In July 1883, thousands of former Union soldiers in the East and Midwest boarded railroad cars bound for Denver, Colorado, to attend the Seventeenth National Encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), the largest and most powerful Union veterans organization. It was the first time a western state had hosted such an event, with the Centennial State (nicknamed for its admission in 1876) beating out such contenders as Nevada and California. The choice of Colorado might have struck some of the visiting veterans as curious; they were headed to what had been a territory when they first shouldered their muskets in 1861 or finally marched home from Appomattox in 1865. But they enjoyed day trips into the Rockies, marveling at mountains so hugely different from peaks in the Appalachian and Allegheny ranges they may have traversed during the war.
“The land where our weary feet have halted in the march to the final roll call was almost a wilderness when the war began,” GAR Commander Paul Vandervoort said in addressing the assembly. “Its mineral wealth was yet untouched,” he continued, “its plains were untilled. Its quarries were unopened. Its fountains of eternal youth unfrequented save by the wild savage.” Vandervoort, the first enlisted soldier to rise to the rank of commander in chief in the GAR, believed that Union victory in the Civil War had thrown open the gates to the American West: “It is a happy thought that this progress, this onward movement of the car of fortune, this red flame of the torch of liberty, the glory of civilization, the triumph of education, the wonders of the exposition, would not have been possible had it not been for the victories of the Grand Army of the Republic.” Vandervoort’s remarks made clear the ferocious belief in American Manifest Destiny, with only an oblique reference to the savage cost of that conquest.