Even 100 years after the United States’ entry into the war to end all wars, Army 1st Lt. Charles Stewart’s letters to his wife — found years ago in a trunk in the attic of a Denver home — still evoke vivid snapshots of a relatively short but bloody chapter in history.

“Well, 2:30 to a second this morning hell opened up, and the earth trembled as thousands of guns began vomiting their tons of death and destruction,” Stewart wrote on Sept. 26, 1918, in now-faded pencil on pages preserved in History Colorado’s archives. “… At 5:30 just getting light the doughboys went over the top. They had been streaming past us all through the night some laughing, some deadly serious but as the flash of our guns lit up their faces they looked stern and their jaws were set for the struggle before them.”

That struggle — which officially began with an April 6, 1917, declaration of war — left indelible marks on Colorado, both for better and worse. Economic benefits flowed from the wartime demand for the state’s agricultural and mineral goods, and eventually the construction of what would become Fitzsimons Army Hospital.

The expanding role of women in society continued to gain momentum through their efforts overseas with the Red Cross and in a variety of capacities on the home front. The once-divided opinion on whether the U.S. should join the war effort against Germany quickly morphed into patriotic fervor that translated to both productive civic engagement and troubling social backlash.

“The recruiting poster said, ‘Uncle Sam Wants You,’” said Stephen Leonard, history professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver. “I think a lot of people in Colorado wanted Uncle Sam, in various ways.”

Immigrants who found their loyalty questioned — about 16 percent of the state’s population was foreign-born at that time — sought validation. Women sought more ways to show they could make significant contributions. “And then there were economic interests — we wanted that hospital,” Leonard added. “There was a whole lot of wanting Uncle Sam, once we started to go to war.”

“The recruiting poster said, ‘Uncle Sam Wants You.’ I think a lot of people in Colorado wanted Uncle Sam, in various ways.”

But support for entering the war was hardly unanimous. Two Colorado congressmen, Reps. Benjamin Hilliard of Denver and Edward Keating of Pueblo, were among 50 who voted against the declaration.

For Coloradans, the shift in sentiment toward entering the conflict owed much to Germany’s intensifying submarine warfare that threatened trade routes, but also to that country’s proposed alliance with Mexico that offered U.S. territory to Mexico if Germany prevailed in the war.

Just a year earlier, the Colorado National Guard had been federalized and sent to the Mexican border to deal with issues arising from skirmishes with Pancho Villa.

“So we had friction with Mexico,” said Leonard, “which locally added to patriotic fervor.”

At the opposite end of the philosophical spectrum stood Ben Salmon, a Denver man who registered for the draft but then immediately wrote President Woodrow Wilson, announcing his stance as a conscientious objector.

His position made him a local pariah once described in The Denver Post as a “slacker, pacifist, the man with a yellow streak down his spine as broad as a country highway.” Salmon, a Catholic who found himself at odds with the church’s support of the war, was convicted in both civilian and military courts.

He endured solitary confinement and launched a 135-day hunger strike before the War Department pardoned him and 32 other conscientious objectors. One group of Catholic peace activists recently pushed for his canonization.

Meanwhile, many Coloradans shipped off to war as institution of the draft increased the state’s military participation to as many as 43,000. The state’s death toll from the war has been estimated at a little over 1,000.

Front page of The Denver Post, April 5, 1917

Front page of The Denver Post, April 6, 1917

Front page of The Denver Post, April 7, 1917



Front page of The Denver Post, April 8, 1917

Front page of The Denver Post, April 9, 1917

Passions ran strong as patriotism devolved into scapegoating. Denver’s East High School dropped German language courses, as did towns like Fort Morgan, which emphasized its distaste by torching German books in a bonfire — an activity repeated in many small towns around the state.

“The war stirred up a huge amount of patriotism, but also huge amount of fear of the ‘other,’” Leonard said. “It caused a lot of the bad things that happened in early 1920s” — including the Red Scare as communism took hold in Russia — “and also was the genesis for mental attitudes that led to the strong rise of Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. All these animal spirits were stirred up by the war and needed a place to go.”

Women, who would soon gain the right to vote, took on more prominent roles in the war effort. Colorado Gov. Julius Gunther organized two Councils of Defense, one of them comprised of women, who advocated across the state for Liberty Bonds to help finance the war. Even members of the wealthy and iconic Evans family, descended from territorial governor John Evans, had a profound and very public impact.

Anne Evans organized relief efforts in Colorado, particularly around food conservation that saw her help turn vacant lots into gardens and harvest peaches on the Western Slope.

Cornelia Evans, John’s daughter-in-law, took part in shipping surgical dressings to France through a unit of the Red Cross. Josephine Evans actually traveled to France to assist in helping the wounded, though she arrived after the armistice. Still, she stayed overseas until the fall of 1919 helping war victims.

“Before there was Rosie the Riveter, World War I cracked that door open in ways that were unimaginable before.”

“That was a big outcome of the war,” said Jason Hanson, director of interpretation and research at History Colorado, which will open an exhibit on Memorial Day weekend at the Byers-Evans House Museum focusing on women’s role in the conflict. “Before there was Rosie the Riveter, World War I cracked that door open in ways that were unimaginable before.”

Even as the war wound down, it remained inextricably bound to another relentless killing force — an influenza epidemic that claimed millions more than the conflict that contributed to its spread.

“The fall of 1918 — September, October, November — is the very peak of the influenza epidemic in the United States and in France as well,” said Carol Byerly, a Boulder-based historian and author who has written extensively on the subject. “So it doesn’t happen after the war, it happens during the war. And because of the war.”

Estimates put worldwide deaths from the pandemic around 50 million, while the number of dead from the war ranged around 12 to 15 million. In Colorado, more than 7,700 died from what was inaccurately called the Spanish flu.

“The war and disease cannot be separated,” Byerly says. “This epidemic was intimately related to war and the transport of military personnel.”

There was another medical scourge that ultimately impacted Colorado: tuberculosis. When the draft swelled the Army’s ranks to the millions, many of the incoming soldiers already had the disease, or a latent form that went active under the stress of training, Byerly said.

The Army had only one hospital handling tuberculosis cases, in New Mexico, and needed to establish others. In 1918, that imperative gave rise to General Hospital No. 21, which eventually was renamed two years later for William T. Fitzsimons, the first American officer killed in the war.

“This hospital becomes the footprint for the way to get federal dollars into the state,” Byerly said. “It was an economic boon, no doubt. When World War II began, it was the largest, most modern Army hospital in the world. That comes directly out of World War I.”