The last of the delegates elected to Colorado’s first-ever state party convention arrived in Pueblo on a special train from Denver on August 23, 1876. The newly proclaimed Centennial State’s Republican establishment opened proceedings at the county courthouse just after 8 p.m.

“The prospects at present are exceedingly good for a tolerably lively contest for the nominations for the various offices to be selected by the convention,” reported the Pueblo Chieftain.

The state of Colorado’s inaugural elections were to be held on the first Tuesday in October. In a tense presidential election year, Republicans and Democrats would battle for control of the 75-seat state Legislature, the three-member state Supreme Court, the office of governor and a half-dozen other executive-branch positions, and the state’s at-large representative to Congress.

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After the appointment of a credentials committee and a song by the GOP’s glee club, Rev. Benjamin F. Watson, a Black delegate from Denver, led the convention in prayer, making “an eloquent appeal to the Throne of Grace, in behalf of the convention and its objects,” said the Chieftain.

Watson, who’d arrived in Colorado earlier that year, had been born a slave in Missouri, escaped to Illinois via the Underground Railroad at 14 years old and later served in the Union Army during the Civil War. Later in 1876, he would be appointed the first chaplain of the Colorado Senate.

With some introductory business out of the way, the Republican faithful marched through the streets of Pueblo in a torchlight parade.

“Great enthusiasm prevails, and a general desire for a strong ticket, and one that will harmonize the party and all sections of the state,” said the Rocky Mountain News, whose editor and publisher, William N. Byers, was another of Denver’s convention delegates.

Harmony in the Colorado GOP was easier said than done. It was a fraught and anxious time for the Republican Party nationally, with President Ulysses S. Grant’s administration plagued by scandal and Democrats confident their party was poised to sweep back to full control of the federal government for the first time since the Civil War.

In Colorado, long-simmering tensions between Denver’s business and political establishment and other parts of the new state — southern Colorado, with its large Catholic Hispano population, and the frontier mining settlements in the mountains — threatened to complicate any consensus the convention hoped to reach.

“Most of the southern delegates got in on Tuesday evening, and spent the time yesterday in caucusing and laying plans to head off the common enemy — the Denver ring,” reported the Chieftain.

To counter Denver’s influence, southern delegates united behind San Luis Valley rancher Lafayette Head for governor.

In a state where being a “59er” carried no small amount of prestige, Head had made his home in Colorado even before the 1859 gold rush. After settling in the conquered territory of New Mexico in the wake of the Mexican-American War, he moved north and in 1854 helped found the town of Guadalupe in what would become Colorado’s Conejos County. A Catholic convert and fluent Spanish speaker, he went on to serve as an Indian agent for both the Apache and Ute tribes, a territorial legislator and delegate to Colorado’s constitutional convention.

Northern delegates had the votes to prevent Head’s nomination, but needed to pick which horse to back. Both Governor John Routt, a newcomer to Colorado appointed by Grant in 1875 as its final territorial governor, and Samuel Hitt Elbert, a former territorial governor himself and a prominent Republican attorney in Denver, were touted as candidates for governor, but both men appeared to send mixed signals as to whether they’d accept the nomination.

After several informal ballots among the 140 or so GOP delegates on August 24, no clear winner emerged. It took a compromise reached behind closed doors to break the deadlock.

“After the adjournment of the convention in the afternoon caucusing was carried on industriously, and about five o’clock it became noised abroad that a compromise had been effected,” the Chieftain reported. “Governor Routt would be nominated for governor, and Lafayette Head for lieutenant governor.”

The full convention nominated both men by acclamation that evening. Elbert received the consolation of a nomination to the Colorado Supreme Court, where he would serve until 1888.

“Governor Routt then stood up beside Maj. Head and said: ‘Now, gentlemen you have the old and the new,’” said the Chieftain’s account. “The glee club then sang a song the chorus of which was ‘Hurrah for Routt and Head.’”

Selected sources

• The Pueblo Chieftain, August 22–25, 1876