#7 The History of Denver and the Wild West w/ Dick Kreck
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 629 Ratings
🗓️ 22 June 2016
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
During a recent trip to Denver, Bob and Ben were fortunate enough to sit down with journalist and historian Dick Kreck at the historic Brown Palace Hotel for a conversation about the history of Denver and its establishment in the 19th and early 20th century. Dick Kreck has more than four decades of experience as a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner, The LA Times, and The Denver Post, and has published numerous books on the history of Colorado and the west. Kreck shared his incredible knowledge about western migration, the construction of the trans-continental railroad, and the ways that the Denver of the 21st century reflects the region's past. Recorded June 18th, 2016 at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver Colorado. For more information on this episode and links to topics discussed in the interview, please visit www.TheRoadToNow, and follow us on twitter: @Road_To_Now.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Coming up, on the road to now. |
| 0:02.5 | People don't realize that in the early days in the west, |
| 0:05.8 | there were almost equal numbers of southerners and northerners, |
| 0:09.5 | and it could get quite violent. |
| 0:13.8 | One of the interesting things I think is that while Denver was isolated in far west, |
| 0:18.4 | all that stuff came west with the people who came here. |
| 0:21.6 | They brought their prejudices, they brought their hatreds, |
| 0:25.6 | and they brought a lot of religion. |
| 0:28.6 | They covered it like OJ. |
| 0:30.6 | I mean, every day there were columns and columns about the murder, |
| 0:33.6 | and then there were two trials. |
| 0:35.6 | And it did a couple things. One one it gave me a sense of the |
| 0:40.2 | language of the time you know people don't talk now like they did back you know and people don't |
| 0:47.2 | call each other a dirty cur anymore you know and it was there was a rhythm to it and usage that you don't see today. |
| 0:56.0 | And so it really helped a lot to set the scene for the book. |
| 1:00.0 | I still admire the people who set out to do that. |
| 1:05.0 | Because as you pointed out, they might as well fall on off the face of the earth. |
| 1:09.0 | It was unknown territory. They didn't |
| 1:11.7 | know exactly where they were going, how they were going to get there, how far it was. They just set |
| 1:16.8 | out and, you know, and I especially have read several books on women pioneers. It's unbelievable |
| 1:26.2 | what they went through. Not only did they take care of the kids |
| 1:29.3 | and do the cooking and do the washing and do all that stuff, they did everything the men did. |
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