Temperatures in Denver hit 61 degrees on March 13, 1876, and that night the first rain of the year fell, though it soon turned back to snow. The Rocky Mountain News reported the first “centennial rain” on what was otherwise a slow news day in the territorial capital.

“News gatherers picked up but few items yesterday,” the paper wrote. “There was no stir at all in the sheriff’s office, at police headquarters, or about the courts.”

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As the weather warmed, Colorado newspapers filled up with notices from tailors and milliners, advertising the arrival from the East of the “spring trade” in men’s and women’s fashion, with ecru neckwear singled out as particularly in vogue.

“Chas. Ballen & Co have just received a large invoice of spring goods, comprising all the novelties of the season,” read one ad. “In the fashionable cream color we have a full line of cashmere laces, ties, tie ends, hortense and chenille dot nets, illusions, laces for scarfs … We have also received an elegant line of silk ties in all the new shades.”

“The conundrum on the social mind at present is whether society will get the spring styles from the April fashion journals or send last year’s clothes to the scourers,” reported the News.

Gallup’s Bazar, at 855 Larimer Street, advertised its spring stock of “base balls and bats.” In Golden, practice games had been played since mid-February, and the weekly Globe predicted its local nine would “clean out any club in the territory in the coming season.”

“The base-ball mania has again made its appearance in our midst,” reported the Golden Transcript. “A majority of last year’s first nine are not within reach at present, but the four that are left over are the slick ones.”

The constitutional convention adjourns

After nearly three months of deliberations — longer than most of the territorial papers had expected — the 39 delegates to Colorado’s constitutional convention in Denver finally concluded their work in mid-March.

Near midnight on March 14, the entirety of the 21,000-word constitution was read aloud, and “several errors (were) discovered and corrected,” reported the News. Thirty-one delegates signed the constitution that night, and the remaining eight signed the following morning, some by proxy.

Among the body’s last actions was to settle its accounts. Total expenses for the 65 days it had spent formally in session ran to $29,945 — more than two-thirds of which went to delegates themselves, in the form of $6 per diem payments and mileage reimbursements. The News, the Denver Daily Times and the Denver Tribune each received a share of the convention’s $2,330 printing budget. The cost of coal and firewood to heat the chambers ran to $45.

After a final round of pleasantries, including the gift of a Webster’s dictionary to Joseph Wilson, the El Paso County Republican who’d served as the convention’s president, the body adjourned sine die around 4 p.m. on March 15. A copy of the completed Colorado Constitution was promptly delivered to the offices of the News, which devoted three-quarters of the next day’s edition to printing the document in full.

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Colorado voters would get the final say in a constitutional referendum scheduled for July 1. The News, which had championed repeated attempts at statehood over the preceding 17 years, didn’t hesitate to lavish praise on the constitution’s “many excellent provisions,” declaring that it had “been pronounced by competent authority the most perfect of its kind to be found in the union.”

The convention’s proceedings had featured heated debates over women’s suffrage, school funding, taxation of church property, corporate regulation, the structure of the state’s judiciary, the size and apportionment of its legislature and other issues. But in a special address to Coloradans, published alongside the drafted constitution, convention delegates from both parties urged citizens of the territory to set aside their disagreements and work together toward the shared goal of statehood.

Delegates had “labored assiduously,” they wrote, “to frame a fundamental law, wise and wholesome in itself, and which would be adapted to the general wants of the people.”

Reviewing each of the major issues raised during the convention in turn, delegates defended the document’s many compromises, including its approach to the “troublesome and vexed questions pertaining to corporations,” which it said had caused “more anxiety and concern” than any other topic. Within the convention, a handful of progressive populists sympathetic to the Granger movementhad attempted to enshrine strict limits on the power of railroad corporations, but most of their proposals had been defeated.

“We are aware that these provisions do not cover the whole ground, but it must be remembered that, while some of our sister states have not gone far enough in placing restrictions on the legislative power, others have gone too far, and have had to recede,” explained the delegates. “We have endeavored to take a middle ground, believing it to be more safe, and in the end that it will give more general satisfaction.”

In concluding their address, delegates anticipated that some within the territory would oppose statehood on the grounds of a “supposed increase of expenses and consequent taxation.” Such concerns had helped motivate territorial voters to overwhelmingly reject a state constitution proposed in 1864.

But at a moment when many Americans had become disillusioned by reports of political scandal and corruption in Washington, the constitution’s defenders struck a stridently populist tone, framing statehood as the superior choice to remaining “a sort of penal colony” of the federal government.

“Who is there among us that would not rather be a citizen of an independent sovereign state, than a mere settler upon the public lands of the territory, governed by satraps appointed and removed at pleasure, as best serves the whims and purposes of political rings and cliques?” delegates asked. “Now that the golden opportunity is afforded, shall this state of things longer exist? We confidently believe it will not.”

Selected sources

• The Rocky Mountain News, March 14–16, 1876
• The Golden Transcript, March 15, 1876