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Originally Posted by Cirrus
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Little trade value, lots of drinking value. There are only so many places in Colorado where there was enough fresh water 150 years ago to support permanent settlements.
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The Front Range really only had three good options (on the east side), two where the major rivers flowed out.
Cheyenne made sense because it was the only easy gap through the mountains through the Great Divide Basin. Look at the current path of I-80 and many railroads and you still see that. But it lacked a major river and is too far from the mountains to really benefit from their bounty.
Pueblo was the next best choice - Arkansas River, somewhat milder climate, and a gap thru east-to-west that the railroads could follow. But I think it suffered from being too far south (everything that anybody wanted to connect to - Chicago, San Fran, St Louis - connected farther north). But most importantly, Pueblo is also pretty far from the good stuff that came out of Colorado's central mountains. It's a long haul to mountains of any significance at that point along the Front Range. Incidentally, that's also why Pueblo doesn't capture (or benefit from) many of the quality-of-life migrants moving to Colorado today.
Denver had the Platte River and Cherry Creek, which provide more than enough water. Denver was immediately east of the mountains that were actually producing ore (and produce recreational opportunities today). And once investors ponied up to build the Moffat Tunnel, giving Denver a much-needed east-west railroad connection, it was all over.
Something else about the Platte... not only does it provide reliable drinking water (the Arkansas did that for Pueblo too), it provides a natural highway that folks could follow all the way to the Missouri River and beyond (I-76/I-80 today). If you were in your covered wagon leaving Independence, MO, heading west and you had to slog your way all across Nebraska (it's bad enough today at 80 mph!), the Platte gave you two easy paths to follow - North, into middle-of-nowhere Wyoming and onward along the Oregon Trail, and the other, South, directly to Denver.
(The old Santa Fe Trail was another option out of Missouri, and it came close to Pueblo, but you'd still have had to detour a bit to get there).