorado to Denver, lest that trade go through Utah or Wyoming.
This history lesson could continue interminably, but the point is that Denver once saw its role quite clearly. It was the Regional Capital. If the region thrived, so did Denver. If the region faltered, Denver's capitalists tried to improve the situation.
Look at the current situation. Millionaires aren't the same these days. Horace Tabor and David Moffat bought into some spectacular failures. But those failures -- irrigation, railroads, smelters -- were an effort to improve the region. The current crop of big-money bankrupts mostly represent swindlers who over-built office buildings and shopping malls, not regional infrastructure.
Nothing I've seen about the recent city elections
indicates that any candidate for any office in Denver has
the slightest awareness of how Denver, rather than Golden
or Bent's Fort, became the leading city of the Rocky
Mountain Empire.
Nor is there any indication that they
want Denver to continue that role.
They apparently want Denver to take its place among the Leading Cities of the World. No more of this cowtown stuff, and certainly there is more class in fretting about jet connections to Munich and Tokyo than there is in providing hay hooks to Haxton and Holly.
This may be an admirable goal, but it leaves a void. Is Pueblo, Grand Junction, Laramie or Albuquerque interested in becoming the region's commercial and financial center, since Denver doesn't want the job?
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