The state of Colorado is a giant rectangle, its right-angled borders the arbitrary creation of the U.S. Congress, which carved the state out of four other territories in 1861.

Yet within those straight lines, there are a number of geographic and cultural dividers. If we were to divide Colorado along these lines, we would have not one but five states: Southern Colorado, Western Slope, Eastern Plains, Front Range and Metropolitan Denver.

That is the premise of the new 90-minute documentary film The Five States of Colorado, a collaboration between the nonprofit Colorado Humanities and Denver’s HaveyPro Cinema. Colorado Life and Denver’s 9News are the film’s media sponsors.

The Five States of Colorado tells the life story of each region separately, drawing on interviews with locals and experts, all set to beautiful still and moving imagery from across the state. 

Renowned Colorado author and historian Patty Limerick, a key consultant on the film, sees The Five States of Colorado as a way for people from different parts of Colorado to better understand each other.

“Maybe things would work better if we got acquainted,” Limerick said. “Strangers need to be introduced if they’re going to do something together. And we might find out we thought we were strangers, but we actually have so much in common.”

Colorado Humanities plans to hold events where people from across the state watch the film and use it as a framework to discuss what it means to live in Colorado.

The Five States of Colorado premieres on April 6 at the Denver Botanic Gardens. It will be broadcast on 9News on April 15, 7-9 p.m. Further screenings at theaters across Colorado will be announced at a later date.

In the meantime, here is an introduction to the “five states” that the film explores.

 

Southern Colorado

Southern Colorado encompasses the San Luis Valley, as well as Pueblo and the land on the plains south of the Arkansas River.

Before European contact, the San Luis Valley was the territory of the Utes, while Cheyennes, Arapahos and Comanches lived on the plains portion. Southern Colorado nominally became part of the Spanish Empire in 1598, when explorer Juan de Oñate claimed it in the name of King Phillip II.

When Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, it opened up trade with the United States along the Santa Fe Trail. The wagon route passed along the Arkansas River, which then marked the border between the two nations. Fur-trade outpost Bent’s Old Fort opened in 1833 on the American side of the Arkansas, becoming a hub of interaction between whites and native people.

After Mexico lost the Mexican-American War, it ceded huge chunks of land in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, including Southern Colorado. The Hispanos living in the region were now American.

“If you talk to residents of Southern Colorado who’ve been there for generations,” says History Colorado Executive Director Dawn DiPrince in the film, “you may often hear them say, ‘I didn’t cross the border – the border crossed me.’”

In the late 1800s, coal and steel production became huge industries in Southern Colorado. Some 15,000 people worked for Colorado Fuel & Iron, or CF&I, whose operations spread throughout the region, including a massive steel mill in Pueblo.

Immigrants from many nations worked in CF&I’s mines and mills. Work conditions could be dangerous and unfair, prompting employees to unionize to demand improvements. CF&I refused to negotiate with the union, which led to a series of confrontations known as the Colorado Coalfield War. The culmination of the conflict was the Ludlow Massacre, in which the Colorado National Guard opened fire on striking miners and their families, and set fire to their tent village. At least 19 people were killed.

Over the course of the 20th century, coal and steel production declined in Southern Colorado. Today, the region is largely agricultural, from the cultivation of melons in Rocky Ford to potatoes in the San Luis Valley.

 

Western Slope

The Western Slope consists of most of Colorado west of the Front Range.

Ancestral Puebloans built the state’s first permanent settlements at Mesa Verde; later, the Utes came to dominate the region. That would change when the discovery of gold and silver brought an influx of miners and settlers.

A series of treaties and agreements forced the Utes into ever smaller territories. Open conflict broke out in 1879, when Utes fought illegally encroaching U.S. Army troops at the Battle of Milk Creek and killed federal Indian Agent Nathan Meeker. This led to most of the tribe being expelled to Utah, though some bands remain in Colorado on the small Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute reservations.

Mining boomtowns sprang up throughout the Rockies. Silver mining, in particular, made towns like Leadville, Creede and Aspen incredibly prosperous. But the boom went bust in 1893, when the price of silver crashed. Some boomtowns were abandoned, while others struggled on.

Resource booms continued in the 20th century. In the early 1980s, Exxon launched its massive Colony Oil Shale Project near Parachute. The company poured money into the area, making Grand Junction and nearby towns thrive. Exxon’s plans called for operations to continue for decades. But on May 2, 1982 – a day remembered on the Western Slope as “Black Sunday” – the company suddenly announced the end of the oil shale project and the layoff of 2,300 employees. It was an economic blow that took the region a decade or more to recover from.

In recent decades, tourism has become a more reliable source of prosperity for many Western Slope communities. Drawn by scenic beauty and outdoor recreation opportunities, many people have relocated to mountain towns – a trend that has picked up steam with the rise of remote working.

A constant on the Western Slope has been the importance of rivers.

“Western Slopers don’t necessarily think of themselves as being from a county, but they think of themselves as being from a river basin,” longtime Glenwood Springs attorney and current Denver Water CEO Jim Lochhead says in the film. “So, you talk to somebody in Glenwood Springs or Carbondale, and they say, ‘I’m from the Roaring Fork Valley.’ You talk to somebody in Steamboat or Craig and they say, ‘I’m from the Yampa Valley.’”

The Colorado River is especially important – and not just to those on the Western Slope: Fully half of Denver Water’s supply comes from water diverted from the Colorado River Basin.

 

Eastern Plains

As its name suggests, the Eastern Plains includes the plains east of the Front Range and north of the Arkansas River.

This region was the historic home of the Cheyennes and Arapahos.  However, the 1858 discovery of gold prompted tens of thousands of miners and settlers to flood across their land.

On Nov. 29, 1864, Colorado volunteer cavalry led by Col. John Chivington attacked the peaceful village of Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle, killing at least 230, mostly women, children and elders. Known as the Sand Creek Massacre, this event sparked an all-out war on the Eastern Plains that ended with the Cheyennes and Arapahos being relocated to reservations in Oklahoma, Wyoming and Montana.

In the late 1860s, Texas cattlemen Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving led some of the earliest cattle drives through the Eastern Plains. Open-range cattle ranching flourished for a few years, until the arrival of farmers and fences. Wheat became a primary crop, with sugar beets becoming prominent around the turn of the 20th century.

“It’s a beautiful place to live, but it can be a difficult place to live,” says Jim Yahn of Sterling, manager of the North Sterling Irrigation District. Summertime heat is intense, and hail storms can wipe out a season’s crops in five minutes. Winters can be brutally cold and windy. “It takes an optimistic person and a really strong-willed and independent person to push through all those things.”

Many of the early settlers of the Eastern Plains were Germans from Russia who immigrated here to grow sugar beets. More recently, some communities have seen growth with the arrival of immigrants and refugees from Latin America and Africa who find jobs at meat-packing plants and other agricultural work.

While many families in Eastern Plains communities have lived there for generations, changes in agriculture have led some of the younger generations to migrate elsewhere. Still, many remain.

“People really have roots that go deep into both the soil and into the small communities that are part of our Eastern Plains,” Yahn said. “When you’re in agriculture every day, you see that water in the summertime flowing by in a ditch, and you know that’s coming from a reservoir that was built 100 years ago, it gives you a deep sense of appreciation for those people that worked so hard and so diligently, and has sustained the area for such a long time.”

 

Front Range

The Front Range is the heavily populated area that hugs the Rocky Mountain foothills from Colorado Springs to Fort Collins – not including the immediate Denver metro area.

Often called the I-25 corridor, this area has been a corridor for travel and commerce since humans first came here more than 20,000 years ago. It became a neutral meeting ground and passageway for native tribes.

Mountain men began frequenting the Front Range in the 1820s, and in the 1830s, four fur-trading forts were built along the South Platte River. The 1858 gold rush truly transformed the region with an influx of settlers, who helped provide food and equipment for the mining industry, which remained lucrative for most of the 19th century.

“The miners lived up in Cripple Creek,” Colorado Springs Pioneer Museum Curator of History Leah Davis Witherow says, “but the gold ran downhill to Colorado Springs.”

Colorado Springs was founded by Gen. William Jackson Palmer, who also founded the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad. Palmer conceived of the city as a health resort for people suffering from tuberculosis. From those beginnings, Colorado Springs has evolved into a major military town. Some 75,000 service members live in or around the city in El Paso County. Fort Carson is the second-largest employer in the entire state.

Many choose to live in the region because it is close to both the mountains and Denver.

“I don’t want to be in a big city, but I have access to the big-city assets when I need them,” says Dawn Thilmany, a professor at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. “So Denver is a big, bad wolf, but we also understand we get some of our businesses and our people, because we’re an hour from it.”

The steady growth of Front Range communities has seen cities expand onto what had been agricultural land. Between 2010 and 2020, Colorado’s population increased by nearly 750,000 people, and the Front Range accounted for the vast majority of that growth.

The availability of water will be a key factor in determining how much more cities on the Front Range can grow. Most communities get their water from diversions from the Western Slope, but declining flow in those rivers could hamper further expansion.

 

Metropolitan Denver

Distinct from the Front Range, Metropolitan Denver is the city itself and its suburbs.

Founded in 1858 by gold seekers, Denver quickly became the center of politics and commerce in Colorado and the Rocky Mountain West. A key to the city’s growth has been its status as a hub of trade and transportation – something that was threatened when the transcontinental bypassed Denver, going through Wyoming instead. Local businesses financed construction of the Denver & Pacific Railroad to connect to it, knowing how important that link to the rest of the country was.

Denver’s population has been diverse from its earliest days. A significant number of Chinese immigrants, who had first come to the West as railroad laborers, settled on Wazee Street, creating Denver’s Chinatown. African-Americans established a community in the Five Points neighborhood.

The 1880s silver boom in the mountains also made Denver prosper, fueling a population boom. Between 1880 and 1890, the city grew from 35,000 to 106,000 residents. The optimism that pervaded Denver was dampened by the 1893 silver crash, but spirits were buoyed by the opening of the State Capitol Building in 1894 and the arrival of the National Western Stock Show in 1896.

Denver experienced another boom – oil, this time – in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was during this period that most of the skyscrapers that dominate the city’s skyline were built. The population declined when the boom ended, but it went back up in the 1990s, when the city shifted to a steadier economy based on high technology, transportation – Denver International Airport opened in 1995 – and tourism.

The city’s population exploded once more between 2010 and 2020, when it grew from 600,158 to 717,630 residents in Denver proper. The entire Denver metropolitan area has a population approaching 3 million. Having shed much of its national reputation as a “cow town,” Denver became one of the most desirable places for people nationwide to relocate.

Metropolitan Denver is also a destination for many immigrants from Latin America, Asia and Africa. In Aurora, some 20 percent of residents are foreign-born.

“We are where we are because of our history,” former Denver City Councilwoman Happy Haynes says at the film’s conclusion, “and we should understand all of it – the good, the bad and the ugly – because that helps shape the path for the future. What binds us and what divides us? As our state continues to grow, we have to do it together.”