1876: COLORADO'S FREE SILVER CRUSADE

Workers at the Boston & Colorado Gold and Silver Smelting Company pose next to stacked silver ingots in Empire in this 1875 photograph by Joseph Collier. (Courtesy of Denver Public Library Special Collections, X-60031)

The special cargo arrived on the evening of May 3, 1876, on a westbound express train to Denver, where it was watched carefully and wheeled in through the side door at the Colorado National Bank.

The barrel looked "quite as unpretentious and common as an ordinary beer keg," the Rocky Mountain News reported the following day — but inside were five heavy sacks full of a product that would dominate the soon-to-be state of Colorado's politics for the next quarter century.

"SILVER ONCE MORE," blared the News' headline.

"(The) keg full of silver shiners, fresh and bright from the mint … contained 275 pounds of coin, in the denominations of quarters and halves," read the report. "The Colorado National also received, per the afternoon train, a bag of $100 in specie from their correspondents in St. Louis, the coin consisting of halves, quarters, and dimes, tied up in small paper packages."

Similar shipments were being made to banks across the country following Congress' April 1876 passage of a bill to resume the minting of silver coins, which had been out of circulation for 14 years, having been replaced during the Civil War by fractional paper currency — also known as postage currency, since the designs of the paper notes, in denominations ranging from 5 to 50 cents, had been adapted from U.S. postage stamps.

"The pockets of all classes of tradesmen were jingling last night with the old time quarters and half dollar pieces," said the News in a follow-up on May 5. "It was only silver coin, but it had the right jingle about it, and a fistful of it had a solid, honest feeling."

Congressional approval of new fractional silver coins in early 1876 was among the first concessions to these demands — and the excitement that greeted Denver's first keg of freshly minted quarters and dimes was an early example of what would evolve into a political mania in the Centennial State in the final decades of the 19th century.

The Silverite movement, which advocated for a return to bimetallism — or "free silver," as advocates called it — united mining interests in the West with populist firebrands across the country, who accused wealthy capitalists in the East and overseas of "demonetizing" silver in order to artificially limit the money supply.

By the end of the Centennial year, Colorado newspapers were regularly publishing editorials on what they described as "Patrician Gold Against Plebian Silver," and letters alleging that "the money kings of Europe, with the Rothchilds at their head, have undertaken to make gold the only medium of exchange in the world." The 1873 Coinage Act, which had been uncontroversial at the time of its passage, would later be christened by Colorado Sen. Henry Teller, in a speech on the Senate floor, as the "Crime of 1873.".

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