The Thirty-Eighth Star: Colorado Becomes the Centennial State

Colorado became a state in 1876. But the road to becoming the 38th star was hardly straightforward. In this episode of Lost Highways, the team follows the seventeen-year statehood story that finally brought Colorado into the Union. Taxes, railroads, gold, and Civil War politics all played a role. But the most consequential battle centered on the deceptively simple question of who got to have a voice in Colorado's future. In 1865, just 137 Black Coloradans answered that question with a petition demanding the right to vote. Their organizing helped derail a prejudicial voting law, forced Congress to protect Black suffrage, and ultimately helped secure voting rights for African American men across US territories. It's a story of race, political schemes, competing interests, and stubborn resistance that finally brought Colorado into the Union, and shaped who we are today. 

Colorado Springs has long sold a seductive story: a Quaker Civil War general falls in love with Pikes Peak, builds a railroad, and creates a beautiful, healthy city where churches replace saloons and the Rocky Mountain air restores the soul. But the real story of Colorado's second city is stranger—and tells a more interesting story about how becoming a state depended as much on marketing as on gold rushes or coal booms. In this episode of Lost Highways, we peel back the myth of William Jackson Palmer and the founding of Colorado Springs. Palmer was an abolitionist, Civil War general, railroad visionary, land developer, idealist, and relentless capitalist. His dream depended on a clever—and sometimes ethically murky—combination of railroads, real estate, violence, foreign investors, aggressive marketing, and the creation of a city so his railroad would have somewhere to go. Join the Lost Highways team to uncover the deeper legacy of a place that, in some ways, may still be living inside the marketing scheme that created it.

Ready to rediscover Colorado's statehood story? To commemorate the state's 150th anniversary on August 1, 2026, Lost Highways hit the road for an all-new, three-part series asking what happens to our sense of our state when we rethink its starting points. We're kicking things off with "Expedition 1776," tracking the epic journey of two Franciscan priests through what became Colorado. While the thirteen colonies were busy declaring independence in the East, these two men were leading an expedition through treacherous canyons, surviving on porcupine meat, and relying on Ute guidance to map the rugged American West. They were searching for a shortcut to California, but their journey offers something much bigger: a look at an alternate Western history playing out on the other side of the continent. Join us in welcoming back hosts Noel Black and Tyler Hill as we explore the empires, the maps, and the "what-ifs" of our statehood story.

It's often said that slavery is America's original sin. But the kind of slavery most of us learn about in history class—the brutal, dehumanizing enslavement of Black people in the Southern states—wasn't the only or even the first kind of bondage in the Americas. On this episode of Lost Highways, we look at a far-less institutionalized form of forced labor and servitude widely practiced in the American West. And as we'll see, enslavement has taken many different forms. We'll look at the ways power and economics in the Borderlands helped to perpetuate slavery in the United States long after its official abolition. We'll also look at the ways this history of Indigenous slavery continues to affect descendants, some of whom struggle to reconcile their familial and genetic pasts with their sense of belonging in what has been their homeland for generations. 

A monument to Christopher Columbus, sitting in the middle of Pueblo, Colorado has been dividing the town for years. To the large population of Italian-Americans whose ancestors came to Pueblo around the turn of the twentieth Century, it has long been a point of pride and a symbol of cultural belonging. But for the Indigenous and Chicano communities who also call Pueblo home, the statue of Columbus is a dark reminder of the long history of colonialism and genocide his voyages sparked. On this episode, we look at how community identities have been formed around historical heroes, and what happens to those communities when the actual history of those heroes catches up with what they've come to symbolize.

Since the racial justice protests of 2020, when most people think of monuments being torn down, they think of confederate statues in the south being toppled from their pedestals. But a Civil War monument to Union soldiers that stood in front of the Colorado capital for more than a hundred years was also pushed over during the protests that followed in the wake of George Floyd's murder. On this episode, we'll look the ways History Colorado has pioneered a new approach to  dealing with controversial monuments. We'll also take a look at what monuments should mean, the purpose they serve in maintaining our cultural narratives, and the challenges of reframing those monuments as the stories we tell ourselves about the past evolve over time.

On this episode of Lost Highways, we'll take a look back at how Title IX's passage in 1972 inadvertently codified the separation of sports by sex. And while the law opened the door to equal opportunity in sports and education for women, it also placed sex at the center of how we define fairness without fully addressing issues of equality where gender and race are concerned. We'll also meet Donna Hoover, the young woman who, in 1976, went out for the boys soccer team at Golden High School in Golden, Colorado and wound up changing women's sports in America forever.

On a sleepy summer evening in Boulder, Colorado, in 1974, three young Chicano activists sat in a car at Chautauqua Park at the base of the iconic Flatirons—the giant red sandstone rock formations that sit above the foothills. Then, at approximately 9:50 p.m., the car exploded. Two days later, another car in downtown Boulder exploded, killing three more young activists. Their deaths came against the backdrop of the Chicano movement and the social justice activism of the 1960s and '70s. On this episode of Lost Highways, we'll look back at Los Seis de Boulder—the nearly-forgotten group of six activists in the Chicano movement who were fighting for student aid and representation on the CU Campus, and the unresolved mystery of their deaths.  

The Sand Creek Massacre was the deadliest day in Colorado history, and it changed Cheyenne and Arapaho people forever. On the morning of November 29, 1864, US troops under the command of Colonel John M. Chivington attacked a peaceful camp of Cheyenne and Arapaho people made up mostly of women, children, and elders along the Big Sandy Creek in Southeastern Colorado, near the present day town of Eads. The scale of the massacre was horrifying. More than 230 men, women, and children were murdered in the most brutal ways imaginable. US troops mutilated living and dead bodies, taking body parts as gruesome trophies back to be paraded and displayed in Denver.  This is the first episode in a series about the Sand Creek Massacre. Throughout the series, we'll focus on sharing Cheyenne and Arapaho accounts and oral histories.

In 1881, white residents in the mining town of Gothic, Colorado lynched a Chinese man. Or did they? As the latest episode of Lost Highways investigates this reported act of anti-Chinese racial violence from Colorado's past, we consider what it means to belong in the places we call home, and how such acts of violence continue to echo into the present—whether it actually happened or not.