Who was the first baby born in Denver? The answer depends on how you ask

There is a theme throughout these references that illustrates some strengths and obvious weaknesses of the Denver Public Library's Western History and Genealogy Collection.

On the positive side, finding well-sourced citations to prove or disprove any of these claims is pretty easy. In fact, there were more sources on this subject than we could use in this single blog. Of course, the flip-side is that finding information about non-white or less-prominent settlers and previous inhabitants of the land around Cherry Creek is extremely difficult. 

For example, the article "Our First White Boy" uses a letter from Dolman's mother (who is not named) describing her arrival in Denver that reads,

"We arrived in Denver July 18, 1859 we put up our tent on Blake Streete more thane 200 hundred Indians wigwams of Arrapahoes and chyans they was very peaceable and friendly..."

While it's impossible to know for certain how many Indian dwellings were in place when the Dolmans arrived in Denver, it seems a safe guess that there could have been a child born in one of them at some point between July and October of 1859. But those births would not have been on the pioneers' radar unless the father was a prominent white man. 

Some births simply mattered more to the pioneers and early historians than others - as the cases of William Denver McGaa and Richard Denver Dolman prove. McGaa was half American Indian which, in the eyes of those early chroniclers, made his birth less noteworthy than Dolman's, as Dolman was the product of an all-white union. The Trail, which was the official publication of the Colorado Historical Society, confirms this idea by stating flatly, "The Historical Society is equally interested in establishing the claim of the first white girl born in Denver..." 

The fact of the matter is that in 1859 the settlements around Cherry Creek were not particularly diverse. Most of those pioneers were from places like Kansas and Georgia and consisted primarily of white men. Denver and Auraria's female population was extremely sparse at the time, making any birth somewhat unusual - though some men, like McGaa Sr., did pair with "Indian wives." These relationships were relatively fluid and would likely be jettisoned when the opportunity to pair with a white woman was presented. 

Chinese immigrants didn't really arrive in Denver until the 1870s. While there's no word on who the first Chinese baby born in Denver was, according to author Liping Zhu, the first Chinese baby born in Colorado was the daughter of Chin Lin Sou in Blackhawk in 1873.  

Hispanic residents were found in greater numbers in the southern part of the state where they had resided for many years, though there were certainly at least a few Hispanics in the Denver/Auraria area.

There were also a small number of African-Americans who passed through or settled in the Denver settlements, but their presence in historical resources like Smiley's History of Denver is relatively sparse. The possibility that an African-American mountain man like James Beckwourth could have fathered a child with an Indian woman in the area is not unthinkable.

Our colleagues at the Blair Caldwell African American Research Library point out the fact that African American families would have been more likely to record a birth in a family bible than on an official registry. Given these circumstances, we haven't run across a card in the Western History Subject Index reading, "First African American Baby Born in Denver."

So who was really the first baby born in Denver? If the official existence of a place called "Denver" and an official record of that child's birth is the standard, then the crown rests on William Denver McGaa's head. If the question is left more general, then the answer is, we'll never really know for certain.