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.