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As a history buff who is also fascinated by place names, I have often wondered how Samuel Hitt Elbert's name got attached to the highest peak in Colorado -- indeed, the most elevated summit in all 3,000 miles of Rocky Mountains.
Various climbing guidebooks, while quite informative about the origins of other montane names, were rather vague about Elbert -- that he had some mining interests in the area, perhaps. Ancient tomes at the local library offered biographies of prominent 19th-century Coloradans, Elbert among them, but nothing about the mountain.
Eventually I found the story of the naming in History
of Leadville & Lake County, Colorado,
compiled by
Don L. Griswold and Jean Harvey Griswold. It comes in two
hefty volumes, and was published in 1996 by the Colorado
Historical Society and University Press of Colorado.
By combining that brief account with other histories detailing the political issues of Colorado Territory in 1873, I think I've put it together.
Sam Elbert, a lawyer from the Midwest, came west in 1862 for a patronage job: Territorial Secretary under Gov. John Evans, whose daughter, Josephine, he married in 1865.
He was appointed territorial governor in 1873, just as gold and silver were discovered in the San Juans. Most of the Western Slope, including the San Juan region, was then part of the Ute reservation, where mining was forbidden.
The prospectors were trespassing. The Utes refrained from warfare and instead complained to the Indian Bureau, which in turn asked Gen. John Pope to send in soldiers to expel the trespassers. Pope began organizing an expedition.
So there was a tense political situation when President Ulysses S. Grant visited Denver in 1873. Colorado miners wanted the San Juans. The federal government felt obliged to honor its treaty with the Utes.
Grant met with Elbert, and then rescinded Pope's order. Instead of sending soldiers to expel the miners, the federal government would negotiate a new agreement -- the Brunot Treaty -- with the Utes, who would be persuaded to cede the San Juans.
The Rocky Mountain News praised Gov. Elbert for opening the San Juans to mining. That June, the account reached the mining camp of Twin Lakes at the east foot of Independence Pass -- an area where Elbert had some mining investments.
About half a dozen prospectors gathered to celebrate this exciting news that the San Juans were now open to mining, thanks to Gov. Elbert's efforts.
They took a shiny new tin dinner plate and inscribed the
soft metal: ELBERT PEAK, Named and dedicated to our
governor for the interest which he has manifested in our
behalf in having the San Juan order rescinded.
The Griswolds note that Unfortunately, the names of
the miners have been lost to history,
but After the
men had inscribed the tin plate, they climbed the peak,
built a monument of stones on the summit and placed the
plate in the monument, which was found later that summer by
men in F.V. Hayden's surveying party.
Presumably the finder of the plate was one Henry W. Stuckle, often credited for making the first recorded climb of Mt. Elbert.
In this age of revisionist history, is Elbert's name an appropriate one for our highest summit?
Elbert's personal probity has never been questioned, as best I know, and for a territorial governor during the Grant administration, that's a major accomplishment in itself.
Elbert went on to a distinguished career as chief justice of the Colorado Supreme Court. During the territorial days, he organized the first national irrigation conference, which proposed federal assistance to water development, diversion and storage. Even before he was governor, he advocated the patenting of mining claims made in the public domain -- policies that became the General Mining Law of 1872.
In other words, the controversies that continue in the West today -- Indian treaty rights, the federal role in water development, whether mineral patents should be replaced by a royalty system -- were all very much a part of Sam Elbert's political career 125 years ago, when a few of his constituents named the nearest mountain after him.
Samuel H. Elbert may be a rather obscure figure in our history, better known as the namesake of a mountain than for anything he performed or advocated in his political career. But Colorado was greatly shaped by Ute removal, mining claims and irrigation projects, even if they're out of favor today.
So on balance, the name is an apt one for our highest peak.
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