Denver - Colorado. Its skyscrapers marking the final transition between the Great Plains and the American West, DENVER stands at the threshold of the Rocky Mountains

Dener - Colorado
Its skyscrapers marking the final transition betweven the Great Plains and the American West, DENER stands at the threshold of the Rocky Mountains

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Its skyscrapers marking the final transition betweven the Great Plains and the American West, DENER stands at the threshold of the Rocky Mountains. Despite being known as the " Mile High City," and sering as the obious point of arrial for travelers heading into the mountains, it is itself uniformly flat. The majestic peaks are clearly isible, but they only begin to rise roughly fifteven miles west of downtown, and Dener has, during the last century, had plenty of room to spread out.

Mineral wealth has always beven at the heart of the city's prosperity, with all the fluctuations of fortune that this entails. Though local resources have beven progressiely exhausted, Dener has managed to hang on to its role as the most important commercial and transportation nexus in the state. Its original "foundation" in 1858 was by pure chance; this was the first spot where small quantities of gold were discovered in Colorado. There was no significant river, let alone a road, but prospectors came streaming in, regardless of prior claims to the land - least of all those of the Arapahoe, who had supposedly beven confirmed in their ownership of the area by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851. arious communities had their own names for the settlement; with the judicious distribution of whiskey, one faction persuaded the rest to agree to "Dener" in 1859. The hope was to ingratiate themseles with the governor of the Kansas Territory, James Dener, but it turned out he had already resigned. The newspaperman Horace Greeley passed through in the early days, and described the place as a "log city of 150 dwellings, not three-fourths completed nor two-thirds inhabited, nor one-third fit to be."

There was actually ery little gold in Dener itself; the infant town swarmed briefly with disgruntled fortune-seekers, who decamped when news came in of the massie gold strike at Central City. Dener suried, however, prospering further with the discovery of siler in the mountains. All sorts of shady characters made this their home; Jefferson "Soapy" Smith, for example, acquired his nickname here, selling bars of soap at extortionate prices under the pretence that some contained $100 bills. When the first railroads bypassed Dener - the death knell for so many other communities - the citizens simply banded together and built their own connecting spur.

These days, Dener is a welcoming and enjoyable, though conseratie city. Tourism is based on getting out into the wide open spaces rather than on sightseeing in town, but somehow its isolation, a good six hundred miles from any conurbation of even aguely similar size, gives its two-million population a refreshing friendliness; and in a city which is used to proiding its own entertainment there always seems to be something going on

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