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Got another update finished. Here it is. Not sure what picture should go with it, so any suggestions would be great.

Part Twenty-Three: From the Mountains to the Sea

Colorado Gold Rush:
In 1855, a group of Spanish settlers had struck north from Santa Fe to find a place to settle in northern New Mexico Territory. The settlers followed the Rio Grande and then the foothills of the mountains until they came upon a series of rock formations consisting of uplifted sandstone slabs against the side of a mountain. It was here that they decided to set up their final camp, along a creek that ran through the area. Soon the settlers met with a local Arapaho band led by Chief Niwot. After securing a tentative peace with Niwot, the settlers set up camp. Soon they began traveling up the local canyon into the mountains, and the settlement started to grow. In the spring of 1856, one of the settlers, Lázaro Mendinueta, discovered some gold five miles up one of the canyons.

This discovery began what is now known as the Colorado Gold Rush. For almost a decade after the discovery, almost two hundred thousand settlers from the south and the east poured into the southern Rocky Mountains in search of gold and silver. New cities quickly sprang up in New Mexico Territory. While many of them were small mining towns in the mountains that were abandoned after the rush calmed down, a few on the eastern edge of the Rockies served as important depots and thrived even afterward. Some of these cities include Zeublon near the base of Pike's Peak, Ororio on the South Platte River, Pueblo on the Arkansaw River, and Ferroplano at the point where the Spanish first settled[1]. Ferroplano would come to prominence as the capital of the territory and later state of Colorado.


Houston, We Have Contact:
After the undersea cable from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland was completed, countries on both sides of the Atlantic were postulating a telegraph cable to connect the two continents. The quickest path was clearly Newfoundland to Ireland, and in 1855 the London and Acadia Telegraph Company was formed to try and link England with the Acadian Union, and through that, Europe and North America. In 1855 an attempt was made to connect the two sides but the project fell through when the United States Senate narrowly vetoed a funding bill due to the Anglophobe opinions of many senators[2].

After a series of meetings between representatives from the United States, the United Kingdom, and other Atlantic European countries, a compromise was made. In 1857, Congress passed a bill for the funding of a telegraph line to run from Nova Scotia to Lisbon. The London and Acadia Company worked with British companies to build the cable, and in 1857 the first laying of the cable began from Halifax. This attempt failed as the cable broke during the journey, but a successful laying was completed a year later starting in Lisbon. In July of 1858 the cable was completed, and President Houston and Queen Victoria sent the first telegrams across the Atlantic.

The title of this section refers not to the first message sent across the cable, as is commonly thought, but to the message sent to Washington from Halifax upon receiving the first message from Queen Victoria. In the first two telegrams sent across the cable, Queen Victoria on a visit to Lisbon wished that the communication line would help improve relations between the United States and the United Kingdom, while President Houston expressed his wish for further cooperation between the United States and Europe.

However, this first cable did not last long. A winter storm in Nova Scotia destroyed the cablehouse at Whitehead where it came up out of the Atlantic. During attempts to rebuild the cable house, it was found that the cable had deteriorated too much for continued use. Another cable was laid in 1859, and this sturdier line survived the next winter. After this first success, more cables were laid in the late 1860s and 1870s, from many different locations up and down both sides of the Atlantic coast.


[1] Colorado Springs, Auraria (now part of Denver), Pueblo, and Boulder, respectively.
[2] In OTL this anglophobia was in Congress as well, and the bill seeking funding from Congress only passed the Senate by a single vote.