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Historical Factors in Colorado's Economic Development Mining and Railroads: 1860--1900. The modern economic history of the region that is now Colorado began with the discovery of gold near the confluence of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River in 1858. It should come as no surprise that the location is virtually in the center of what is today the Denver metropolitan area. Other cities made equally good claims for becoming the principal city of the Rocky Mountain region in the years immediately following the discovery of gold--Golden wanted desperately to be a major city and Cheyenne was given a major headstart when the transcontinental railroad was routed through it--but a combination of luck, persistence and geographic advantage gave the edge to Denver. The Colorado gold boom was on in full force after the first strike was confirmed by a second major discovery on Clear Creek in the spring of 1859. Horace Greeley, publisher of the enormously influential New York Tribune, came out to see first-hand what; the fuss was about. When he reported to his readers that the Clear Creek strike could be worth anywhere between $21 and $494 dollars a day, men poured into the region; some estimated 500 newcomers a day were crowding into the 4 square mile area (Abbott, 1976). Eventually most of those men moved to other :locations or went home empty handed, but the initial in-migration was enough to start a sustained mining industry. The discovery of gold soon lead to the discovery of other precious metals and the value of the industry as a whole increased rapidly. In the decade of the 1860's, the value of all metals extracted totaled $28 million. This rose to $50 million in the next decade, $225 million in the third, and to $324 million in the 1890's. By 1920, the Colorado Rockies had yielded almost $1.5 billion dollars worth of gold, silver, lead, zinc and copper (Frush, 1959). By 1890, there were three main mining regions in the State. The oldest was the Front Range mineral belt west of Denver. Central City and Leadville were its gold, silver and copper production and smelting centers. The second region was Cripple Creek near Colorado Springs, which was the most productive gold region in the State. The third was the San Juan region in the southwest part of the State, with the towns of Silverton, Telluride and Ouray as,the major contributors of gold, silver and copper. The regions were connected to each other and to Denver by an intricate network of railroads, 4176 miles in all (Dorsett, 1986). In Denver, five major railroads connected Colorado to markets all over the nation. The railroads were just: one of many industries that flourished as a result of mining, but maybe the most important one because it made many regions of Colorado easily accessible for the first time. Prior to 1860, Colorado was separated from the rest of the nation by six days of tortuous stage travel. There was an almost total lack of transportation in the western part of the State (Athern, 1976). Clearly, if Colorado was to prosper economically, transportation would have to improve. An effort was organized to persuade the Union Pacific to route its transcontinental line through Colorado and over Berthoud Pass at an estimated cost of $100,000 per mile of track (maintenance costs in the winter were conveniently ignored). Whatever chance Colorado had of convincing the Union Pacific to build across Colorado vanished in 1866 when an October snow storm on the pass nearly killed the Union Pacific's chief engineer who was surveying the proposed route. The - 2 -