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 Chicanos. 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 acti ..read more

he 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 gr ..read more

How did the mountains get so white? Not snow, but people. It wasn’t always so. And on this episode we look at a particular history of violence toward Chinese immigrants and Indigenous communities in one of Colorado’s scenic mountain towns. We’ll examine how it echoes in the present with increased violence toward Asian communities that began during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. How do we reconcile unsettling new facts with who we believe we are now? And how has the history of colonization and the marketing of whiteness in the Rocky Mountains excluded so many communities, including its or ..read more

Colorado's San Luis Valley is the last place you might expect to find a centuries old lineage of Sephardic Jews. But a rare form of breast cancer and a host of odd traditions, artifacts, and rituals led researchers to discover an enclave of Crypto-Jews that fled Europe for the New World in the 16th Century to hide out in one of the most remote areas of the lower 48 states. On this episode, we’ll unveil a secret Jewish faith and identity rooted deep in the American Southwest ..read more

For nearly a century-and-a-half, archaeologists have been studying Mesa Verde in hopes of deciphering what happened to the Ancestral Puebloan people who lived and thrived there for so long. For many, it remains one of the great mysteries in the history of North America. On this episode of Lost Highways, we’ll explore the way that historians and archaeologists try to solve these kinds of mysteries, and how they know what they say they think they know. Where does that confidence come from? How confident are they, actually? And what happens when what we think we know changes?      ..read more

On this episode of Lost Highways, we look at the mustang, the wild horse of American myth and legend. Though they’re widely revered as symbols of untameable American freedom in the West, the reality of the wild horse in the 21st Century is far less romantic. From the long history of the horse's evolution in North America to the helicopter roundups on rangeland in The West, we'll follow the line blurry line between the way we've mythologized horses to how we actually treat them.    ..read more

Westerns often reveal more about the period when they were produced than the era they portray, but the genre won't die. On this episode of Lost Highways, we'll trace the rise of The Western in American pop culture, the significance of landscape in film, and the moral guidelines that set the boundaries for US films produced from the late-19th Century to the present. From classic to revisionist and contemporary films, Westerns have both created and pushed back on the myths America tells itself.  ..read more

On this episode of Lost Highways, we take you inside the history of NORAD, or North American Aerospace Defense Command. AND we’ll take you inside The Cheyenne Mountain Complex, the base that has stoked the pop cultural imagination of generations with movies and shows from Dr. Strangelove to Stargate to Interstellar. As the war in Ukraine and Chinese spy balloons have brought long dormant fears of a nuclear attack back to public consciousness, we look at the way the Cold War reshaped and modernized the already militarized American West as it became the stage for a global high noon with the Sovi ..read more

Barney Ford was one of the most successful and resilient Black businessmen in the early American West. He came in search of gold, owned and operated hotels and restaurants, lost them in fires, rebuilt them, and enjoyed a reputation as a King of hospitality in early Denver, Breckenridge, and Cheyenne, Wyoming. Much of his legend was built upon a 1963 biography called "Mr. Barney Ford: A Portrait in Bistre" written by a hack journalist named Forbes Parkhill who moonlighted as a screenwriter for schlocky westerns. And for almost 60 years, Parkhill's colorful account of Ford's birth, his enslaveme ..read more

If you work hard enough, or get lucky enough, the distinctly American myth goes, anyone can become rich. And once you’re rich, of course, you’ll be happy … right? In the nineteenth century, no one embodied that American myth of the rugged individual than Winfield Scott Stratton, the first millionaire of the Cripple Creek Gold boom in 1893. He'd spent half his life searching for gold and, once he found it, became rich beyond his wildest dreams. But his sudden wealth made him miserable, even as he tried to give away, and he drank himself to death in 1902. On this episode, we complicate the ..read more