Denver

Gold was found at the confluence of the South Platte and Cherry Creek in 1858, and the rush that followed was called Pikes Peak or Bust. Most of it was bust. The placer gold ran out quickly and thousands turned around and went home, and Denver would have gone with them except that the harder rock in the mountains held silver.

So Denver became not a mining town but the town that supplied and banked for mining towns, which is a more durable thing to be. The photographs show that clearly — the city has smelters and banks rather than shafts.

Larimer Street was the first street and the commercial center for decades. The photographs from the 1860s and 1870s show false-front timber buildings and mud, and from the 1890s show masonry blocks with cast-iron fronts on the same sites.

The State Capitol was finished in 1894 and the dome was covered in gold leaf in 1908, using two hundred ounces from Colorado mines, on the argument that a state built on gold should say so. It has been re-gilded several times since. The building sits at exactly one mile above sea level and there is a step on the west side marked to say so, though surveyors have moved the mark twice.

The Brown Palace opened in 1892, triangular because of the site, with a nine-storey atrium under stained glass. It was one of the first hotels in the country with electricity and hot running water throughout, and it has never closed.

The mountains are the other constant. Photographers positioned themselves so the range appears behind the city, and a great many of the wide views were made specifically to show that relationship. The scale is genuinely difficult to photograph — the peaks are fifteen miles away and fourteen thousand feet up.

Union Station and the railroads made the rest of it. Denver was bypassed by the transcontinental line and had to build its own connection to Cheyenne by subscription, which the citizens funded themselves in 1870.

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