greeley colorado and nathan cook meeker and horace greeley and nathan meeker

As I was returning from Cheyenne to Denver after placing third in the 2006 National Senior Spelling Bee, I decided to avoid Interstate 25 and take the old route 85 from Cheyenne through Greeley, CO and then down toward Denver International Airport. I didn't know if there really would be anything to explore, but I wanted to stop for a moment in Greeley, CO just to learn what I could. I arrived there about 8:30 on a Sunday morning, and the town was almost completely quiet and seemingly deserted. A sign on the main street pointed me to the "Nathan Meeker Home," and I, who am a sucker for historical signs and old homes, turned off the main road and found, just across the street from the Presbyterian Church, a neatly-kept modest two-story 1870 home built out of adobe brick. I knew there had to be a huge story here, and a little research on the spot as well as in other sources took me out of 2006 and put me back into the fascinating and explosive world of the late 1860s in the American West. This and the next essay explore some of the "world" which explains the Meeker House and contributed to the shaping of the American West.

Getting our Bearings with Nathan Cook Meeker

The reason there is a Meeker House in Greeley is that one Nathan Cook Meeker (1817-79), a native of Euclid OH and, during the late 1860s, agricultural writer for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, led the effort to found a utopian community in what was then known as the "Union Colony" halfway between Denver and Cheyenne. With the completion of the Union Pacific Railroad in 1869 through Cheyenne with a Southern spur to Denver, Meeker thought that a spot about halfway between these two settlements, in the neighborhood of two rivers, would be a perfect one to set up an agricultural-based community founded on Puritan values and communitarian instincts. He visited the area in 1869, reported his findings to editor Greeley who, with the power of his voice as represented in the newspaper, put out a call for those interested in setting up a sort of utopian community in the foothills of the Rockies. Expecting only a handful of responses, Greeley was overwhelmed with nearly 1000 volunteers to undergo this journey. A meeting in December 1869 let the prospective settlers know that this would be a moralistic and educated community, and would be populated by those who were financially well-off (i.e., could pay their way and still have enough left over to build homes in the West). Eventually about 300 families (comprising somewhat more than 700 people) decided to move West to the "Union Colony" in April and May 1870. Some of the colonists, upon getting off the train and realizing there was not a tree within 30 miles, prompty got back on the train but, for the most part, the 700+ settlers, led by Meeker, wanted to make a go of this community.

A Word on Communitarianism

Meeker had grown up in Ohio and come of age in the 1840s, the decade of some of the most radical and interesting communitarian movements in American history. Emerson was quoted once as saying that every farmer at the plow in those days had in his back pocket a manual for a utopian community he wanted to found or join. Meeker briefly joined one of these in the 1840s in Ohio, but it soon disintegrated, as almost all of them did, because of conflicts between leading community members. But I think that the "bug" stuck with Meeker, and the temptation was strong at the conclusion of the Civil War to try to implement the communitarian plans (Meeker was strongly influenced by the French thinker Charles Fourier) which had come to naught in the '40s. But the problem with many men, and Meeker seemed to be one of them, is that we are idealistic to a fault and often hide our practical incompetence in a fog of idealistic longings. Meeker seemed to be such a person, for he failed at nearly every job he had until finally he seemed to have found his niche as an agricultural reporter for Greeley after the Civil War. But it may have been Meeker's idealism that appealed to Greeley, for if there is any adjective appropriate to describe that energetic publisher and Western promoter is it "idealistic." Nevertheless, the glue that would bind together the settlers to the Union Colony halfway between Denver and Cheyenne would be a firm commitment to developing the West on the basis of moralistic Protestant principles. Prosperity, temperance, education and disciplined living would make the desert bloom.

The Communities of the Old West

The early 1870s was a time when the most diverse and interesting people mingled in the West. Or, to put it more accurately, it was a time when the most divergent groups set up their little worlds in the West, with most of them only periodically interacting with each other. Take the following examples. The Mormons had settled in the Great Salt Lake Basin in 1847, after having been chased out of many Eastern locations, and were assiduously building their new Zion in the desert. Actually, I think it was the relative isolation of the LDS Church for almost a century that gave it such a distinctive stamp that it will continue to grow and shape America in ways that we don't yet fully understand. Then, there were those who had heard about the gold and silver discoveries. The gold hadn't really "panned out," so to speak, but silver mines from Montana to Nevada to California were opening in the 1870s, attracting the most rag-tag collection speculators and hucksters that America had seen to that time. Mark Twain regaled us with some stories about these people. Then there were the more staid, family-based, conservative settlers of the Willamette Valley in Oregon, who crossed the plains on wagon trains to establish their Edenic paradise in Oregon.

Economics drove other settlements, and the cattle barons of Wyoming and Colorado were eagerly gobbling up land in these arid states. Railroad agents, too, covered the West, bribing territorial and early state legislatures in order to get concessions from them. In short, when Meeker and his New York band arrived in the "Union Colony" in April 1870, they would be part of a society of diverse and contrary interests that already was growing up in the untamed West. The next essay describes what happened.

1936