“Coyote was young and foolish, consumed with curiosity. ‘What is this I carry?’ he kept asking himself. As soon as he was over the first hill and out of sight, he stopped. He was just going to peek in the bag. ‘That could hurt nothing,’ he thought. Just as he untied the bag and opened a small slit they rushed for the opening. They were people. These people yelled and hollered in strange languages of all kinds. He tried to catch them and get them back into the bag. But they ran away in all different directions.”

– Ute oral tradition

The Myths of Manifest Destiny

Many Americans draw their images of the Native inhabitants of this continent from the bands of survivors that endured wave after wave of European and American expansion, genocide, and disease. The Wild West image of raiding tribes on horseback screaming in from the plains to wantonly murder settlers is the idea that Hollywood has projected for decades. The false stereotype goes like this: The land is empty, there are no agricultural projects, and the Native inhabitants have barely made an impact on the environment or changed culturally at all. Afterall, they really haven’t been here that long.

In reality, the Americas were a vast mosaic of cultures — from thriving metropolises with pyramids in Mexico, to established hunter-gatherers and mountain experts in Colorado, monumental mound builders and farmers in Mississippi, to fisher-gatherers and expert traders in California, and everything in between — this land was never empty.

Our entire national American ethos is based on the idea of Manifest Destiny, the belief that God had granted the American people an entire continent basically devoid of human presence. A pristine wilderness to be explored, tamed, and settled. The Homestead Act, which gave settlers land if they intended to farm it, is mythologized in early American history. In reality, the Homestead Act was a blatant land grab based on the belief that farming was the inherent best use for land and that there were few Native Americans living here.

In reality, the Americas were a vast mosaic of cultures — this land was never empty.

The pill is easier to swallow if we continue to believe that the people, land, and history of the Americas before the arrival of Europeans was in some way lesser than that of the Old World. It is not.

Taking a brief step back to examine this national myth reveals a deep and uncomfortable truth that still reverberates today. We live on stolen land and can often trace its theft back to a specific date. It was taken by force through genocide and massacre working in deadly concert with disease and false promises. The heroic image of the cowboy fighting the Indian becomes a lot less romantic when you realize this was a people who had literally survived an apocalypse of disease, destruction, and devastation.

Colorado has an uncomfortable role to play in this history. The Sand Creek Massacre committed against the Cheyenne and Arapho people in Kiowa County is seen by many Native Americans as the beginning of a widespread and systematic genocide of Plains Indians but barely remembered as a one-off incident by most Coloradoans.

“In many histories of the American West, the Lewis and Clark expedition marks the beginning of recorded history,” writes Colin G. Calloway in his seminal work entitled, “One Vast Winter Count.” History does not begin with Europeans.

Archaeologists, historians, and other academics are discovering more evidence that supports what Native Americans have been saying all along — that the Americas were vastly more populated, with a much longer and deeper history than previously understood by non-natives.

Charles C. Mann, author of “1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus” and winner of the 2006 National Academies Communication Award states in his book that scholarship has shifted to reflect the fact that the Americas were “a thriving, stunningly diverse place, a tumult of languages, trade, and culture…”.

Demographers and archaeologists now believe that 90% of all people in the New World were killed, mostly through disease, but also due to genocide and the effects of forced migrations. Germs spread faster than colonizers. By the time explorers, trappers, and conquistadors arrived in a new area, the population had already undergone significant collapse. Farms were abandoned in favor of mobility. Tribes were forced to move to unfamiliar lands, either at the behest of a rifle barrel or due to necessity for survival.

Teotihuacan, a preeminent city in Mesoamerica, now Mexico. Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

What was it like before 1492?

Not all Native Americans were mobile societies. Some of the tribes we associate with Colorado today were in fact agriculturalists with large settlements. The Arapaho tribes “originally occupied the headwaters of the Arkansas and Platte Rivers,” according to the Northern Arapaho Tribe website. The Cheyenne called lands near the Great Lakes their home. Neither of these groups of people were nomadic hunter-gatherers in the traditional sense. They had large scale agriculture and long-term settlements. Hunting and gathering was a part of daily life, as it was in many societies before refrigeration and modern factory farming, but this was coupled with growing crops. Europeans and Americans failed to recognize this.

Europeans practiced mono-crop agriculture in which a single crop is planted and grown in a field. Their preconceived notion of what farming looked like blinded them to the extensive agriculture they encountered in the Americas where milpas are much more common. A milpa is a field in which multiple crops are grown at once, each replenishing a nutrient the other plant takes from the soil. Corn, beans, and squash are commonly grown together at the same time, the plants intertwining and supporting each other. This looks nothing like a European style farm. What colonists thought were wild lands were often complicated agriculture systems that had been perfected over centuries.

The effects of colonialism are widespread and have deep roots. Even the words we use to describe the original inhabitants of the Americas can carry political baggage. Many tribes called themselves some version of “The People.” Columbus erroneously thought he landed in India, so he and his crew called them Indians.

The effects of colonialism are widespread and have deep roots.

This mistake was realized almost immediately but, as in most Euro-American and Indian relations, never rectified. “We get lumped in together all the time. It’s important to talk about the Cheyenne, the Arapaho, the Ojibwe, who those people are, and how they’re different,” Marty Strenczewilk explains. Strenczewilk is part of Creative Nations — an all-indigenous art collective at the Dairy Arts Center — and he recently was part of Wyoming Public Radio’s The Modern West podcast exploring the Plains Indians Wars from the tribal side of history. 

Neither “Native American” nor “Indian” was coined by anyone of indigenous ancestry, yet they are used as a catch-all phrase for inhabitants from the tip of South America, nearing the South Pole, all the way up to the frozen north of Canada and Alaska, almost at the North Pole. Each group should be referred to by the name they use, which can vary.

Waves of colonization caused by Europeans forced many Native American groups into new migration patterns. Disease, war, and theft of land all worked in unison to drive inhabitants out of their homes. Agricultural societies adapted to horses and transformed into nomadic hunter-gatherer groups, forced to rapidly adapt their ways to new environments and threats. The United States is almost incomprehensibly vast. The variety of terrain and biospheres leads to very different ways of life across the continent. It is no easy feat to move entire nations into new environments.

A Great House at Chaco Canyon. Photo by Austin Clinkenbeard.

These bands of survivors adopted new technologies and lifestyles. Although there were hunter-gatherers who thrived in the Americas, there were also incredibly complex agricultural societies that constructed massive monuments and cities. The Cahokia Mounds in the southern U.S. and the massive constructions by ancestral Puebloans found in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico point to higher populations, intricate world views, and farming on a scale not previously thought possible. Chaco Canyon’s largest building, occupied from sometime around 850 – 1150 AD, was five stories tall and included over 800 individual rooms.

Calloway writes about another challenge to re-creating the pre-Columbian world near Colorado, “The inter-national border established between the United States and Mexico in 1848 has distorted Native American historical geography and obscured the Southwest’s place as the northern edge of an Indian world that reached out from Mexico.”

Trade routes and cultural connections reached deep into the heartland of what is now Mexico. The Puebloans who built these settlements lived in what is the Four Corners region and had interconnected networks spanning the western United States and Mexico. Turquoise mined from California, extensive road networks, and ball courts influenced from Mesoamerica are some of the features pointing to a diverse and important central hub. None of this was noticed by settlers because the entire Chacoan system had risen and fallen centuries before their arrival.

Mesoamerican ball court. Photo by Austin Clinkenbeard.

Even the Chacoan constructions would have been relatively recent compared to the depth of history that humans have here. Radiocarbon dating has been used to show that people inhabited the Lindenmeier site in Larimer County, Colorado over 12,000 years ago. Undoubtedly the hunter-gathers that occupied this site also utilized areas of Boulder County. This means you may well be standing on ground that has been continuously inhabited in some form for well over 10,000 years. Archaeologists call this early group of hunter-gatherers the Folsom tradition, named after a distinct spearpoint used to hunt game such as bison.

Colorado’s landscape is dramatic. The plains offer completely different challenges and opportunities than the foothills and heights of the Rockies. Hunting bison is viable in the open spaces, but not a reliable option for food in the mountains. CU Boulder historian Dr. Thomas Andrews informed me of the ancient people that adapted to the mountain terrain, establishing a way of life different from those on the plains. Archaeologists call this the Mountain Tradition. Both of these traditions are situated in the larger Great Basin region, spanning from Oregon and Idaho down through Nevada and Colorado, into northern Baja California.

Some of the oldest identifiable inhabitants of Colorado are the Utes. They traded and interacted with the Pueblo people, just south of them. Puebloans are often considered the northernmost edge of the mesoamerican world of people like the Maya, the Olmec, and, later on, the Aztecs.

Robert Moore’s aptly titled book about trails in the United States, “On Trails,” states that many of the roads used by the Spanish, that were later codified into highways and overpasses by the Americans, followed the original pathways established by groups like the Utes. Taking a roadtrip today can partially be traced back to the vast distances traversed by Native Americans — a testament to the interconnectedness and complexity of the pre-Columbian world.

Rock art from the Four Corners Region. Photo by Austin Clinkenbeard.

How old is old?

Just how far back human settlement in the Americas extends is a thorny subject for scientists and indigenous groups alike. Countless indigenous belief systems place their respective nations in North America since time immemorial. For many tribes, “there’s no place to even get that information, except to go back to tribal historians who have passed on generation to generation word of mouth only,” notes Strenczewilk. “We have missing pieces of our story,” he shares. 

Vine Deloria Jr, a now deceased member of the Standing Rock Sioux and former professor at CU Boulder once said “I can’t tell you how many white people have told me that ‘science’ shows that Indians were just a bunch of interlopers.” For decades the narrative of a recent arrival, over the Bering land bridge that once connected Alaska to Asia, persisted as undisputed fact. 

These alleged first groups hunted large animals, wore furs in the icy cold, and crafted huge spear points. They followed large game across the recently unfrozen land and, when the glaciers started to melt as the climate shifted, entered North America down through Canada, across an “ice-free corridor” that led them straight to the heart of the Americas.

Countless indigenous belief systems place their respective nations in North America since time immemorial.

Their spear points, named Clovis points after the New Mexico town they were first discovered in, became the defining and identifying factor. Scientists once believed that these were the first Native Americans in the region we call Colorado. They would have been some of the most ancient arrivals, dispersing from north to south, with South America naturally inhabited much later than North America. This general theory, of big game hunters following animals though melting glaciers down from Alaska, is called “Clovis-first.”

Scientific careers were built off of this theory. Clovis First was supported by the largest names in American archaeology at the time. Discoveries that challenged the conventional dates, meaning anything providing evidence of humans in the Americas before 13,000 years ago, were seen as anomalies with incorrect dating or improper excavation techniques. Unfortunately, Clovis First had become dogma rather than a working scientific theory. This story still dominates intro textbooks and popular history today.

Archaeology regarding the populating of the Americas was flipped upside down when Monte Verde in Southern Chile was excavated by Tom Dillehay and his team. Dillehay knew the implications of claiming a pre-Clovis site and preempted the criticism by inviting the top names in American archaeology to examine his excavations themselves. In South America, the visiting experts unanimously agreed that the findings were indisputable: there was hard evidence of human occupation at the most southern tip of South America over 15,000 years ago, thousands of years before Clovis. One man later recanted his acceptance of the findings, but the paradigm had been shifted among the new generation of archaeologists.

This created an obvious academic dilemma — how did big-game, cold-weather Clovis hunters reach South America before Colorado? For starters, the earliest Native Americans may not have been arctic hunters but coastal fisher-gatherers.

More discoveries, this time on the West Coast of the U.S., added to the debate. Arlington Man represents one of the earliest human remains in North America and was found on the Channel Islands off the coast of mainland California. Daisy Cave, also located on the Channel Islands, contains artifacts dated to 16,000 years ago. These early sites on the coast, alongside coastal artifacts, point to an entirely new route of entry by sea.

For starters, the earliest Native Americans may not have been arctic hunters but coastal fisher-gatherers.

Dr. Jon Erlandson, archaeologist and professor at the University of Oregon, proposes that the main wave of humans arrived in the Americas via a coastal “kelp forest” route that would have provided a much easier passage than a recently unfrozen tundra. Similar diets, even temperatures, and identical strategies point towards a less complicated adjustment for early humans along the coast as opposed to the landscape of the interior of North America. Instead of traversing tundra, desert, mountain, and plains, the first arrivals would have followed similar tidal resources and mild climates next to the ocean before spreading inwards.

The first massive cities, temples, and artifacts such as Olmec heads are found along the coast in Central America. The oldest artifacts are along the coast of California and Oregon. Additionally, Mann presents data compiled from archaeologists that show the earliest Clovis sites are actually in the southern parts of the United States, with sites dated later near the Canadian border. Instead of a top-down, through-the-tundra path, these inhabitants likely followed the coast, down through California, Baja California, and Mexico, and well into South America, before entering the Great Basin and subsequently Colorado.

This is all to say that Native Americans have been here in the Americas at least several thousand years earlier than commonly taught. Archaeology may finally be catching up with what Native Americans have adamantly stated all along. They have been here much longer, in much larger numbers, and with greater development than previously thought.

Mesa Verde in Southern Colorado. Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

Acknowledging genocide

“What we’ve all been told since kindergarten is a very clear history of the U.S. White people coming over to this glorious land that was prepared for them, with very Christian orientations, and they were in the right,” Strenczewilk emphasizes.

Beginning Colorado’s story with settlers, trappers, and miners erases and silences the depth of history that has existed well before anyone from across the Atlantic knew this continent existed. It makes the story of white settlers displacing the original inhabitants easier to swallow. It helps absolve us of guilt and prevents reflection on our national narrative. It is something most Native peoples have known all along — the land we occupy today was built on blood. “They kicked people off their land, took from them, killed, raped, and maimed [them],” Strenczewilk noted and elaborates. “The two things this country was built on were slavery and genocide.”

Essentially, when colonizers finally made their way to what is now Colorado, they were encountering groups that had been forced off their land, survived epidemics, endured war, and found a new home.

More archaeologists are recognizing the power and information contained in oral histories. Western oral history is purported to stretch back to the Epic of Gilgamesh, established in some form in the 22nd century B.C. We would be wise to take stock and listen to oral histories that establish Native nations in this land as well. To move forward we need to acknowledge our uncomfortable past, that is not that distant at all.

The post Whose Land Are You Really On? appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Beginnings

A blanket of January snow buries many of the small gravestones. The taller memorials stand over the snow in gray or black marble. Thick evergreen tree trunks rise like pillars throughout the cemetery. The names reveal perhaps a surprising diversity in the town’s early residents. Hispanic, Eastern European, English, Greek, Japanese.

A prominent memorial commands attention, so I walk carefully between the graves, the snow crunching under my feet, until I stand before it to read the inscription:

“Lest we forget. At dawn on November 21, 1927, six union miners were killed at the Columbine Mine fighting for a living wage and a measure of human dignity. Five are buried here.”

Photo courtesy of Doug Geiling

Coal. It is the reason Lafayette exists. Seventy million years ago the land on which the Lafayette Cemetery was built, where I stand, was under a shallow inland sea. A great swamp formed. Tropical plants grew and died in the swamp, sending their remains drifting down to the bottom over eons to form a thick black muck. Under pressure, as the Rockies lifted, the muck hardened to become the Northern Colorado Coal Field. This energy reserve powered most of the Denver area for decades, and Lafayette was the epicenter of northern Colorado’s coal industry.

Those who exploited these coal deposits beginning in the late 1800s were preceded by hundreds of generations of others who used this land. Imagine a twelve-foot length of rope laid out in a straight line. Each foot of the rope represents one thousand years. The coal miners show up only about an inch from the end. Indigenous peoples account for the other eleven feet and eleven inches of the timeline. One of the earliest of these, the Clovis culture, took down massive beasts. A railroad crew in 1932 unearthed a pile of hunted mammoth bones near Greeley carbon dated to nearly 13 thousand years ago. A site near Rock Creek on the south edge of Lafayette was occupied six thousand years ago.

The Native Americans that the white man first met here were Cheyenne and Arapahoe. But they, too, were relative newcomers to the Front Range. The Cheyenne and Arapahoe had reinvented their way of life to suit the high plains environment after being forced to move west from their Great Lakes homeland due to European settlement in the previous century. Just as they arrived in the Front Range area, from points north and east, the first European fur trappers also appeared. Chief Niwot (which means Left Hand) already spoke English when he encountered the first gold prospectors at the mouth of Boulder Canyon in 1858.

The common story is that the Indians and the mountain men coexisted relatively well. Both survived off the land, were in tune with natural cues, and were reliant on reading the mercurial seasons. These interactions are romanticized by Americans but seen very differently by the tribes whose land they were encroaching on. Many tribes were relative newcomers to this area as well, surviving as hunter-gatherers due to necessity rather than choice.

Other interpretations see the mountain men as the first wave of colonizers, paving the way for further American expansion into lands already occupied. Agriculturalists from successful societies suddenly forced into a nomadic lifestyle by disease and disruption differ drastically from the early tendrils of entrepreneurial colonialism that were mountain men.

Everything changed drastically when gold brought hordes of prospectors and their hangers-on to the area in the late 1850s. By 1864 the mostly white settlers outnumbered the Cheyenne and Arapahoe by at least three-to-one. What happened during that time was disgraceful. It started with broken promises, progressed into coercing the Cheyenne and Arapahoe into ever smaller and less desirable territory, and culminated in wanton slaughter at Sand Creek where approximately 200 Native Americans, mostly women and children, were murdered by a 700-strong militia out of Denver. Among the dead was the ever conciliatory Left Hand.

Photo courtesy of Doug Geiling

As I walk through the cemetery, I try to imagine this place in 1864. There would have been no gravestones or structures and probably no trees. I envision an expanse of dry grass with low rolling hills extending for miles in every direction — high prairie. To the west is a clear view of the Rockies. In the foreground is a wagon road where 111th Street is today. This is the Cherokee Trail, and it passed right through what would later become Lafayette.

I imagine the earthy thumps of hooves on dirt, faint at first, building into a rumble as a six-horse team rides up from the south pulling a Wells Fargo coach. The party is headed north to Cheyenne. They would have recently passed through one of two stage stops not far to the south. I head that way from the cemetery.

From the Centaur Village neighborhood, I walk east on ice and mud along the beautiful Coal Creek Greenway. Just before the wide path reaches Highway 287 a spur trail breaks off to the right and crosses the creek on a footbridge. Here I find a historical marker for the “Old Laramie Trail Crossing.” I walk down to the snow-covered bank, leafless winter cottonwoods all around. The unfrozen creek pools into a dark swirl at my feet. I imagine in 1864 a group of tired and dirty travelers bent over the creekside at this very spot to wash sweat-stained clothing. By the time they arrive here they have already come a great distance for many weeks across a monstrous prairie wilderness under nothing but horse and foot power.

Photo courtesy of Doug Geiling

Photo courtesy of Doug Geiling

Just up the hill from the crossing is another historical marker near three big cottonwoods. It’s the old Waneka Stage Stop. Before moving his operation to the stage stop, Adolf (sometimes spelled Adolph) Waneka built a small cabin in 1861 near the bank of Coal Creek in what is now south Louisville. Although records are conflicting, some historical information suggests that he may have lived in a small cave near the creek until his cabin was ready. Waneka’s descendants are still in the area to this day, and every July 4th Lafayette residents celebrate their independence at Lafayette’s Waneka Lake.

In 1864, the future founder of the town of Lafayette would have been just a couple miles to the south at Rock Creek. Lafayette and Mary Miller, young twenty-somethings and pioneers from Iowa, set up a stage stop and tavern there. Unlike most of the other Lafayettes, Fayettevilles, and Fayettes scattered around the country, Lafayette, Colorado is not named after the French fellow who helped Washington win the American Revolution. The town is named for Lafayette Miller, or just “Lafe” to his friends and family.

Lafe, however, did not found the town of Lafayette. He drank himself to death (most likely) in 1878 at the age of 38. The real dynamo of that partnership in marriage was his wife, Mary. She was just nineteen years old when she ventured into the vast western wilderness of the Colorado Territory, chasing a dream born out of the 1862 Homestead Act.

When Lafe died, he left Mary with their six kids. Along with her brother, James Foote, Mary started many local ventures. In 1888 Mary subdivided her land, sold off the lots, often directly to other women at deep discounts versus the men, and the town of Lafayette was formed. Learning of massive coal deposits under her land, she worked smart deals with coal mining interests creating the passive income of royalties on the extracted coal. She became the first woman in America to head up a bank. She started Lafayette’s first school and hired its first teacher. Likely because of her husband’s alcohol addiction, Mary was a prohibitionist and made Lafayette a dry town everywhere east of Public Road, a rule that remarkably stood until the early 1980s.

The First 40 Years

Coal mining began in Lafayette in 1888 with the opening of the Simpson Mine in the southeast part of present-day Old Town Lafayette. The various coal mines in the area excavated a massive honeycomb of shafts, passages, and underground rooms. Walk around Old Town Lafayette, and you will be walking over places where, just a few decades ago, subterranean men in canvas hats and oil headlamps moved about like moles through a dangerous underworld of creaking mine timbers and wafting coal dust.

The life of a coal miner in those days was often brutal. The companies that owned the mines cared little for the wellbeing of the miners. In those days the predominant perspective of the mine owners was that, if a miner didn’t like the job, he was free to quit. The problem with this is that swinging a coal miner’s pick was often the only game around for a roughneck with a family of mouths to feed and few marketable skills. The mining companies knew this and put the miners into a de facto state of slavery, often paying them in scrip (fake money) that could only be spent at the company store. They offered them housing in the company town (The one at the Columbine Mine was ironically named “Serene.”) for which the miners became indebted to pay the rent.

Photo courtesy of Lafayette Library

The working conditions were dangerous — inhumane even. Since most coal mining was done in the winter, Sunday was truly “sun day” for miners. On all other days of the week, they would drop underground before sun-up and not emerge until after sun-down, never feeling the sun on their faces until Sunday just to do it all over again week after week. The miners also only got paid for actual mining work. If they needed to secure a bulging beam so their skull wouldn’t get crushed in a collapse, they were not paid for that work. This led to horrible accidents in the mines as desperate miners were loath to spend time on unpaid labor, called “dead work.”

These conditions inevitably led to revolt. Strikes broke out regularly which were often suppressed with brutal indifference to the miners by both the mining companies and the local and state authorities.

I learned a lot about Lafayette’s nationally instrumental coal mining labor movement from two great local historians and published authors, Nicholas Bernhard and Dr. Leigh Campbell-Hale. Bernhard wrote the historical novel “November in America,” and Dr. Campbell-Hale is the author of the 2023 book “Remembering Ludlow but Forgetting the Columbine: The Colorado Coal Strike of 1927-1928.”

Dr. Campbell-Hale is a coal miner’s daughter from the mines of Arkansas. Unlike in Arkansas, according to Dr. Campbell-Hale, Lafayette coal mining depended largely on immigrant miners. First, they came primarily from England and Wales. Then, in the 1910s and 1920s, a second wave arrived, often as strike-breakers, from all over the world — Eastern Europe, Mexico, Greece, Japan, and many other places.

Photo courtesy of Lafayette Library

In the 1910s and 1920s the town of Lafayette was filled with tension during strikes as clashes erupted between strikers and strike breakers (called scabs). In one such account, described in Doug Conorroe’s book “Lost Lafayette,” a great gun fight erupted between the two groups in east Lafayette in 1913. Apparently, while miners may be good with a pickaxe, they are terrible shots. Over one thousand rounds were fired, and the only fatality was a single horse.

It was during this time that Lafayette was also put on the map, literally. Before Eisenhower’s Interstate Highways, and even before Route 66, there was the Lincoln Highway. It was the first transcontinental automobile route. Thanks to the then recent designation of Rocky Mountain National Park in 1915, local lobbyists convinced the Feds to route a south-to-north spur of the highway from Denver to Cheyenne right through Lafayette. It followed the same general route as the Old Cherokee Trail, right up 111th St. past the Lafayette Cemetery.

The combination of World War I and the route of the old Lincoln Highway resulted in the construction of the World War I pillars at Nine Mile Corner in 1928. It was part patriotic remembrance and part marketing scheme by the citizens of Boulder to encourage more traffic to turn left at this gateway and go to Boulder instead of Longmont. The pillars are a historical site, and they are under threat from development. They will likely need to be moved soon, and the Boulder Rotary Club is leading an effort to organize that work. At a recent town forum on the project it was confirmed that there is a time capsule in the south pillar. Legend has it that a live toad was placed in it. When the pillars are moved and restored, the contents of the time capsule will be revealed. Hopefully, it will not be a mummified toad.

Photo courtesy of Doug Geiling

As the World War I pillars went up, so did the burning crosses. Throughout much of the 1920s and into the 1930s the Ku Klux Klan menaced minorities and Catholics in Lafayette and the state of Colorado. On July 4, 1923, the fireworks show in town was a burning cross on a hill just east of Lafayette. Extensive local Klan membership included William Lafayette Miller, Mary Miller’s grandson, who once led a Klan parade from the saddle of a white horse through downtown Lafayette. In the mid-1920s most of Lafayette’s city council, volunteer firefighters, teachers, school board members, and Mayor Lee Baker were members of the Klan, as was Colorado governor Clarence Morley.

On November 21, 1927, six miners on strike were killed by gunfire from state rangers in plain clothes as violence erupted at the gates of Erie’s Columbine Mine. Dozens of others were injured. But out of this tragedy came progress. Shortly after the massacre, Josephine Roche took over majority ownership of the mine and implemented some of the most progressive labor policies of the time. This set an example for other heavy industries to follow. After running for Colorado governor in 1934 Roche served in Franklin Roosevelt’s cabinet as the second woman in American history to hold a cabinet level position.

The Last 100 Years

By the 1930s, coal was in decline with natural gas taking its place. The Great Depression and then World War II did not allow the town to relax from the trauma of its coal mining heyday. Coal mining continued into the 1950s before petering out completely. By then Lafayette had become a sleepy hub for local agriculture and a bedroom community for a growing Denver-Boulder metropolitan area.

Jerry Morrell, founder and owner of long-time local business Morrell Printing and President of the Lafayette Historical Society remembers what Lafayette was like when he first moved to town in the mid-1960s. In those days, if you lived in Lafayette, you did your business there. You got your groceries, did your banking, and bought your appliances right in town. High school kids cruised up and down Public Road on weekends. “It was American Graffiti,” said Morrell. Instead of a Mel’s Diner there was an A&W. It was classic mid-20th-Century Americana.

By then Lafayette had become a sleepy hub for local agriculture and a bedroom community for a growing Denver-Boulder metropolitan area.

One of the culminating local events of this era was the epic rivalry between Lafayette and Louisville High Schools. As Morrell described it, they had to stop football games between the two schools due to the fights, not between the students, but between the parents. In 1968 some kids from Lafayette prematurely burned down the bonfire pyre at Louisville High School. Louisville kids retaliated by setting fire to the press tower at Lafayette High.

Then things changed. Malls and big grocery stores went up in surrounding communities, and local stores closed up shop. Centaurus High School was built in 1973, mixing the student population and ending the rivalry. Downtown Lafayette became a place that you drove through to get somewhere else. “Nobody walked up and down Public Road in the 1980s,” said Morrell. “No one had any reason to.”

Morrell recognizes the similarities between the new vitality of today’s Lafayette and that of the 1960s, although the nature of it is different. Back then Lafayette was a town of necessity. You went to town because that’s just where business was done and where local life happened. Now it’s a town of choice. We go to Old Town for the atmosphere and a sense of nostalgia, choosing that local, small-town experience over the suburban big-box sprawl down the highway.

Long-time resident Bill Gougler moved to town in 1979, recruited by Storage Tech which was building offices on Lafayette’s west side. I learned from Gougler that, in the 1980s, the west side of Lafayette was a boomtown. People were moving in to fill new jobs in the burgeoning tech scene of the 1980s and housing developments like Indian Peaks were going up. But the boom was bypassing downtown Lafayette as Louisville arguably benefited more from Lafayette’s west side growth.

As I was speaking with the very enthusiastic Mr. Gougler, his wife Barb jumped on the phone to tell me about the origins of what became the world’s largest annual oatmeal festival. Started in 1996, the Lafayette Oatmeal Festival was just a crazy idea to get people back into downtown Lafayette, and it arguably worked.

Back then Lafayette was a town of necessity. You went to town because that’s just where business was done and where local life happened.

In the 1990s there was concern in the town that the Highway 287 bypass would hurt the town’s economy by directing thru-traffic away from Public Road. According to Gougler the bypass was a blessing because it allowed downtown Lafayette to become a bonafide destination. Before the bypass, Public Road was just an exhaust-choked thoroughfare as motorists squeezed through town to get somewhere else but never having any reason to consider stopping in Lafayette.

Lafayette’s current mayor and Angevine Middle School teacher, J.D. Mangat, was born in Lafayette just twenty-seven years ago, the son of Indian immigrants. Mangat told me that, despite popular belief, Lafayette is not currently experiencing high levels of population growth like it did in the 1990s through the early 2000s. Now it is growing inwardly, figuring out what it really wants to become.

Mayor Mangat was proud to point out that “Lafayette currently has the most diverse city council in the history of Boulder County.” Reflecting on that comment I thought it to be a perfect closing to this brief journey through the town’s history. Lafayette is originally a town of immigrants who came here to find a life, but through their struggles, they built a legacy. Like the high school kids who used to cruise down Public Road, Lafayette is a town that is now coming of age. Like the mayor said, it’s time for the town to grow internally, to leverage its rich legacy, and finally come into its own.

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