Thesis Clouds Over Fort Collins
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THESIS CLOUDS OVER FORT COLLINS: SETTLEMENT, URBAN EXPANSION, AND FLOODING ALONG A LAYERED LANDSCAPE Submitted by Tristan Purdy Department of History In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the Degree of Master of Arts Colorado State University Fort Collins, Colorado Summer 2020 Master’s Committee: Advisor: Michael Childers Co-Advisor: Jared Orsi Neil Grigg Copyright by Tristan Purdy 2020 All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT CLOUDS OVER FORT COLLINS: SETTLEMENT, URBAN EXPANSION, AND FLOODING ALONG A LAYERED LANDSCAPE Fort Collins, Colorado, home to over 150,000 people along the northern Front Range, is prone to flood. This natural disaster threat is not a recent development nor a strictly natural problem. Rather, flooding in Fort Collins is informed by the interaction of the local environment and the city’s growth and development beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. This thesis explores the historical roots of Fort Collins’s flood threat by considering the social, economic, and political factors that informed the physical shape of the city and how the city interacted with the watershed within which it sat. By tracing how the city’s agrarian root’s informed its location, and how a university, (usually) pleasant weather, and westward migration paved the way for urban and suburban expansion, this thesis displays flooding not as an exterior threat, but a natural process that has become enmeshed in Fort Collins’s physical structure. Fort Collins is just one of many mid-sized American cities across the American West whose growth over the past century-and-a-half has created increasingly pressing environmental concerns. Addressing contemporary and future concerns over further growth and an increasingly unstable environment in Fort Collins and cities like it begins with understanding the historic interconnections between city growth and the environmental problem in question. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project would not have been possible without the help of countless people. Over the past two years, Mike Childers has introduced me to new ways of thinking, new titles to read, and has lent an open ear and open mind each and every time I stepped into his office with a new idea or potential change in course. I thank him for sacrificing his time to shepherd this project along. Jared Orsi has taught me more about the writing process in just two years than I could’ve imagined, and I thank him for his detailed reading of multiple drafts and thoughtful feedback throughout. Writing environmental history requires the researcher to occasionally venture out of their comfort zone and into the hard sciences. Fortunately, Neil Grigg fielded my questions on the science and math that undergirds how we quantify flooding and floodplains while also offering unique insights into the politics of flood planning. I thank him for sharing his expertise and experience in flood planning with me, simplifying his explanations when need be. Beyond their expertise, each of my committee members have been consistently supportive of this project and practically always willing to engage in impromptu discussions on my questions and concerns whenever I poked my head through their cracked office doors. Supportive and willing to help, I believe, characterizes not just my committee, but CSU’s History Department overall. From Nancy and Sharon helping me navigate paperwork and travel arrangements to professors up and down our history hallway checking in to see how my writing was coming along, I am grateful for the entire department’s collaborative and supportive atmosphere. I am also grateful for my cohort—a group of bright thinkers with diverse interests that have pushed me in the seminar room and helped me pull my thoughts together when I struggled to do so. iii Navigating collections and knowing where to turn in the archives can be a tricky and time-consuming business. I am thankful for the assistance of Patty Rettig at CSU’s Water Resource Archive, and Lesley Struc and Jennifer Hannifin at the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery who helped me think through half-baked ideas and theories and pointed me toward the collections that buttress much of this thesis. I would also like to express my gratitude to the CSU History Department and Brigham Young University’s Charles Redd Center for Western Studies for their financial support that funded my research and travel. Finally, I am eternally grateful for the ones who have been in my corner from the start. My parents, Shirley and William Purdy, have thrown their unconditional love and support behind my every endeavor. Their words of encouragement have helped me work through the worst of my writing slumps. As too has my sister’s faith that I would inevitably finish this project off and that writing something over 100 pages was “pretty cool.” Family far and wide—aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents—have all proved sources of strength and inspiration. I am excited for them to finally get a good look at what I’ve been working on over the past two years. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................... iii INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 1 The Structure of “Dumb Luck:” Flooding along the Front Range ............................................. 5 CHAPTER ONE – A Fort on the Frontier .................................................................................... 15 Sowing the Seeds of an Agricultural Community: Fort Collins and Northern Colorado, 1858- 1873........................................................................................................................................... 18 An Agricultural Colony on the Great American Desert, 1873-1890 ........................................ 28 Sugar Beets and a Staggering Flood: Florescence along the Floodplain, 1890-1911 .............. 39 CHAPTER TWO – Runoff Flooding in the Big Dam Era ........................................................... 49 From Agricultural Hinterland to Intellectual Hub, 1911-1938 ................................................. 52 Federal Flood Planning and Fort Collins’s Invisible Flood Problem, 1917-1938 .................... 65 Flash Flooding Strikes Twice, 1938-1951 ................................................................................ 73 CHAPTER THREE – Unprecedented Growth and the Arrival of Floodplain Management along the Front Range ............................................................................................................................. 83 Making the “City of Plentiful Plains, Fascinating Foothills, Magnificent Rockies,” 1950-1975 ................................................................................................................................................... 86 Making up for Lost Time: Fort Collins Flood Protection, 1975-1997 ..................................... 95 Flood Planning in a New Century, 1997-2013 ....................................................................... 105 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................... 109 BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................................... 112 v INTRODUCTION In September 2013, much of Northern Colorado lay submerged under floodwater. A week of unprecedented rainfall along the eastern slope of the Front Range—the base of the Rockies and home to a majority of the state’s population—had overwhelmed streams, creeks, and rivers, and spilled into the communities sitting along their banks. Draining to the South Platte River, Front Range runoff then flooded agricultural communities along the eastern plains all the way to the Nebraska border. From Estes Park at the base of Rocky Mountain National Park to Julesburg along Colorado’s state line, flood water destroyed houses, bridges, and roads, stranded communities, and streamed into basements. All told, the flooding killed eight people and caused more than $4 billion in damages across seventeen counties. One Front Range city with a long history of flooding, however, emerged from the week of flooding relatively unscathed. In Fort Collins, a city of over 150,000 people nestled along the base of the foothills and the banks of the Cache la Poudre River (a South Platte tributary), the flood caused minimal damage and at no point proved life-threatening.1 To many, it seemed that Fort Collins dodged disaster because of the city’s investment in flood defenses following a deadly local flood in 1997. As Matthew Fuchs and Laura Lightbody of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ “Flood-Prepared Communities Initiative” have argued, the losses in 1997 “catalyzed city officials to pass stringent 1 Marsha Hilmes-Robinson and Chris Lochra, “Fort Collins Floodplain Management Program: Success Stories from the September 2013 Flood,” Colorado Water 31 (Spring, 2014), 14, https://watercenter.colostate.edu/index.php?gf- download=2019%2F06%2FMarApr31_2.pdf&form-id=38&field- id=4&hash=f551fed9843ba625c7f47146a0c1031206f7eb2de751b1c63bd239f232a5a807; Ruth M. Alexander and Naomi Gerakios, “Final Report: 2013 Northern Colorado Flood History Project,” January 2015, 2013 Northern Colorado Oral History Collection, Water Resources Archive,