Grant signs Colorado into the Union, four weeks late for the centennial
The United States turned one hundred years old on July 4, 1876, and Colorado wanted in on the occasion. Congress had set the terms the year before, and a constitutional convention worked through the Denver winter into March. Voters ratified the document on July 1, and on August 1, 1876, President Ulysses S. Grant signed Proclamation 230 making Colorado the 38th state. It missed the centennial by four weeks, but the name Centennial State stuck.
Colorado's admission fell in the same year the nation marked its hundredth birthday at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, giving the country a fresh state to point to alongside the birthday celebrations. The nickname stuck long after anyone remembered it missed the actual date by a month.
QWhat made Colorado the first western state to host a major political convention?
In 1908, the Democratic Party held its national convention in Denver, a first for any state west of the Mississippi. The choice showed how far Denver's infrastructure had grown just over three decades after statehood. Denver had grown from a rail-hungry frontier town under territorial governor John Evans into a city with the infrastructure to host a major party gathering. The convention nominated William Jennings Bryan for president. It showed the Centennial State had become a fixture in national political life, not just a name on an old admission proclamation.
QWhat made Colorado's 1893 suffrage vote different from how other states granted women the ballot?
Colorado became the second state to grant women full voting rights, on November 7, 1893, but it got there by a method no earlier state had used: a popular vote of male citizens. Wyoming had granted suffrage first, in 1869, through legislative action as a territory. Colorado's approach meant the state's men directly voted to extend the franchise, making it the first state where suffrage passed by referendum rather than legislative or territorial decree. The vote arrived the same year the Sherman Silver Purchase Act was repealed and Colorado's mining economy collapsed.
QWhat triggered Colorado's second great mineral rush near Leadville?
A major silver lode discovered near Leadville in 1878 set off the Colorado Silver Boom, a rush distinct from the 1858 Pike's Peak gold rush that had first brought settlers pouring into the territory. The boom got a second wind in 1890 when the Sherman Silver Purchase Act reinvigorated demand, and that same year Cripple Creek delivered Colorado's last major gold strike, pulling in a fresh wave of prospectors. The two rushes bookended Colorado's mineral economy: silver near Leadville dominated the 1880s, and gold at Cripple Creek closed out the frontier mining era in 1890, just before federal silver policy collapsed and took the state's fortunes down with it in 1893.
