By Mike Anton
Denver Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer

Ed Baird watches the sun set over the Dolores River Valley in southwestern Colorado. Long ago he mined unranium in this unforgiving land, where hardships came to many and wealth to few. As the century wanes, Colorado remains a place build on hard work, hope and failure. A dramatic landscape with a lasting, human imprint.

Legacy. n., anything handed down from, or as from, an ancestor.

Colorado, 1859:

When the people began to pour in, this is what they found: A wild land. Unpredictable, inhospitable, untouched, mesmerizing. Opportunity. To create something new, to strike it rich. Native people who believed the land had been carved out for them by the creator. Space. So big, so endless, enough room for everyone.

Colorado today:

The land still dazzles. But it's less wild, more predictable. It has been harnessed and tinkered with, channeled and maintained to meet man's needs.

Now, the land is touched by boots and skis and bikes more than by pick-axes and plows. Colorado has become as much a playground as a workplace. A stage on which dreams of adventure are fulfilled.

It's still a place, though, where dreaming can hurt. Just ask the oilman of the '80s. Or the uranium miner of the '50s. Or the farmer of the '30s. Colorado has always held the promise of the boom and the hardship of the bust in the same hand.

In fact, the place was built on broken promises. It's hard to deny. The native people who were here aren't gone, but America took away their land. War, slaughter, broken treaties, two nations under god where only one could fit. Now you have to listen hard, really hard, to hear the echoes of the past.

Sometimes you have to look hard to find the open space. A lot of it is still there. But much of it is gone, paved over and swallowed by wave after wave of newcomers. One generation looking for gold, another for good soil, another for the good life amidst a sprawl of rooftops.

These are some of our legacies -- the Colorado we've created, the Colorado we will leave behind.

"Remarkable as developments and progress here have been in the past, it would seem that they are to be overshadowed in relative magnitude by those that are yet to come," Jerome Smiley wrote in his History of Denver, published in 1901.

Words that were true then. Words that are true today.

October 3, 1999

Colorado Millennium 2000 is a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society
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