Denver

Denver is the capital of Colorado Territory and the end of the Denver Pacific Railway, a hundred miles south of Cheyenne. In 1870 the census counted 4,759 people; by 1880 it counted 35,629. Between those two counts the town got three railroads, a horse-drawn streetcar line, a water company and its first synagogue. This chapter gives a GM the history, the layout, the institutions and the people a party meets there between 1869 and 1876, and the roads out to the mountain camps. Cheyenne is covered in its own chapter; the two cities are linked by one rail line, one telegraph and one set of freight contracts.

Where accounts differ on a date, the text says so.

Denver at a Glance

History, 1858 to 1876

Why the railroads mattered

Before 1870 Denver was a hundred miles off the Union Pacific main line and relied on freight wagons and stage coaches. The Denver Pacific (about 106 miles) was incorporated 19 November 1867, broke ground 18 May 1868, and ran its first train from Cheyenne on 24 June 1870 (track finished 22 June). Its Denver depot stood at Wazee and 21st Street. Two months later the Kansas Pacific gave Denver a second connection, from the east; its trains used the Denver Pacific depot, and through service to Kansas City began 1 September 1870. The Colorado Central joined the Denver Pacific at Jersey Junction, three miles north, that September. Freight rates fell from stage and wagon levels, and mining machinery and smelting equipment could come in by rail. A party can now cover the Cheyenne to Denver road in a day, and a rail-borne lawman, creditor or telegram can be in Denver before a fugitive.

The Colorado Central (standard gauge to Golden, 1870; narrow gauge up Clear Creek to Black Hawk by December 1872) and the Denver and Rio Grande (narrow gauge, south to Colorado Springs, 1871) tie the city to the mines and to the new towns of the plains. The Denver, South Park and Pacific, reorganized 16 June 1873, reached Morrison in 1874 and did not go farther into the mountains within the play range.

Layout and Districts

Denver sits where Cherry Creek enters the South Platte. The oldest settlements lie on opposite banks and still keep separate characters.

Denver's grid follows the creek and river rather than the compass, and street names changed more than once. Use the names above as given.

Arriving in Denver

The train from Cheyenne takes a day and comes in at the Denver Pacific depot at Wazee and 21st Street (Gear and Prices, Passage, has the fare). Hacks wait at the depot; Gear and Prices gives the rate. The near hotels are the American House and the Inter-Ocean, both at 16th and Blake, with the Tremont and the Broadwell on Larimer; In 1872 the principal houses are the American, Tremont, Sargents and Broadwell. The horsecar runs along Larimer from December 1871. A livery takes a party's horses, and the freight houses by the depot take a wagon. A concealed pistol or knife is an offense under the territorial act of 1862, and the marshal's men know the depot. A stranger's first audience is the hotel clerk; Prejudice (Attitude) applies as in Cheyenne (Era Rules).

Government and Law

The territory and the city

Colorado Territory had been organized 28 February 1861. The capital moved from Denver City to Colorado City (July 1862), to Golden (14 August 1862), and back to Denver by December 1867. From that date the legislature meets in Denver, the governor sits here, and the federal officers for the territory work from the city.

The governor is a political appointee from Washington. He has the Army's attention and the legislature's suspicion, and he decides whether the territorial militia is called.

City, county and courts

• City: Denver is governed by a mayor and council under a charter that dates from 1861. The city's first marshal was elected in December 1859, and a formal police department with appointed members and a chief of police was set up in April 1874.

• County: Denver is the seat of Arapahoe County. The county sheriff is the main officer for serious crime outside city limits and for serving process. David J. Cook was Denver city marshal from 1866 to 1869 and Arapahoe County sheriff from 1869 to 1873 (Factions and Powers).

• Courts: The territorial supreme court and the district court for the district that includes Arapahoe County sit in Denver, and the governor, the secretary, the Surveyor General, the district land office and the U.S. Marshal keep offices in the city, in rented rooms on or near Larimer and Fifteenth Streets; the legislature too meets in rented rooms, and no capitol building stands in the range. The one federal office with a fixed address is the United States Mint, in the former Clark, Gruber and Company building at Sixteenth and Holladay Streets: it assays and buys gold and casts bars, has struck no coin since the government bought it in 1863, and was made an assay office in name in 1869. In 1874 the U.S. Marshal for Colorado Territory is M. A. Shaffenburg (succeeded by Charles C. Tompkins in February 1875).

• Jurisdiction at the table: Offences inside the city go to the marshal and municipal court; felonies go to the county and territorial district court; theft of mail or federal property goes to the federal officers. Cheyenne's sheriff has no authority in Colorado, and Denver's has none in Wyoming; a prisoner crossing the line needs extradition or the cooperation of both offices. A deputy U.S. marshal for Wyoming stops at the line too: a federal fugitive found in Denver is taken by Colorado's marshal or a Colorado magistrate and removed on a judge's warrant.

Law enforcement

The city had marshals from 1859 and a police department from April 1874. The force is small, partly part-time, and paid by a city that is always short of money. In practice:

• The marshal handles drunkenness, brawls, vagrancy, gambling and vice at the edges of tolerance.
• The sheriff's deputies serve warrants, run the jail and carry prisoners to court.
• Railroad detectives and the freight companies' own guards protect the depots.
• Private watchmen and the Army (when asked through the territorial government) fill other gaps.

Carrying firearms in the city: a territorial act of 1862 bars carrying concealed pistols, Bowie knives, daggers and other deadly weapons in any city, town or village, with a fine of $5 to $35. No Denver ordinance on carrying arms openly in 1869 to 1876 is on record; the GM sets whether loaded pistols may be carried in the open on the main streets.

Commerce and Industry

Hotels

Room, meal, stabling and horsecar rates follow Gear and Prices.

Newspapers and the telegraph

The Rocky Mountain News began 23 April 1859 and remained under its founder as editor until 1878 (a daily since 1860). The Colorado Tribune ran from 15 May 1867 to 19 January 1871 and was followed by the Denver Daily Tribune; the Denver Times began as a daily on 1 April 1872. Telegraph service reached Denver in 1863; a message can reach Cheyenne in minutes, which is why an informed sheriff knows who is coming before the train does. The train itself takes a day from the Wazee and 21st Street depot to Cheyenne. An express leaves Denver mid-morning and reaching Cheyenne in the early afternoon; the ordinary first-class fare in the early 1870s was about $10, falling toward the $7 figure recorded for 1877 (Gear and Prices, Passage).

Communities

Each community in Denver has its own churches, newspapers and benevolent societies. Prejudice follows the social condition in Era Rules.

The Chinese quarter

The Colorado Tribune reported Denver’s first Chinese resident on 29 June 1869; Hong Lee, a laundryman who lived in a shanty at Wazee and F streets, arrived about a month later and is the first whose name the record keeps. By fall 1870 a later account counts about 42 Chinese men and women living along Wazee Street, near Holladay Street, though the 1870 census shows far fewer. Most people in the quarter ran laundries or worked as cooks and servants; others were merchants, former railroad or placer workers who had come from the West Coast. The street was called Chinaman’s Row; the later nickname “Hop Alley” (from the slang for opium) is the name that survives, though its first use is unclear.

The 1880 census counted 238 Chinese residents (225 men, 13 women), and an anti-Chinese riot on 31 October 1880 killed one man and wrecked the quarter. The riot falls after the play range. The GM may use rising hostility in 1874 as a situation but not as a certainty.

Chinese Denver in 1874 has its own economy: a laundry that extends credit to four households, a cook who keeps accounts for twenty boarders, and a merchant who imports tea and medicine (Wong Yik Lun of the Era Cast, whose Wo Hing store is on Wazee Street). Characters of Chinese background are playable (see Character Creation and Roles).

Religion and Civic Life

Fraternal and benevolent bodies (the Turnverein, B'nai B'rith, the Masons and others) provide credit, burial and introductions. A character who joins one gains a contact and an obligation.

Medicine and Public Health

The 1879 typhoid outbreak, which sickened more than 600 and killed at least 40 from contaminated water, is after the play range. Water in the 1870s is a ditch, a river and a new company formed in 1870.

Social Life and Recreation

• Theater and music: Denver had a theater by 1859 and its first opera performance in 1864. Ed Chase’s Progressive Hall on Blake Street (rebuilt after the 1863 fire) is the large gambling house of the range; his Palace Theater, a variety house and gambling rooms at 15th and Blake, is later, about 1880. Traveling companies come by rail.
• Saloons and gambling: Blake and Larimer streets. Gambling is tolerated, and the marshal's attention follows the proprietor's standing.
• Horsecar rides: The Denver Horse Railroad (1871) is a cheap way to cross town and a good place to overhear a conversation.
• Societies: Turnverein (German gymnastics and singing), B'nai B'rith, Masonic lodges, church socials.
• Vice: Holladay Street is the district of record. Authorities tolerate it when they do not license it, and the people who keep houses pay fines and fees and have allies in the council.

Cheyenne and Arapaho Memory

Denver is the city where, on 28 September 1864, Governor Evans and Colonel Chivington met Black Kettle, White Antelope and Bull Bear of the Cheyenne and Neva, Bosse, Heap of Buffalo and Na-ta-nee of the Arapaho at Camp Weld (the camp stood on the east bank of the South Platte about two miles southwest of the town and was abandoned in 1865), and the city to which soldiers returned after the attack at Sand Creek on 29 November 1864. At dawn that day troops under Colonel John Chivington attacked a camp of Cheyenne and Arapaho people on Sand Creek; about two-thirds of the roughly 230 people killed were women, children and older people. Black Kettle, the Cheyenne leader who flew the American flag, survived. The Denver response is a matter of record: first a hero's welcome, then federal investigations.

In 1869 to 1876 the Cheyenne and Arapaho people who suffered at Sand Creek and survived are not living in Denver. By treaty the Southern Cheyenne and Southern Arapaho have been assigned to a reservation in Indian Territory; the Northern Cheyenne and Northern Arapaho draw rations at the Red Cloud and other agencies and have no reservation of their own in the range (see Tribal Nations). A Cheyenne or Arapaho character arriving in Denver arrives in a city whose residents remember the event differently from the nations that lived it.

The Ute Nation and Denver

The Ute people (the Nuche; the Tabeguache (Uncompahgre), Muache, Capote, Weeminuche, Yampa, Grand River (Parianuche) and Uintah bands are the bands named in the 1873 agreement) hold the western half of Colorado under an 1868 treaty. Gold and silver prospecting in the San Juan Mountains puts that land under pressure from Colorado's territorial government and its mining interests, and Denver is where that pressure is organized.

Ute delegations travel through Denver on the way to Washington. A Commissioner of Indian Affairs report mentions Ouray in Denver and wanting to see the commissioner. Denver is a place where an interpreter, a lawyer and a land agent can bargain over an agreement that the Utes themselves regard as extracted from them under pressure.

Nearby Destinations

Fictional Denver NPCs

Hooks