Colorado history

Monday, September 7, 2026

Colorado takes the afternoon off before the rest of the country does, a Pueblo kid leaves town and invents a garage, and a canyon west of Boulder writes a smoke plume across the plains.

Labor Day gets a Colorado date, then Broadway fills with uniforms

1903 · Denver

On Sept. 7, 1903 — a Labor Day Monday, same as today — more than 6,000 union members marched down Broadway in matching uniforms. Colorado had already written the holiday into state law sixteen years earlier, second only to Oregon, and Denver has been arguing about how to spend the afternoon ever since.

The Sixth General Assembly did the paperwork on March 15, 1887: the first Monday in September would be a public holiday known as Labor Day. Oregon had beaten Colorado to the statute book by less than a month. Congress and Grover Cleveland would not catch up until 1894, after the Pullman Strike made Washington decide a day off was cheaper than another summer of troops.

Colorado did not wait. On Sept. 6, 1887, trains left for Argo Park at 10:30 a.m. About 2,000 people listened to Governor Alva Adams and Mayor William Scott Lee, then did what Denver still does with a free Monday: sandwiches, beer, swings, and a band at the pavilion. The Rocky Mountain News, never shy, clocked the “dapper dudes” trying their luck with unattended women and thanked Providence that the ice-cream man had not found the grounds.

By 1903 the picnic had become a parade. Wire reports put more than 6,000 marchers on Broadway that afternoon, most of them in uniforms ordered for the day. Daniels & Fisher handed a banner to the Painters and Decorators. The Plasterers took second. The roll call in the Colorado Transcript is a city in miniature: typographers, tile setters, theatrical stagehands, horseshoers, mattress makers, retail clerks. Pueblo sent a column so long it took an hour to pass one corner. Louisville still runs a parade. Most of the rest of us grill something and pretend we invented the long weekend. The statute is older than that story.

Sources: Denver Public Library — Colorado: The Second State to Adopt Labor Day · History Colorado — Labor On Parade · Morning Oregonian, Sept. 8, 1903 — Denver Labor Day report · Colorado Session Laws, 1887 — Labor Day act

David Packard is born in Pueblo, then leaves with a toolbox and $538

1912 · Pueblo

David Packard was born in Pueblo on Sept. 7, 1912, the son of a lawyer and a teacher in a steel town that still looked like a frontier city. He packed for Stanford, met Bill Hewlett, and turned a Palo Alto garage and $538 into Hewlett-Packard — which is a long commute from the Arkansas River, even by Colorado standards.

Packard later described 1912 Pueblo as less a Midwestern farm town than a western frontier city. He built models in the backyard, messed with explosives, and injured a hand doing something that would now be called a pipe bomb. Class president all four years of high school. Then west to Stanford, letters in football and basketball, an electrical-engineering degree in 1934, a short stop at the University of Colorado, and a refrigerator-testing job at General Electric in Schenectady.

In 1938 he came back west, finished a Stanford master's, married Lucile Salter, and in 1939 opened a partnership with classmate William Hewlett in the garage behind 367 Addison Avenue. Seed money: $538. First real product: an audio oscillator that Walt Disney bought to help test Fantasia. The garage is now a California Historical Landmark and a Silicon Valley origin myth. The management style they named the HP Way — skip the corner office, share the profits, trust the bench — outlived both founders.

Packard ran the company, took a tour as deputy secretary of defense under Nixon, came home, and spent the rest of his life giving the money away through the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. He died in 1996. Pueblo still makes steel. The garage is in Palo Alto. The kid from the steel town is the part of the story Colorado gets to keep.

Sources: Wikipedia — David Packard · IEEE Engineering and Technology History Wiki · Encyclopedia of the Great Plains — Packard, David · Agilent — David Packard biography

Fourmile Canyon keeps burning, and NASA draws a line of smoke to Denver

2010 · Fourmile Canyon, west of Boulder

On Sept. 7, 2010, the Fourmile Canyon Fire was still running west of Boulder. NASA's Aqua satellite caught the plume at 2:40 p.m. — a red hot-spot outline and a river of smoke that reached the plains northeast of Denver and threw its own shadow. By morning thousands of people had left their houses.

The fire had started about 10 a.m. the day before, when an improperly extinguished fire pit in Emerson Gulch woke up in 7-percent humidity and wind gusts to 41 mph. Most of the eventual 6,181 acres burned on that first afternoon. Sept. 7 was the day the rest of the Front Range found out. Boulder County told people to stay inside. The smoke sat on the city. Air tankers worked the edges when the wind allowed it.

Final count: 169 homes gone, then listed as 171 in some tallies, and about $217 million in property damage. At the time it was the most destructive fire in Colorado history by houses lost. High Park and Waldo Canyon would take that title two years later, which is not a competition anyone wanted. Investigators traced the start to a fire pit on a volunteer firefighter's property. The lesson was already old: a canyon full of ponderosa, a dry September, and one leftover ember will write the rest of the week for you.

The Aqua frame from 2:40 p.m. on the 7th is the picture that traveled. Red outline on the heat. Gray river headed east. Denver visible under the far end of the plume. Sixteen years later the scar is still on the maps west of town, and the satellite file is still the cleanest sentence the fire ever got.

Sources: NASA — Fourmile Canyon Fire, Sept. 7, 2010 Aqua image · NASA Earth Observatory — Fourmile Canyon Fire · Wikipedia — Fourmile Canyon fire · USFS Rocky Mountain Research Station — Fourmile Canyon Fire Findings