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.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I feel as tall as you.”
—Ellis Meredith, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 14, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“The history of a soldier’s wound beguiles the pain of it.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)