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Colorado constitutional debates foreshadowed a populist backlash against Gilded Age railroad barons

Chase Woodruff

(Colorado Newsline)

Pueblo’s grand celebration of the arrival of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway began promptly at dawn on March 7, 1876, with a 38-gun salute from an artillery piece loaned from Fort Lyon — “37 for the states admitted, and one for Colorado,” explainedthe Pueblo Chieftain.

At 10 a.m., another gun sounded, signaling representatives of Pueblo’s city government, fire companies, military orders and social clubs to assemble in formation for a parade down Main Street and Union Avenue.

After speeches and music on the steps of the courthouse, hundreds of dignitaries proceeded to a banquet at Chilcott’s Hall, seating themselves at three long tables to feast on an extravagant spread that featured ribs of beef, baked mackinaw trout, roast antelope with plum jelly, pickled oysters, oxtail soup, macaroni and cheese, potato salad and apple fritters — along with three flavors of ice cream, four kinds of pie and five kinds of cake.

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Toasts and speeches followed. Hiram Pitt Bennet, a two-term territorial delegate to Congress in the 1860s, saluted President Ulysses S. Grant — “at once the ruler and the subject of forty millions of free men” — while Rocky Mountain News publisher William Byers took the opportunity to applaud “the press of Colorado,” which he judged to be “exceedingly creditable to the territory” and instrumental in its growth and development.

But the evening’s most florid praise was reserved for the railroads themselves. Speakers hailed not only the newly arrived A.T. & S.F., which heralded “the commencement of a new era in the history of southern Colorado,” but also its more northerly rival, the Kansas Pacific, “the great central line which opened Colorado to the world,” and the narrow-gauge Denver & Rio Grande, which it was hoped would “soon bring to us the ores of San Juan and the fruits of Old Mexico.”

There were about 900 miles of completed railroad tracks in Colorado in 1876. In addition to two direct east-west connections to the states in the Kansas Pacific and the A.T. & S.F., the Denver Pacific, chartered by a group of local investors, linked the territorial capital to Cheyenne and the Union Pacific to the north.

Guests at the Pueblo banquet were read a letter from John Evans, a former territorial governor turned railroad executive, who sent his regrets at not being able to attend, but stressed “the great importance of rapidly extending our system of railroads to all parts of Colorado.”

“I trust our plains and mountains will soon be traversed from north to south and from east to west with a complete system of railroads, lined with prosperous towns and cities, and that mills and furnaces producing the gold and silver, the copper and lead and the iron of a vast commerce will be the result,” Evans wrote. “It is therefore of the highest interest that the people of Colorado shall foster, encourage and protect railroads as they in turn foster and develop every other interest.”

Anxiety in Denver

Beneath all the pomp and circumstance of the occasion, Evans’ absence — and his plea to “foster” and “protect” railroads like the ones he invested in and promoted — betrayed the undercurrents of anxiety in the soon-to-be-state of Colorado about the complex relationships between its business and political leaders, the railroad companies and the public they were meant to serve.

After a somewhat perfunctory appearance, the special passenger train that had ferried Bennet, Byers and other dignitaries from Denver departed Pueblo again at 7:30 that evening.

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The congratulations that leaders in the territorial capital offered their southern neighbors on the A.T. & S.F.’s arrival tended to be terse and begrudging. They were deeply concerned that the economic benefits the railroad would bring to Pueblo would come directly at the expense of Denver, where business already felt slow amid the distant “mining excitements” in the San Juan Mountainsand the Black Hills.

“Circumscribe our commerce on the entire North and South, limiting it to a few mountain towns, and our business men may very well ask, ‘What shall we do to be saved?’” worried the Denver Mirror in February 1876. “The effects of evils to which we have briefly adverted are already apparent — in stagnation of business, the difficulty of collection, the collapse of private enterprises, the exodus of many and the income of few.”

Compared to the A.T. & S.F., which had laid tracks into Colorado cheaply, on favorable grades, through territory that was already becoming densely populated, the northern routes were “relict(s) of greed and incompetence,” writes historian Richard White. With privileges under federal law guarded by considerable political influence, the Union Pacific could charge extortionate rates, or tariffs, on any goods shipped from Denver through Cheyenne, while in terms of mismanagement, “the Kansas Pacific may have been the sorriest of the lot,” White writes.

“A tariff that over the Kansas Pacific or the Union Pacific and Denver Pacific into Colorado just pays expenses, to the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe … is a profitable rate,” the Golden Transcript observed on Feb. 16, 1876.

Denver merchants appealed to freight agents at the northern railroads to bring down their rates, and hoped the competition from the A.T. & S.F. would force their hands. Evans, meanwhile, renewed his efforts to build the narrow-gauge Denver & South Park Railway over Kenosha Pass, enabling the city to capture commercial traffic to and from the San Juans. He wouldn’t succeed in reaching South Park until 1879, by which time the San Juan fever had given way to a silver boom in Leadville.

The Grangers in the constitutional convention

In Golden — which years earlier had been on the losing end of a battle with Denver to become northern Colorado’s main railroad hub — editors at the Transcript could hardly conceal their gloating at the possibility that “the Denver chickens which have been pecking at the prosperity of other sections for years are now coming home to roost.”

A letter published under a pseudonym, “Granger,” argued that the overlapping rivalries between towns and the railroad companies whose favor they competed for had “at last been found to be a losing game.”

“You will see that the effort to crush a neighboring town in her efforts to work out her own salvation, has rebounded against you in Denver with four-fold violence,” wrote Granger.

Closeup of a United States quarter coin showing "Colorado 1876"

A growing number of Americans were resentful of the political and economic power that had been concentrated in the hands of a few railroad companies. “Corporation” was a term practically synonymous with railroads at the time, writes White, and “by the 1870s special privilege and monopoly had become synonymous with corporations.” As railroad barons enriched themselves through rate-fixing and financial schemes, they used sophisticated lobbying operations and outright bribery to protect themselves from government scrutiny, beginning the era of excess and corruption later known as the Gilded Age.

An early populist movement known as the Grangers — named for an agricultural society, The National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry — led the revolt against railroad corruption, and the backlash gained momentum after rampant financial speculation in railroad stocks helped cause the Panic of 1873 and plunge much of the country into a depression.

Henry Bromwell, a Denver Republican and a former congressman from Illinois, led a faction within Colorado’s 1876 constitutional convention that was sympathetic to the Grangers.

The Bromwell faction, which also included Byron Carr, the one-armed Civil War veteran and future Colorado attorney general, influenced constitutional provisions relating to eminent domain, mining taxes and water rights, but its most controversial proposals targeted Colorado railroads.

As in many other states, the Colorado constitution was drafted with language designating railroads as “common carriers,” and granting a right to the “transportation of freight or passengers” without “undue or unreasonable discrimination.” Carr proposed that this right extend to transportation at “just and reasonable rates,” but his motion was defeated on an 11-22 vote. A separate proposal by Bromwell would have given the Colorado Supreme Court the power to “order and decree just and reasonable rates of compensation to such corporation for services under its charter.”

The convention was inundated with letters from influential territorial figures, including Evans and his fellow railroad baron David Moffat, warning against such provisions. In Pueblo, where political and business leaders were overjoyed by the A.T. & S.F.’s arrival, they provoked a broadside in the Chieftain, which decried the “absurdity and falsity” of the Supreme Court proposal and other “Bromwellian resolutions.” With roughly seven members, the convention’s Granger faction was heavily outnumbered by moderate Republicans and Democrats, and the Supreme Court proposal was defeated.

“Colorado, with a vast territory, a sparse population, few railroads, and undeveloped resources, was cautious about offending capital,” historian Colin Goodykoontz observed in a 1940 Colorado Magazine article. “There were also some who were afraid that the business interests of the Territory would throw their influence against the Constitution if they had strong reasons for disliking the document.”

Though the Granger movement largely came up short in Colorado in the 1870s, the populist backlash against railroads would continue to build, leading to congressional investigations of railroad corruption and the establishment in 1887 of the Interstate Commerce Commission, a federal body empowered to regulate transportation to ensure fair rates.