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And so the census began, with Colorado first appearing in the 1860 statistics. This seems a bit odd, since Colorado Territory wasn't formally organized until 1861, a rectangle carved out of Nebraska, Kansas, New Mexico, and Utah territories. Without boundaries in place, how was the Census Bureau supposed to know who was in Colorado and who wasn't? My guess is that they had the data from the various census precincts, and when Colorado was organized, the Bureau just added up those precincts for a Colorado population: 34,277.

It hardly grew at all in the next decade, with 39,864 inhabitants in 1870. Then came the railroads and a silver boom: 194,327 in 1880, 413,249 in 1890, and 539,700 a century ago.

THE COLORADO that responded to the 1900 census was distributed differently from today's. Southern Colorado then had a third of the state's population; today it has about a tenth. With 28,147 residents, Pueblo was the second largest city in the state -- Salida ranked 11th with 3,722 residents, just behind Florence and its 3,728 denizens.

The miner's pick and hammer on the state seal (until I looked closely a couple of years ago, I had thought they where the miner's pick and the farmer's shovel, sort of like the old Soviet emblem of miner's hammer and farmer's sickle) reflected the mineral reality of Colorado at the start of the 20th century.

Leadville was Colorado's fourth-largest city with 12,455 residents, followed by Cripple Creek with 10,147, and neighboring Victor was the eighth-largest city with 4,896 people.

EXCEPT FOR PUEBLO and Colorado Springs, all of today's top 10 are along the northern Front Range: Aurora, Lakewood (which wasn't even incorporated until 1969), Fort Collins, Arvada, Westminster...

Just the census numbers tell us how much Colorado has changed from an urban industrial state to a suburban zone, where people live in one place and work in another, and local political boundaries don't mean all that much -- if anybody can figure them out at all.

I recall chatting with Bob Ewegen at the Denver Post once, and he asked me why I didn't write more about Denver politics. I explained that I didn't live there, so I really didn't feel comfortable writing about Denver.

"Hell, that doesn't bother most people," he responded. "We get letters all the time about Denver's actions, and you'll call the writer to verify the letter, and it turns out they actually live in Sheridan or Aurora or something -- and had no idea that they didn't live in Denver."

For further illustration of this geographic mishmash, consider the coverage of the Columbine High School tragedy last spring. The school is in a suburban zone that doesn't really have a name -- the closest you can get is "unincorporated Jefferson County." It got its mail from the Littleton post office, although Littleton is the seat of Arapahoe County. And it's a realm of franchise restaurants and big-box retailers that resembles thousands of other generic American off-ramp places; little wonder that people couldn't really identify where this happened.

CONSIDER ONE of the farming areas out on the plains, like Kit Carson County. It had only 1,580 people in 1900. It boomed to 7,483 in 1910, and by 1930 it had 9,725 people. Similar figures apply to other High Plains counties: Lincoln, from 926 in 1900 to 8,273 in 1920; Sedgwick, from 971 to 5,580 in 1930; Cheyenne from 501 to 3,746 in 1920.

Yet even as Colorado's population has grown nearly eight-fold in the past century, all those counties have fewer people now than they did in the 1920s. What happened?

A few wet years meant that dry-farming looked possible. A war in Europe meant high prices for wheat, from 62 cents per bushel in 1900 to $2.19 in 1919. The result was a rush to those counties.

And then the weather turned Dust Bowl dry just as crop prices dropped -- wheat was 32 cents a bushel in 1932. People left, often after a foreclosure auction. There's a similar sequence for the agricultural counties in the San Luis Valley, though the timing is different: Costilla went from 4,632 in 1900 to a peak of 7,533 in 1940; Conejos had 8,794 in 1900 and peaked at 11,641 in 1940; Saguache went from 3,853 to a 1930 peak of 6,250, followed by a decline to 3,827 in 1970. In the past decade, it has grown enough to have a few more people than it did 70 years ago.

Likewise, mining camps boom and bust, and not just for precious metals like gold and base metals like zinc. Las Animas (Trinidad) and Huerfano (Walsenburg) counties both mined coal. Their combined population was 15,411 in 1900. It was 55,854 in 1920. Today it's 21,812.

Technology changes -- people heat their houses with natural gas, railroads run their locomotives with diesel fuel, and improved machinery means fewer miners in coal operations, both above and below ground. Colorado still produces a lot of coal, but most of it comes from strip mines in Routt and Moffat counties.

At any rate, those abandoned farmsteads and shrinking populations in farm country always seem more tragic than the remnants of a mining boom. Miners are by nature rather transient ("tramping" ranks right up there with "stoping" and "tramming" in their lexicon), and they all know the vein will pinch out someday.

The farms, by contrast, were carved out by people who wanted to stay indefinitely, to build something for their children. When they're forced off by economic and climatic changes, it seems a much greater tragedy than when a mine shuts down.

Go back 20 years to 1980, and much of Central Colorado still revolved around mining. Mostly it was Climax with its 3,000 employees, but there was also the Black Cloud and the Sherman, along with the Monarch Quarry (limestone to make steel in Pueblo) and a lot of uranium promised. Gold was pushing $800 an ounce, and silver $20.

The census reflected this. Lake County had 6,150 residents in 1950 and 8,830 in 1980. Chaffee had likewise grown from 7,168 to 13,227. Then came the bust of 1982 when commodity prices collapsed and the mines and quarries closed. Both counties lost population in the '80s: Lake to 6,007 in 1990, and Chaffee to 12,684.

THE MINES haven't reopened, but the population growth has resumed. Custer County has been among the top counties nationally in growth, though that goes by percentages, and when you start with a small base, 1,926 people in 1990, it doesn't take many people (about 2,000 more since then) to show a huge growth rate.

In general, our mountain counties show a decline from 1900 to 1950, then a slow rise to 1970 or 1980, followed by a decline, then the recent growth of this decade.

I find all this fascinating, and occasionally the census provides information for making business decisions, even on a small local scale. That is, an appliance manufacturer would want to know how many American houses have microwave ovens and perhaps the average age of those appliances in order to plan marketing and production.

Those routes were expensive, and they looked to get more expensive as gasoline prices kept rising and supplies looked questionable.

And the census revealed that although Chaffee County's population had grown from 10,162 in 1970 to 13,227 in 1980, very little of that growth occurred in town. Salida had gained only 525 people, and Buena Vista only 113.

So, you've got a daily newspaper which should be delivered that day. Your market area is growing, but mostly out in the county where delivery relies on gasoline that isn't getting any cheaper.

Merle Baranczyk, the publisher, and I looked hard at those numbers and trends, and decided the best course was to switch the Mail from an afternoon to a morning publication. With a morning paper, printed the night before and delivered to the post office in the wee hours, the Postal Service could insure same-day delivery to the growing population out in the county. And the Postal Service wasn't about to run out of gasoline.

Thus in early 1981, on the basis of the 1980 census, was a business decision made. Multiply that by thousands or millions, and you can see how important the census is to American commerce -- which may explain why the Bureau of the Census is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce.

But that isn't why it was constituted. The Founding Fathers wanted to make sure each state got its proper number of representatives. And thus the census is used to determine how many House seats that Colorado gets (six at the moment, but it may gain a seat this time around) and then to draw the lines for the congressional districts (and for the state legislature's own senate and house districts).

In 1790, and for many decades thereafter, geography mattered a lot more than it does now, in that people who lived near each other necessarily shared certain interests. They grew the same kinds of crops, they mined from the same geologic formations, they used the same routes for marketing, distribution, and communication. Thus a representation based on geography made sense.

This shows in the census reports. I had to drive to the Tutt Library on the Colorado College campus in Colorado Springs to find those reports for 1900 -- it's the nearest federal depository library whose records go that far back. (The Savage Library at Western State College in Gunnison only goes back to 1930.)

The older census reports focus almost entirely on geography, especially political boundaries. The newer the census, the more it focuses on other divisions, like educational status of Hispanic households in a standard metropolitan statistical area that has no formal political boundaries.

And our representatives see themselves less as representing a region that you can see on a map, and more as representatives of constituencies who may be scattered throughout the country.

OUR REPRESENTATIVE, Scott McInnis, isn't really representing the Third Congressional District in the controversies over public lands use, like the proposed White River National Forest management plan. If he were trying to represent the district, he'd be trying to hammer out a compromise we could all live with. Instead, he sounds like a shill for the motorized recreation lobby -- certainly a significant part of this district's population, but not a defining element.

For another example, consider former Rep. Pat Schroeder, who represented Denver for 24 years. Technically, she represented Denver; more accurately, she represented women across America because she was one of the few women in the House.

It shows in her memoir, 24 Years of House Work and the Place is Still a Mess: My Life in Politics. There's a lot in there about representing America's women; very little about representing Denver.

And yet that part would tell us what a shrewd politician Schroeder was. She had the reputation of a very liberal Democrat, but she took good care of the oil industry -- part of her job, since so many oil companies were so prominent in Denver during those days. How she pulled that off would make a great tale -- and one she didn't bother to tell, perhaps because it doesn't seem that important in an era when geography matters less and less.

Much the same is true of former Colorado representative and senator Tim Wirth. He had the reputation of a liberal. He also represented Colorado, then a center of the cable-TV industry, which contributed handsomely to his campaigns. On one level, Wirth represented environmentalists nationally; on another level, that monthly gouge from the local cable monopoly can be connected to Tim Wirth.

At any rate, the point is that our politicians are elected by geographic location, but generally view themselves as representatives of other constituencies that don't have much to do with physical location on the planet: McInnis and the ATV promoters, Schroeder and feminists; Wirth and environmentalists; Ben Campbell and Indians across America, etc.

That probably means they're truly representative, because we tend to see ourselves as members of groups rather than residents of an area. The census reflects that in how it classifies the population, and with modern communications, well, there are people who live thousands of miles away whom I'm in better touch with than anyone who lives down the street.

I'm part of various groups -- free-lance writers, users of certain varieties software, mildly libertarian trouble-makers -- whose affinities have little if anything to do with physical location.

Increasingly, the census reflects that. Pick up the thick bound Volume I of the 1900 census report, and it's easy to find out how many people lived in any given town, county, precinct, township, etc. Pick up the 1990 report, and it's a struggle to find that amid all the other ways that the population is categorized.

And yet, our political system is based on geographic representation. The average Santa Fé merchant probably has more in common with her Aspen counterpart than with anyone in nearby Española, but our political system doesn't reflect that.

The Columbine High School tragedy attracted so much national attention because it took place in modern Generica, an upper-middle-class suburb just like its counterparts from Seattle to Miami. It could happen anywhere because that's where it did happen -- in an anywhere.

Perhaps in the future, the census would let us pick a category, the way they do with races now. I could click something like "impoverished college-dropout who likes to live in town, but near public land," and the computers would accumulate all of us and arrange for electoral districts accordingly, rather than by a certain sprawling congressional district in Colorado.

Then again, perhaps the rising gasoline prices will create an America that is less mobile, more concerned with home, one that relies on local agriculture, and those political boundaries will start to matter again.

I think place matters, and that's one reason for the time and energy I devote to this magazine, but it's a hard case to make these days. And I don't envy the Census Bureau in trying to make sense of it all -- I'm just glad they try.

-- Ed Quillen