Background
In 1858 settlers arrived to frontier land: "The early pioneer came to a silent wilderness. He took hold of the territory 'in the raw.' He had nothing by his hands, his energy and his courage to start a new civilization in the wilderness." In 1859 and 1860 people began arriving in the thousands to settle in the mountains, mining camps or valleys.
People also came to Colorado was the restorative benefits of its "clean air and sunshine." Starting in the 1860s, when tuberculosis (TB) was a world-wide problem, physicians in the eastern United States recommended that their patients go to Colorado. As a result, the number of people with tuberculosis, called "lungers", in the state grew alarmingly and without the services or facilities to support their needs. Not knowing how to manage a population of homeless, ill people, many were taken to jail. Because of the number of people with TB flocking to Denver, by the 1880s it was nicknamed the "World's Sanitarium". Cynthia Stout, a history scholar, asserted that by 1900 "one-third of Colorado's population were residents of the state because of tuberculosis."
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Denver Colorado in 1859
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Denver, Colorado 22 years later, in 1881
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Denver, Colorado in 1889
Read more about this topic: Frances Wisebart Jacobs
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“... every experience in life enriches one’s background and should teach valuable lessons.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“In the true sense one’s native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)