9476

• UCREFRP Catalog Number: 9476
• Author: Colorado Foundation for Water Education.
• Title: Citizen's Guide to Colorado Water Law.
• USFW Year: 2003.
• USFW - Doc Type: \
• Copyright Material: NO

T~NO RIVERS
by Thomas Hornsby Ferril
Two rivers that were here before there was
A city here still come together: one
Is a mountain river flowing into the prairie
One is a prairie river flowing toward
The mountains but feeling them and turning back
The way some of the people who came here did.
Most of the time there people hardly seemed
To realize they wanted to be remembered,
Because the mountains told them not to die.
I wasn't here, yet I remember them,
That first night long ago, those wagon people
Who pushed aside enough of the cottonwoods
To build our city where the blueness rested.
They were with me, they told me afterward,
When I stood on a splintered wooden viaduct
Before it changed to steel and I to man.
They told me while I stared down at the water:
"If you will stay we will not go away."
~~'ritten by Thomas Hornsby Ferril in reference to the confluence of Cherry Creek
and the South Platte River. The discovery of gold at the confluence of these rivers in 1858
led the way towards development of what is now the metropolitan Denver area.
From Thomas Hornsby Ferril and the American West, edited by Robert Baron, Stephen
Leonard, and Thomas Noel

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Preface