Colorado, Racism, and the 1893 Chicago World's Fair

The 1893 Columbian Exposition, also known as the Chicago World’s Fair, was a spectacle of previously unseen technological and cultural entertainment. The Chicago Fair introduced Americans to everything from indoor electrical lighting to Crackerjack candy. It also advanced noxious cultural viewpoints, such as racial chauvinism and the “inevitable closing of the American Frontier” thesis, posited by Frederick Jackson Turner during a famous lecture at the Fair.

As a fledgling state with only seventeen years to her name in 1893, Colorado was eager for her state pavilion and exhibits to make a mark on the global stage. The era's statewide press coverage reads to our eyes today as somewhat insecure posturing, mixed with eagerness and a determination to impress. Colorado indeed brought her most notable ideas to Chicago, but also brought examples of unenlightened viewpoints on the state’s original inhabitants: Native Americans.

The theme for the Chicago Fair, the “Columbian Exposition,” was meant to honor the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas. A highlight of the Fair featured the arrival of full-scale replications of the Pinta, Niña, and Santa Maria, which sailed across Lake Michigan to the fairgrounds’ harbor.

So what did Colorado bring to Chicago in 1893? To contextualize our contributions, it’s important to first revisit what life in this new state was like at that time. 

Having gained statehood just seventeen years prior, Colorado had a population of little more than 412,000, and an economy primarily supported by silver and mineral mining, and agriculture. In Denver, the Fair predated and indeed inspired Mayor Speer’s “City Beautiful” movement. Most of the design-focused city planning efforts of our small, dusty town were yet to come. 

In the year of the Fair, Colorado men would grant Colorado women the right to vote, in the first such popular referendum. And by the closing months of 1893, the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act would devalue silver drastically, decimating one of our primary industries and sending the state reeling into economic crisis.

Racial tensions and efforts to push Native Americans out of their ancestral homelands, and “settle” this Wild West, still defined much of the region. In addition, the area now known as Mesa Verde National Park, which featured ancient homes and other structures built by Ancestral Puebloans, had been “discovered” by the settler Wetherill family just 5 years prior, in 1888.

All of this creativity, technology, and bounty were strong advertisements for anyone considering doing business with or visiting our state. A less celebratory note appears, however, when examining the racist and paternalistic cultural messaging about Native Americans that Colorado dragged along to the Fair. 

Two exhibits in particular exposed the belief then held by many Colorado whites: that the Utes, Cheyenne, and Arapaho, indigenous to the region, were the last of one composite dying nation of Indians, to be romanticized, “civilized,” and eradicated. Equally concerning, the ancient Ancestral Puebloans of southern Colorado were presented as primitive curiosities who had mysteriously disappeared from the face of the Earth. We now believe these ancient peoples did not vanish without a trace, but rather migrated to other regions of the southwest, where large numbers of their descendants continue to live today.

The two exhibits that most glaringly presented these messages were the immersive “Colorado Cliff Dweller” exhibit of Mesa Verde artifacts, and a large-scale statue of a Native American bison hunter. 

Turning to look at how Coloradans at the Fair presented living Native Americans, one need look no further than a sculpture that stood in the Colorado Pavilion, created by Denver University Art School professor Preston Powers. The larger-than-life statue features a Native American hunter standing with one foot atop a slain bison.

The statue will be familiar to many of our readers, as it eventually returned home and came to rest on the eastern side of the State Capitol building, where it remains today.

It is also possible to interpret the title's intent as being a snapshot in time, on the precipice and documenting the vagaries of history.

Current title aside, however, even more questionable is the alternative name for the statue that was printed in many contemporaneous publications about the Fair: “The Last of His Race.”

This alternate title brings one to wonder: who or what does “his race” refer to? Is it the man? Is the sculpture a romanticized vision placing Native Americans firmly in the past? Or does the title refer to the bison itself? And what would that mean, considering bison were hunted nearly to extinction in the late 1800s, partially by whites hoping to hasten the demise of Native communities?

Was the statue meant to document a changing era, or to celebrate cultural extermination? 

Whatever the intent behind the statue’s title, it was indicative of the political and cultural conversations then happening around what was called “the Indian question” in the West.

Overall, as one examines Colorado's exhibits at the Fair, one does not sense hostility towards the subjects represented. Coloradans believed they were bringing their best, most unique contributions to share, in hopes of standing proud in front of the world. As with many aspects of casual racism and chauvinism with which we continue to struggle today, while Nineteenth Century Coloradans' intent may have been benign, their impact was not. The naiveté and misunderstandings of the past have real consequences for many people.

The 1893 Chicago World’s Fair displayed the best of what Colorado, America and the world had to offer, and in the hindsight of history, also exposed the worst aspects of the society that came together to build it. As an exposition of the “latest and greatest” of its time, it was also bound to display the beliefs of its creators in ways they may never have predicted.