William Gilpin (governor) - The Central Gold Region

The Central Gold Region

During the Mexican-American War, he received a commission as Major and marched to Chihuahua City in the successful bloodless campaign to capture New Mexico. He was considered to have served with distinction in the campaign and was later given command of a volunteer force to protect the Santa Fe Trail against attacks by Native Americans.

After the end of the war in 1848, he returned to Missouri and resumed his law practice. He made an unsuccessful attempt at a political career while in Missouri as well. In 1859, Gilpin's early intuition about gold in Colorado proved correct, and the region suddenly became the target for thousands of eager and hopeful prospectors in the ensuing Colorado Gold Rush. That year, Gilpin published a futurist history of the region, called The Central Gold Region, in which he wrote, "the destiny of the American people is to subdue the continent". In the book he predicted that the Mississippi River valley would become the center of western civilization with the new settlement of Denver as its capital, based partly on its location near the 40th parallel north. In the book, Gilpin envisioned that all the great cities of the world along that latitude would eventually be linked by railroad lines, and proposed a rail line over the Bering Strait connecting North America and Asia. Throughout his career in politics, Gilpin was a strong believer that the American West would not only be settled, but that it would eventually hold an enormous population. He was a particularly strong advocate of the now-debunked climatological theory of "Rain follows the plow", which held that settlement in the arid lands of the West would actually increase rainfall in the region, making it as fertile and green as the Eastern United States.