Colorado history

Wednesday, September 16, 2026

A priest rings a bell that still carries on Santa Fe Drive, Denver cannot decide if September 16 is a heat wave or a snow day, and a Denver-born guitarist ends up on the Bangladesh stage.

Hidalgo rings the bell, and Colorado still answers it

1810 · Dolores, Mexico / Santa Fe Drive / Civic Center

On the morning of Sept. 16, 1810, Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla rang the parish bell in Dolores and called New Spain to rise. Colorado was still Mexico then. Two centuries later the same date is the one Denver actually treats as Mexico's Fourth of July — not May 5.

Cinco de Mayo sells the beer tents. Sept. 16 is the date. Hidalgo's Grito de Dolores started an eleven-year war that ended Spanish rule. The land that is now southern and western Colorado stayed Mexican until the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, when the border jumped the Rio Grande and took the San Luis Valley with it. The first permanent towns on that side of the state were Hispano settlements that did not pack up when the flag changed.

Denver has been shouting the date back for decades. El Grito festivals filled Santa Fe Drive between Eighth and Eleventh, then Civic Center when the crowd outgrew the block. In 2005 organizers counted about 35,000 people on the grass under the City and County Building. A group of west-side runners started the El Grito 5K in 1994 out of NEWSED's offices on Santa Fe; the race still begins with a bell, which is the whole point.

The Mexican Consulate in Denver now stages Gritos from Aurora to Fort Collins. McNichols Building has worn green, white, and red for the weekend. If someone at a patio on 16th Street tells you independence day already happened in May, you can be polite. You can also mention that Colorado used to be the country they are celebrating, and that the bell was never for Puebla.

Sources: Colorado Encyclopedia — Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo · Denver Post — El Grito draws a record crowd, 2005 · Westword — El Grito 5K returns · CPR — the war that shaped Colorado

Denver hits 95 degrees, then remembers how to snow on the same calendar square

2000 · Denver

On Sept. 16, 2000, Denver International Airport reached 95 degrees, breaking a 1895 mark and tying the city's 60th 90-degree day of the warm season. The same date in 1971 opened an early-fall snowstorm that buried Stapleton under 15.6 inches and held the high to 46.

September 16 is Denver doing both of its personalities on one page of the almanac. In 2000 the high was 95, which NWS treated as three records in one afternoon: hottest for the date, warmest so late in September at the time, and the 60th 90-degree reading of the season, matching a mark first set in 1994. The previous daily high, 92, had sat there since 1895. The low that night was 63, also a date record on the warm side.

Twenty-nine years earlier the same square on the calendar started the other movie. A wet, almost windless snow moved in Sept. 16–19, 1971. Stapleton measured 15.6 inches for the storm, 12 of them on the 17th, and called it the heaviest first snow of a season. The 16th itself picked up about 2 inches and a high of 46, still the coldest daily maximum for the date. Trees still in leaf came down on lines. Record lows followed: 31, 23, then 20 on the 19th.

The date's all-time low is 28, from 1965. The all-time high is still that 95. Pack the fleece next to the sunscreen. September 16 has already used both.

Sources: Extreme Weather Watch — Denver Sept. 16 records · NWS Boulder — this week in Denver weather history · FOX31 — earliest Denver snows

Don Preston is born in Denver, then plays guitar for the whole traveling circus

1942 · Denver

Donald Jack Preston arrived in Denver on Sept. 16, 1942. The family left for Whittier when he was eight. The rest of the résumé is the kind of session list that makes a trivia night unfair: Ritchie Valens, the Righteous Brothers, Leon Russell, Joe Cocker's Mad Dogs & Englishmen, and George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh.

There are two famous Don Prestons. This is not the Zappa keyboard player. This is the Denver-born guitarist people called the Gentle Giant on the Mad Dogs tour, the one in the film when Cocker is shouting and Leon Russell is running a floating church of a band across America in 1970.

He sang in a boys choir, joined a kids troupe called the Cactus Kids, and by the late 1950s was backing the Coasters, the Penguins, and Valens. The Shindogs put him in a room with Russell and Delaney Bramlett. Shelter Records put him on Leon Russell and the Shelter People. In August 1971 he stood on the Madison Square Garden stage for the Concert for Bangladesh and went home with a documentary credit.

Colorado exports musicians the way it exports pitchers: the birth certificate stays, the work happens somewhere with a bigger stage. Preston kept making records into the blues decades. On his birthday the useful fact is simple. A kid born here on Sept. 16 learned the guitar somewhere else and then played on the records your parents actually owned.

Sources: Wikipedia — Don Preston (guitarist) · Discogs — Don Preston (2) · On This Day — Sept. 16 births