It is the principal city of the DenverβAuroraβLakewood metropolitan statistical area , with almost 3 million people the most populous metropolitan area in Colorado. Denver is the economic and cultural center of the broader Front Range Urban Corridor , home to more than 5 million people. Denver's downtown district lies about 12 miles 19 kilometers east of the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.
Named after James W. Nicknamed the "Mile High City" because its official elevation is exactly one mile feet or As the most populous metropolitan area in a mile km radius, Denver is a major cultural hub with a variety of museums and cultural institutions, including the Denver Performing Arts Complex and Denver Art Museum.
Denver also has sports teams in all five major professional leagues. This definition specifically encompasses the land of modern Metropolitan Denver.
But the discovery in November of gold in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado [ 29 ] then part of the western Kansas Territory [ 30 ] brought on a gold rush and a consequent flood of white immigration across Cheyenne and Arapaho lands. In the summer of , during the Pike's Peak Gold Rush , a group of gold prospectors from Lawrence, Kansas , established Montana City as a mining town on the banks of the South Platte River in what was then western Kansas Territory , on traditional lands of Cheyenne and Arapaho.
This was the first historical settlement in what later became the city of Denver. But the site faded quickly, and by the summer of it was abandoned in favor of Auraria named after the gold-mining town of Auraria, Georgia and St. Charles City. On November 22, , [ contradictory ] General William Larimer and Captain Jonathan Cox, both land speculators from eastern Kansas Territory , placed cottonwood logs to stake a claim on the bluff overlooking the confluence of the South Platte River and Cherry Creek , across the creek from the existing mining settlement of Auraria, and on the site of the existing townsite of St.
