Mobility and Occupational Structure on the Late Nineteenth-Century Urban Frontier: The Case of Denver, Colorado

Americans have traditionally believed that social and geographic mobility is a valuable and characteristic feature of their society. Using quantitative methods, they have begun to exploit the evidence contained in such basic sources as the manuscript schedules of the United States census and city directories. Urban scholars study mobility because of its bearing on social structure and social processes in the community, while historians of the frontier employ the concept of mobility as a means of testing empirically Frederick Jackson Turner’s hypothesis that the frontier encouraged rapid upward social mobility. Denver was the creation of the Colorado gold rush of 1858–1860, but after an initial burst of growth the town experienced economic stagnation in the mid- and late sixties when the easily exploitable deposits of gold were exhausted. Mobility studies already made of other communities provide data that help to place Denver within its proper historical context.