History
Both halves of the road trace their origins to the early days of Aspen's settlement in the 1880s during the Colorado Silver Boom. Prospectors who had missed out on the earlier mining boom that built Leadville began to head west, drawn by reports of vast untapped silver deposits in the Roaring Fork Valley just beyond the Continental Divide. They began crossing what was then known as Hunter Pass, in defiance of an order from Governor Frederick Walker Pitkin not to do so until the federal government had negotiated a peace treaty with the Utes, the dominant Native American tribe in the area.
Read more about this topic: Colorado State Highway 82
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“One classic American landscape haunts all of American literature. It is a picture of Eden, perceived at the instant of history when corruption has just begun to set in. The serpent has shown his scaly head in the undergrowth. The apple gleams on the tree. The old drama of the Fall is ready to start all over again.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)
“I assure you that in our next class we will concern ourselves solely with the history of Egypt, and not with the more lurid and non-curricular subject of living mummies.”
—Griffin Jay, and Reginald LeBorg. Prof. Norman (Frank Reicher)
“So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in this history of the globe.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)