Saturday, November 7, 2026

Colorado men vote yes, and the state becomes the first to give women the ballot by popular referendum

1893 · Colorado

On November 7, 1893, male voters approve equal suffrage 35,798 to 29,551. The next year three women walk into the Colorado House and become the first women elected to any legislature in the United States.

Wyoming had given women the vote while it was still a territory and kept it when it became a state. Utah did something similar. Colorado was the first place that put the question to a popular vote of the existing electorate and watched the men say yes.

The campaign was run by the Colorado Non-Partisan Equal Suffrage Association. Carrie Chapman Catt came west. Local journalists, doctors, and organizers (including Black suffragists) worked the newspapers and the tent camps of unemployed miners during the silver crash. Baby Doe Tabor even lent rooms in the opera house. Saloonkeepers fretted that women would dry up the state. They did not frett enough.

The margin was about 6,000 votes, 55 percent. Governor Davis Waite proclaimed the result. In 1894 Clara Cressingham, Carrie Clyde Holly, and Frances Klock were elected to the House. They were the first women to serve in any American legislature. The rest of the country spent the next 27 years catching up.

The county map is familiar if you have looked at later Colorado elections: stronger yeses in the northern and mountain counties, more noes in the south. The argument that women would vote the way their husbands told them did not survive contact with the actual ballots.

Sources: Wikipedia: 1893 Colorado women's suffrage referendum · History Colorado: The Road to the Vote · Colorado Encyclopedia: Women’s Suffrage Movement

Colorado’s largest historic earthquake rattles the Front Range on election night

1882 · Northern Front Range, west of Fort Collins

Around 6:30 p.m. local time on November 7, 1882, a magnitude ~6.6 quake shakes northern Colorado hard enough to crack walls, drop plaster, and snap bolts in a Denver power plant. It remains the biggest recorded earthquake in state history.

The polls had just closed on a national election day. Then the ground moved. Newspapers the next morning could not resist political jokes; the shaking was real.

Estimates put the event at about Mw 6.6, centered somewhere in the northern Front Range or southern Laramie Mountains west of Fort Collins. It was felt over roughly 180,000 square miles, as far as Salt Lake City and Salina, Kansas. In Denver bolts snapped at an electric light plant. Plaster fell at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Houses cracked in La Porte and Thompson. Windows broke in Laramie. An aftershock arrived before dawn.

Colorado is not California, but the Front Range has been quietly deforming for a long time. This is still the largest earthquake in the state’s historic record. A repeat today would be noticed by a lot more people, most of them holding coffee.

The location is still a little fuzzy because the area was sparsely populated and instruments did not exist. What is clear is that November 7 has hosted both ballot boxes and broken plaster.

Sources: Wikipedia: 1882 Fort Collins earthquake · USGS: M 6.6 Front Range · Colorado Geological Survey: Case Study The Big One

Voters tell the 1976 Winter Olympics the mountains are already busy, and Denver becomes the only host that ever said no

1972 · Colorado

Amendment 8 passes 514,228 to 350,964, barring state tax money for the Games. Denver withdraws. Innsbruck hosts instead. Dick Lamm rides the win into the governor’s office.

In 1970 the IOC awarded the 1976 Winter Olympics to Denver. Boosters celebrated. Then residents started reading the fine print: venues stretched across the Front Range, cost estimates kept growing, and the environmental and growth questions were loud.

State Representative Richard Lamm and Citizens for Colorado’s Future put Amendment 8 on the 1972 ballot. The question effectively banned using state taxes or appropriations for the Games. On November 7 it passed with nearly 60 percent. Denver also amended its charter to keep city money out. Without public funding and without today’s television contracts, the organizing committee had nowhere to go. Denver officially withdrew. The Games went to Innsbruck.

It remains the only time a city awarded the Olympics has voted to turn them down. Lamm was elected governor two years later. The bumper stickers that said “Save our money – save our mountains” and “Stop the Olympics!” still turn up in history exhibits. Colorado kept the mountains and the reputation for occasionally telling the rest of the world it is full.

Also on this date in 1861, the territorial legislature incorporated Denver City. The place had existed as a claim and a post office; now it was a municipal corporation with a charter and the right to hold elections. The name shortened to Denver a few years later.

November 7 weather records in Denver: high 78 °F in 1999, low 10 °F in 2000 and 1938, most snow 5.0 inches in 1929. Average high is in the mid-50s. The date can still deliver either a chinook or a reminder that winter is not theoretical.

Sources: Wikipedia: 1972 Denver Winter Olympics referendum · Ballotpedia: 1972 Colorado ballot measures · High Country News: Colorado refused to play · Extreme Weather Watch: Denver November 7