As the weather continued cooling off in October 1876, Denver’s Rocky Mountain News looked ahead to what a headline called “our winter campaign.”

“Denver promises to be unusually cosmopolitan and lively during the coming winter,” the paper predicted. “Already the town is filling up with strangers, many of them remarkably fine-looking.”

The inaugural state Legislature was set to convene in early November — “many of the more staid and sensible married members are bringing their wives and families with them,” reported the News — while many others who’d been employed in Colorado’s frontier mining camps during the summer months were now returning to the relative comfort of the capital city.

Image

A busy social calendar of “hops,” concerts and other nightly entertainments resumed, many of them hosted by Denver’s vast array of fraternal organizations and secret societies. Surveying the changes in dance fashions, the News observed that “the polka is in high favor again, and the minuet is to be danced at some of the balls and parties this winter.”

“Let our people be hospitable, our business men liberal, and our landlords reasonable — in other words, let our money-getters not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs,” the paper cautioned. “We must make Denver pleasant and attractive if we would derive the utmost benefit from our temporary advantage in these particulars.”

The late excitement over the first state elections had now passed, with Denver’s Republican establishment having done enough to avoid disaster against a Democratic Party that made a strong showing in southern Colorado and the mountain mining camps.

Ex-territorial Governor John Routt had been elected the Centennial State’s first chief executive, and the GOP-controlled Legislature would soon elect its first two U.S. senators, and award its three electoral votes in the 1876 presidential election — a one-time provision in the state constitution that underlined Republicans’ partisan motive for admitting Colorado to the union in the centennial year.

Corruption scandals, silver coins and grasshoppers were the hot topics in Colorado’s 1876 election

But the October 3 election had also set the stage for a controversy that would engulf state politics for the foreseeable future.

Republican James Belford was confirmed as the winner of the race for Colorado’s at-large congressional seat for the remainder of the 44th Congress, but Democrats hoped to get revenge in a second election, scheduled for November 7, for a full term in the 45th Congress, which was set to convene in March 1877.

But now Republicans, flush with victory, said no such election could legally take place. Though the November 7 election had been called by the former Colorado Territory’s Republican-appointed secretary of state, and duly noticed by county officials, the state GOP argued that the authority to hold the election was vested in a state Legislature that hadn’t existed yet. Republicans announced Belford’s withdrawal from the contest and urged the party faithful to “take no part therein whatever.”

“(Democratic candidate Thomas) Patterson and Judge Belford were supported for both the 44th and 45th congresses. … The people elected the one and defeated the other,” state GOP chair J.C. Wilson maintained in the Rocky Mountain News on October 15. “To proceed, then, with an election which has no foundation in law, is not only to impose an unnecessary and heavy burden upon the people, but would also bring the character of our elections into contempt.”

The News, ever the loyal Republican organ, quickly got to work spreading the party line that any result in the Democrats’ favor on November 7 would be a sham.

“As there is no Republican candidate in the field,” the paper wrote on October 22. “Mr. Patterson stands a good chance of being ‘elected.’”

Selected sources

• The Rocky Mountain News, October 15 & 22, 1876