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 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. 

With the new reality of megafires in the West, we take a look at what happens when history itself is destroyed and how we hold on to who and what we are when we lose the artifacts and records that tell our stories. We’ll take you from the Waldo Canyon Fire of 2012 near the town of Manitou Springs to the Denver suburbs of Louisville and Superior, Colorado where the 2021 Marshall Fire wiped out not only hundreds of homes and businesses, but also the entire Superior history museum, along with centuries of artifacts, archives, and community memories.

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.

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? 

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 blurry line between the way we've mythologized horses to how we actually treat them. 

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 Soviet Union. We also look at the ways NORAD’s vigilant watch for threats beyond our borders may have made us feel safe, but also left us vulnerable to threats from within and the instability of our own nuclear arsenal. 

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 enslavement, and his heroic escape to freedom were taken largely as fact. But then, in 2022, history happened. 

Cathay Williams was an African American Woman who was conscripted to work as General Philip Sheridan's cook during the Civil War. When the war was over, she wanted to join one of the all-Black Army Regiments that later became known as the “Buffalo Soldiers." But women weren't allowed to serve at that time. So she put on men's clothes, changed her name to William Cathay, and spent the next three years as a Buffalo Soldier in the "Wild West."  Her story could easily serve as a western myth – a portrait of so-called frontier courage in the face of insurmountable odds. But we look more closely at the way her choice to live as a Black male soldier also reflect the extremely limited options available to Black women at the time. 

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 rags-to-riches American myth of the rugged individual as we look at Stratton's life and the equally fascinating history of the miners and unions of Cripple Creek who made him rich.