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Last week, a friend passed along a promotional flier, designed to impress Denver advertising agencies. It came from the Northern Front Strange Tabloid (once known as the Rocky Mountain News).
We have the circulation lead where people live,
the sheet boasted. They do where cows live. Before
placing your next ad, consider that the lack of opposable
thumbs makes flipping pages difficult.
Some rural residents felt offended, as though the Rocky were claiming that we're so stupid that we lack a distinctive feature of primate anatomy -- an opposable thumb -- and thus must be lower than sub-human.
Others have pointed out that it's not that bad to live where cows outnumber people. For instance, Hal Walter of Custer County has observed that the cows, unlike many people who arrive hereabouts, all have jobs and a place to live. Further, steers and heifers do not engage in real-estate speculation and development. This makes the critters pretty good neighbors, even if they do lack opposable thumbs.
There's a bigger issue here, though. Denver was once a city where cows outnumbered people, at least by one measure: if you counted each cow that came into the city, the total might have exceeded the population.
Denver was a major meat-packing center 90 years ago.
This came in response to the Chicago Beef Trust
that
dominated the industry at the turn of the century. Local
capitalists, hoping to capture more value at home, wondered
why Colorado cattle and sheep had to be shipped to Chicago,
processed, and then returned to Denver. Why not process the
meat in Denver and keep some money at home?
Similar considerations meant that a century ago, Denver was one of the largest smelting centers in the world, and a major grain milling center, too.
Such ores as are mined in Colorado these days do not go to Denver, and the city's stockyards have long since vanished. Most Colorado wheat is exported, and it's easier to find an Idaho potato in Denver than a Colorado potato.
Denver is disconnecting from the hinterland that the city defined and organized in the late 19th century.
In May of 1993, I used up an entire issue of High Country News to explain this. I hoped that the city might wake up and provide some regional leadership before Los Angeles finished taking over the Mountain West.
I might as well have hoped to win the lottery.
Look what has happened since then. The Rocky decides that people in the hinterlands aren't a profitable market, and starts making cow jokes to convince metropolitan advertisers that they can ignore the $1.7 billion that we rubes and hayseeds spend in the city every year.
Then consider the proposed merger between the Union
Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads. (I have, for
several months, and the results will be in High Country
News this summer.) Already the Denver & Rio Grande
Western, Colorado's own railroad, has been merged into the
Southern Pacific -- long known as the Octopus
for
its predatory ways.
In the past, whenever Colorado was in danger of losing its independent railroad, Denver leaders met the challenge.
Indeed, the D&RGW was established by Denver interests in 1870 to insure that the commerce of central and southern Colorado went to Denver, not to Kansas City via the invading Santa Fe.
At the turn of the century, when the D&RGW was controlled by the Gould interests, David Moffat, president of the First National Bank of Denver, started building his own line due west from the city. After Moffat's death in 1911, Denver financiers like Charles Boettcher, William Gray Evans and Gerald Hughes kept the Moffat Road running.
Through the Depression and World War II, the Denver
crowd
fought for improvements in the railroad. John
Evans, Sr., of the First National Bank lent money and found
financing, because independence offered the only
assurance of future growth and prosperity.
Now the UP-SP merger, in the view of the U.S. Department
of Justice, will create a monopoly along the Central
Corridor
between Denver and Oakland. There are many
reasons, too detailed to go into here, to believe the
merger will close the coal mines in western Colorado.
It is too much to expect Roy Romer to speak up in favor of 2,000 permanent jobs in Colorado that will vanish with the merger and consequent abandonment of the Tennessee Pass line west of Pueblo and the old Mopac line east of Pueblo. Romer has trouble standing up to the teachers' union, let alone some billionaires carving up the West.
Even so, you'd think that there'd be somebody in Denver who thought it was important for the city to maintain its connections to the rest of the territory and to supply some regional leadership.
But no, Denver can brag on hosting the G-7 conference next year, its oldest newspaper can boast how it's too smart to serve cow country, and the region can continue to disintegrate.
And damn, I wish I hadn't been right about this three years ago.
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