The beaver an industrious animal with an uncanny ability to redirect the course of flowing water attracted the first white men to the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. Those men were trappers. Gold-miners constituted the next wave of development. By the early 20th century, agriculture had taken hold and small towns could be found down on what came to be called Colorado s Front Range. People liked the moderate climate and flat land both of which contrasted with the other side of the Continental Divide.
Winters get very cold over on the western slope, and the ground is rough.
The only difficulty faced by settlers on the Front Range was a lack of water. Only 12 inches of rain falls in a typical year, and most of Colorado s snow, as well as the rain it gets, falls on the western slope of the Rockies. Engineers beavers in human form solved that problem in the 1930s by rearranging nature s plumbing. They laboriously drilled a hole through mountain rock and started pumping western-slope water east to Fort Collins, Greeley and other communities that now are booming because they have water for irrigation and for drinking. The U.S. government paid for that expensive engineering feat in order to help populate the West.