DENVER — While twinkling lights in the 1920s earned Denver the nickname of “Christmas Capital of the World,” the city’s yuletide celebrations go back much further.
Soon after Denver was founded in 1858, a group of men gathered for their first Christmas.
“That was probably the most raucous of all the Christmas parties, with gunfire and fights and a lot of drinking going on,” said Thomas Noel, a Colorado historian better known as Dr. Colorado.
Just a month earlier, General William Larimer had taken over a camp formerly known as St. Charles Town Company. The men at that camp went away for winter, leaving just one guard. Larimer and his men plied him with whiskey and took over the area.
General Larimer named the new town Denver City, hoping to flatter James Denver, governor of Kansas Territory. It turned out, James Denver had retired a few weeks before, and Larimer just hadn’t gotten the news yet.
Still, the name stuck as more settlers arrived.
“Gold was a big draw out here,” Noel said. “Something like 100,000 people rushed out.”
Back then, there were about 20 males for each female, and there were very few children.
At the time, Larimer and his men shared the land with the indigenous Arapaho tribe, who had camped there in the winters for decades, seeking milder weather than in the mountains or plains.
“There were actually some amicable relations early on,” between Chief Little Raven and the settlers, Noel said. “Of course, [the Arapaho] weren't well repaid for their hospitality at Sand Creek six years later when they were slaughtered.”
Still, at Denver's first Christmas, William Larimer Jr. recounted having Little Raven and Left Hand as visitors. "I gave them many meals and cooked for them myself," Larimer wrote years later in a letter to Colorado's historical society.
On Christmas Day 1858, the day was as “bright and genial” as spring, according to a newspaper editor who attended the festivities and wrote an account for the “poor frozen victims of the States.”
With such a beautiful warm day, the men in Denver “lolled lazily around on the logs, smoking their pipes or spinning inumerable yarns about their gold prospecting and hunting expeditions,” the news editor A.O. McGrew wrote.
But the main highlight of the celebrations was the drinking.
Richens Wootton, better known as Uncle Dick, arrived in Denver that morning with a wagon full of whiskey from New Mexico.
The whiskey was called Taos Lightning and “it had chili peppers in it and gunpowder,” Noel said. Drinkers described it as a “somewhat deadly concoction, but he served it free for that first Christmas party,” so it was still a hit, he said.
Uncle Wootton went on to open a two-story saloon in neighboring Auraria. It was in that saloon, “lubricated with Taos Lightning,” that local officials first met to establish the Colorado territory.
By 1859, there were 35 saloons and no churches in Denver.
On that first Christmas, drunk on whiskey, the men also ate a feast.
“There weren't many farms or ranches anywhere near Denver at that point,” Noel said, and Denver wouldn’t get its first stagecoach until the following year, and wouldn’t have a railroad until 1870.
“Any kind of wild game you could shoot they would be serving up,” he said.
A “bill of fare” from the day lists smothered buffalo, venison a la mode and black mountain squirrel among the many meats, served alongside potatoes, rice and beans.
The Larimers also contributed a stew.
“There was all kinds of things in the stew, including quite a few mice,” Noel said.
Mice getting into grain stores was a big problem at the time. Larimer just stirred the mice into the stew.
“There was not much quality control,” Noel said with a laugh.
With so many mice around, a coveted gift that Christmas would have been a cat.
“Cats were hard to find here. They wanted them for mousers, for catching mice. So, the first cat sold supposedly for $25,” he said. That would be almost $1,000 today.
While we don’t know if the early inhabitants of Denver exchanged Christmas gifts, we do know their drunken feast came with entertainment.
“They would sing some of the traditional Christmas songs that were around that time, gather around the fire,” Noel said. “There were a lot of Irish and Cornish and Welsh who all had their folk songs.”
Songs included Silent Night, the Star Spangled Banner and old folk songs like The Girl I Left Behind Me and Rosalie, the Prairie Flower, according to the 1858 article by A.O. McGrew.
The men also shared toasts of “hip, hip horra” and jokes like “Women and Wine. May they both attain that which ruins the one and improves the other; viz: old age.”
Late into the night, the men asked General Larimer to give a speech.
Larimer went “on and on for hours and hours about what a great place Denver would be,” Noel said. “He claimed that Denver was destined to be the big city of the West.”
Larimer called it “the happiest Christmas he had ever spent.”
More than 160 years later, Denver is still celebrating Christmas — now with more lights and less wild game.
"Brighter every year it seems like," Noel said.
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