This is the first of a five-part series for The Colorado Dream: Happy Birthday! The stories in this series are part of the KUNC podcast The Colorado Dream, airing on Mondays beginning June 29. The podcast is available for download wherever you listen to podcasts and on KUNC.org.
There’s a small parking lot on the corner of 15th and Blake in downtown Denver. On the north end is what appears to be a regular, old brick wall. But it actually holds a piece of Colorado history. Mounted on it is a little gold and black historical plaque that reads, “Constitution Hall.”
“We're standing at the exact spot where the 1876 constitutional convention would have met to debate and write the state constitution of Colorado,” said Katherine Mercier, an exhibition developer and historian with History Colorado.
In 1876, the First National Bank building stood here. The third floor was the meeting space for the convention. American flags hung on the wall alongside a portrait of Ulysses S. Grant, the president at the time.
“There were portraits of George Washington and portraits of Abraham Lincoln,” Mercier said. “There was a portrait of Shakespeare. For inspiration, I guess, for writing.”
The 39 elected delegates sat on hard wooden chairs at black walnut tables and got to work. They had a little over six months to draft a constitution that would be approved - first by the voters, then by Congress - and signed by the president. The clock was ticking.
“Congress had given them an ultimatum, if they could not write and pass a constitution by July of 1876, Colorado would not become a state,” she said.
Colorado had already failed to become a state not once, not twice, but four times. This fifth attempt was part of a long, sometimes dark journey to statehood that took 17 years. A journey filled with stolen land, racism, and protest, but also perseverance, thoughtfulness, and determination.
A complicated history
On December 20, 1875, Colorado’s fifth attempt at statehood began. The delegates gathered at the First National Bank Building for the Constitutional Convention.
“The Constitutional Convention was the group of men who were charged by the United States Congress to draft a constitution for this new state of Colorado,” Mercier said.
The men arrived by train and horse-drawn wagons from all over the territory. They were lawyers, judges, farmers and businessmen; and two spoke Spanish.
The Constitutional Convention sessions were open to the press and the public. Over the next three months, the delegates worked tirelessly, driven, Mercier said, by a feeling of optimism. But Colorado had been down this road before. The first attempt at statehood was in 1859.
It was the height of the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush. Over 100,000 prospectors rushed to places like the South Platte River in Denver, Clear Creek Canyon, and Central City to strike it rich. One of the first questions they thought about, Mercier said, was what the government was going to be?
“What happens when someone commits a crime? What happens when someone needs a road?” she said. “Sort of all these functions of government.”
That August, delegates adopted Colorado’s first constitution. A month later, it was up to the people, and the majority voted no. Being a state meant paying taxes and the miners were struggling to find gold.
Colorado’s first attempt at statehood failed in 1859.
Later that year, the land became the Jefferson Territory. Then, in 1861, the Colorado Territory. On April 12, the Civil War began when Confederate troops fired on Union Troops at Fort Sumter in South Carolina. While the war raged - residents in the Colorado territory continued to fight for statehood.
The second attempt was in 1864, 12 years before Colorado actually became a state. Once again, the voters rejected it. The territory’s future remained uncertain. So did the future for Indigenous people, the original inhabitants of this land. At that time, the Colorado territory was home or the homelands to over 51 Native Nations, including the Ute, Cheyenne and Arapaho.
“You know, it's a complicated story of statehood. It's not always a happy story. It's not a story that includes everyone,” Mercier said.
Stolen Land
The History Colorado Center has an exhibit called 38th Star: Colorado Becomes the Centennial State. The exhibit begins by highlighting the Indigenous people who lived here long before the Gold Rush. Land is an important part of Colorado’s statehood story and the exhibit has an interactive map that shows how land ownership changed over time.
The United States had a long, disturbing history of using treaties, violence and other acts to displace Indigenous people and shrink their land. In Colorado’s case, disrupting Native Nations would help move the territory closer to statehood.
By 1864, a group of Cheyenne and Arapaho people had been pushed onto land in a small corner of southeastern Colorado. They weren’t safe there.
That November, the U.S. Army attacked, slaughtering more than 230 Indigenous people, mainly elders, women and children. The Sand Creek Massacre was the deadliest day in Colorado history.
As Native Nations lost their homelands so that Colorado could move towards statehood, Indigenous leaders remained fierce advocates for their people. History Colorado’s 38th Star exhibit features one of them, a Northern Arapahoe leader named Friday. He would become one of the loudest voices supporting the tribes.
Friday, whose Arapaho names were Teenokuhu or Warshinun, was born around 1822. When Friday was a young boy, he got lost in the wilderness and was separated from his tribe.
“He told my dad and grandpa that a wolf used to bring him rabbits to keep him alive. And that's how we stayed alive. I don't know how long he was lost,” Hubert Friday, Friday’s great-grandson, said during an interview with the Cache la Poudre River National Heritage Area organization.
Friday was found by a white Irish fur trapper and ended up in a Catholic school in St. Louis. Eventually, he was reunited with his tribe.
“With the education he had and he talked English, he used to communicate with settlers and whoever came west,” Hubert Friday said.
In the 1860s, Friday lived with his band of Northern Arapaho along the Poudre River in what is now Fort Collins. Beneath the branches of a massive cottonwood tree, Friday gathered with his people, held councils with other tribes and resolved disputes with settlers.
Friday’s advocacy included several trips to Washington D.C. to secure a reservation. He was successful, but it came with a price – leaving Colorado.
The Northern Arapaho people were relocated to the Wind River reservation in Wyoming. Today, Colorado only has two federally recognized tribes - the Southern Ute and the Ute Mountain Ute.
The removal of Indigenous people from their land was a major turning point for Colorado’s chances for statehood. Now there was land for settlement, farming and ranching.
“It made more settlers come out here, because once native people removed, it was like, Oh, now there's land for taking due to the Homestead Act and other acts that were passed,” Mercier said.
The right to vote
The third attempt at statehood happened in 1865. By then the number of people living in the Colorado territory was growing rapidly. The vast majority were white, but there were people of color here as well, including a small number of Black residents.
Slavery was over and free African American men and women settled in Denver. They created a community, worshipped together and started businesses. Most worked menial jobs, but they were able to save money and buy homes.
They understood the importance of education, teaching themselves to read and write, Historian Charleszine Terry Nelson said.
“That gave them the leg up to do investments and be entrepreneurs, and they recognized the advantages of owning your own property,” she said.
Since 1861, Black men in the Colorado territory could vote. But when the third attempt at statehood passed by a slim majority four years later, the proposed constitution only gave white men the right to vote. Four Black men in Denver were not gonna let that happen.
Barney Ford, Edward Sanderlin, Henry O. Wagoner and William Jefferson Hardin were friends with a lot in common. They were the mixed race children of slaves or free Black women. They were community leaders and influential businessmen who owned property, barber shops, restaurants and hotels.
The men put together a petition that said “Don’t allow Colorado to become a state unless we have the right to vote.” It was circulated around Denver.
“They talked to all the groups to show them the benefits of voting and what they had been kept from and how they should stand up and be a part of this process,” she said.
The petition was signed by 137 Black men. It provided important context as Congress considered Colorado’s latest bid for statehood, which it ultimately passed. But when the effort landed on then President Andrew Johnson’s desk, he vetoed it.
This third attempt at statehood had also failed.
But the efforts of Ford, Sanderlin, Wagoner and Hardin to secure Black male suffrage did not. In 1868 Congress passed the Territorial Suffrage Act, allowing Black men in territories to vote.
“In many cases, black men in territories had the right to vote before black men in states did,” Mercier said. “It starts right here in Denver.”
Colorado’s fourth attempt at statehood, in 1867, also failed and for the same reason. Johnson vetoed it.
Ready to be a state
By 1875, things had changed for the nation and the Colorado Territory. Johnson was out of the White House and war hero Ulysses S. Grant was president. Locally, most of the Native Nations had been removed, their land stolen and given to settlers. Miners got the technology to extract metal from ore, a process called smelting, which boosted the economy. And the transcontinental railroad finally stopped in Denver.
A new president, along with more land, more business opportunities and the train, the timing or statehood was finally right.
“In 1875 Congress ends up passing an enabling act saying, ‘Okay, we think that Colorado is ready to be a state’,” she said.
By mid-March, the delegates had finished the Constitution.
On July 1, 1876, the people voted and it passed. Colorado would soon become a state. But statehood came at a cost, especially for the Indigenous people who were forced off their homelands, often violently, to make way for the nation’s 38th state.
“We have enormous parades and celebrations on July 4, 1876, and then the news gets back to Washington, DC, that we have voted through the Constitution by July of 1876, which was Congress's stipulation in the enabling act,” she said. “They're like, all right, you did it.”
President Grant then issued a proclamation and signed it. At History Colorado’s 38th Star exhibit, the small single piece of paper is framed and displayed on a wall.
Colorado became a state on August 1, 1876.
Next Episode
Colorado was the first state in the nation to include a provision for forest conservation in it's constitution - a fact long lost to history. Discover why Colorado’s founding fathers wanted to protect this natural resource and what it means today.
Credits
The Colorado Dream, Season 6: “Happy Birthday” is a production of KUNC News. This episode was written and reported by Stephanie Daniel. Editing by Sean Corcoran. The theme song was composed by Jason Paton. Michelle Redo sound designed and mixed the episode. Alex Murphy is the digital editor.
Special thanks to Rachel Cohen, Kyle McKinnon, Leigh Paterson, Emma VandenEinde, Lucas Brady Woods, Beau Baker, Jenn de la Fuente, Joseph Lee, Logan Jones, Jen Prall and History Colorado. Tammy Terwelp is KUNC’s president and CEO.
