Lost Highways: Dispatches from the Shadows of the Rocky Mountains

It's often said that slavery is America's original sin. But the kind of slavery most of us learn about in history class—the brutal, dehumanizing enslavement of Black people in the Southern states—wasn't the only or even the first kind of bondage in the Americas. On this episode of Lost Highways, we look at a far-less institutionalized form of forced labor and servitude widely practiced in the Amer...

A monument to Christopher Columbus, sitting in the middle of Pueblo, Colorado has been dividing the town for years. To the large population of Italian-Americans whose ancestors came to Pueblo around the turn of the twentieth Century, it has long been a point of pride and a symbol of cultural belonging. But for the Indigenous and Chicano communities who also call Pueblo home, the statue of Columbus...

Since the racial justice protests of 2020, when most people think of monuments being torn down, they think of confederate statues in the south being toppled from their pedestals. But a Civil War monument to Union soldiers that stood in front of the Colorado capital for more than a hundred years was also pushed over during the protests that followed in the wake of George Floyd's murder. On this epi...

On this episode of Lost Highways, we'll take a look back at how Title IX's passage in 1972 inadvertently codified the separation of sports by sex. And while the law opened the door to equal opportunity in sports and education for women, it also placed sex at the center of how we define fairness without fully addressing issues of equality where gender and race are concerned. We'll also meet Donna H...

On a sleepy summer evening in Boulder, Colorado, in 1974, three young Chicano activists sat in a car at Chautauqua Park at the base of the iconic Flatirons—the giant red sandstone rock formations that sit above the foothills. Then, at approximately 9:50 p.m., the car exploded. Two days later, another car in downtown Boulder exploded, killing three more young activists. Their deaths came against th...

The Sand Creek Massacre was the deadliest day in Colorado history, and it changed Cheyenne and Arapaho people forever. On the morning of November 29, 1864, US troops under the command of Colonel John M. Chivington attacked a peaceful camp of Cheyenne and Arapaho people made up mostly of women, children, and elders along the Big Sandy Creek in Southeastern Colorado, near the present day town of Ead...

In 1881, white residents in the mining town of Gothic, Colorado lynched a Chinese man. Or did they? As the latest episode of Lost Highways investigates this reported act of anti-Chinese racial violence from Colorado's past, we consider what it means to belong in the places we call home, and how such acts of violence continue to echo into the present—whether it actually happened or not.   

With the new reality of megafires in the West, we take a look at what happens when history itself is destroyed and how we hold on to who and what we are when we lose the artifacts and records that tell our stories. We'll take you from the Waldo Canyon Fire of 2012 near the town of Manitou Springs to the Denver suburbs of Louisville and Superior, Colorado where the 2021 Marshall Fire wiped out not...

Colorado's San Luis Valley is the last place you might expect to find a centuries old lineage of Sephardic Jews. But a rare form of breast cancer and a host of odd traditions, artifacts, and rituals led researchers to discover an enclave of Crypto-Jews that fled Europe for the New World in the 16th Century to hide out in one of the most remote areas of the lower 48 states. On this episode, we'll u...

For nearly a century-and-a-half, archaeologists have been studying Mesa Verde in hopes of deciphering what happened to the Ancestral Puebloan people who lived and thrived there for so long. For many, it remains one of the great mysteries in the history of North America. On this episode of Lost Highways, we'll explore the way that historians and archaeologists try to solve these kinds of mysteries,...

On this episode of Lost Highways, we look at the mustang, the wild horse of American myth and legend. Though they're widely revered as symbols of untameable American freedom in the West, the reality of the wild horse in the 21st Century is far less romantic. From the long history of the horse's evolution in North America to the helicopter roundups on rangeland in The West, we'll follow the blurry...

Westerns often reveal more about the period when they were produced than the era they portray, but the genre won't die. On this episode of Lost Highways, History Colorado's Dustin Hodge traces the rise of The Western in American pop culture, the significance of landscape in film, and the moral guidelines that set the boundaries for US films produced from the late-19th Century to the present. From...

On this episode of Lost Highways, we take you inside the history of NORAD, or North American Aerospace Defense Command. AND we'll take you inside The Cheyenne Mountain Complex, the base that has stoked the pop cultural imagination of generations with movies and shows from Dr. Strangelove to Stargate to Interstellar. As the war in Ukraine and Chinese spy balloons have brought long dormant fears of...

Barney Ford was one of the most successful and resilient Black businessmen in the early American West. He came in search of gold, owned and operated hotels and restaurants, lost them in fires, rebuilt them, and enjoyed a reputation as a King of hospitality in early Denver, Breckenridge, and Cheyenne, Wyoming. Much of his legend was built upon a 1963 biography called "Mr. Barney Ford: A Portrait in...

Cathay Williams was an African American Woman who was conscripted to work as General Philip Sheridan's cook during the Civil War. When the war was over, she wanted to join one of the all-Black Army Regiments that later became known as the "Buffalo Soldiers." But women weren't allowed to serve at that time. So she put on men's clothes, changed her name to William Cathay, and spent the next three ye...

If you work hard enough, or get lucky enough, the distinctly American myth goes, anyone can become rich. And once you're rich, of course, you'll be happy … right?   In the nineteenth century, no one embodied that American myth of the rugged individual than Winfield Scott Stratton, the first millionaire of the Cripple Creek Gold boom in 1893. He'd spent half his life searching for gold and, once he...

Two years after the murder of George Floyd, we look back at the origins of policing in America through the lens of the Denver Police Department, how their role in communities has transitioned over time, what happens when they abuse their power, and the long struggle for change.

Less than an hour south of Colorado Springs, Fremont County is home to more than a dozen prisons, including the Colorado State Penitentiary and ADX, or Supermax, aka "The Alcatraz of the Rockies." On this episode of  Lost Highways , we look into the history of the architecture of those prisons to see what they reveal about our belief in the power of incarceration to make society a better place. 

On this episode of Lost Highways, we look back at Mother Jones, one of the fiercest labor organizers in American history, and her role in the United Mine Workers of America's massive strike in the southern Colorado coalfields that led to the Ludlow Massacre on April 20, 1914.

In November of 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) into law. Now, more than 30 years later, we look back at both the letter and spirit of the law, which aims to return tens of thousands of stolen Indigenous remains and funerary artifacts to their tribes.

In 1863, two brothers from Colorado's San Luis Valley allegedly went on one of the most infamous killing sprees in the history of the American West. But the story's sensationalized lore has been entwined with the deeply contentious and unresolved history of land rights in the Borderlands of Southern Colorado for centuries. In this episode, we work with folklorist Jake Rosenberg to peel back the la...

In 2019, Spike Lee's 2018 film "BlacKkKlansman" won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. The film brought national attention to the story of Ron Stallworth, the first Black Detective to work in the Colorado Springs Police Department, who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s. But what many people don't know is that Colorado has been home to THREE Black Klansmen. In this episode, Noel...

Content Warning: Racial Violence People don't often think of Colorado when they hear the word "lynching." But in 1900, one of the most horrifying racial terror lynchings in US history took place in the small town of Limon on the Eastern Plains. Hundreds of spectators looked on as fifteen-year-old Preston Porter, Jr., was burned alive. More than a century later, a group of people from across the st...

In the winter of 1874, Alfred Packer led a group of prospectors into the San Juan Mountains of Colorado. After returning alone, he confessed to eating the remains of his travel companions, and was convicted of murder despite claiming self-defense. The conviction sealed his place in history as the "Colorado Cannibal." After almost 150 years, Noel and Tyler look back at Packer's story and discover t...

As we get to work making Season 3 of Lost Highways, we wanted to share a podcast we think our listeners would love as much as we do. This is Episode 2 of a 4 part series called "The Order of Death" by JoshMattison and Shannon Geis. It's an in-depth look at the neo Nazis who assassinated Denver radio host Alan Berg, who was the subject of the S1 Lost Highways episode, "The Passion of Alan Berg." To...