Having Basil in Basel, Switzerland

For several weeks I’ve been writing about the history of small towns in

Boy and Fish Fountain

Texas. The next few blogs concern the much older cities we visited on our trip from Basel, Switzerland to Amsterdam, Netherlands. Basel is in northwestern Switzerland on the Rhine River. We arrived a couple of days early to allow for jet lag and do some sightseeing on our own. Our first surprise was that the EuroAirport Basel Mulhouse Freiburg is actually in France, and if you go out the wrong door, you end up with taxis that only go to France. However, the cabbies are used to confused tourists and kindly helped us get to the Swiss transportation. Basel, essentially, is located at the nexus of Switzerland, France and Germany with suburbs in each country. It’s not surprising that although the official language is the Swiss variety of standard German, many people speak French and English as a matter of course.

Denver Doings

The Denver area, part of the Territory of Kansas, was settled by Cheyenne and Arapaho

Stream with waterfall in a meadow

Indians and a few Anglos until the late 1850s. However, in 1858 Green Russell and Sam Bates found a small placer deposit that produced about 20 troy ounces (620g) of gold, and the Pike's Peak Gold Rush was on; the population bloomed to about  100,000 gold seekers in just two years. The same year that Russell and Bates found their gold, Denver City was established through rather under-handed means. This rather lawless city prospered as a mining town for a few years, but once the gold played out the population dropped. Denver eventually became a supply hub for mining in the area, cementing its place in history. It was named the seat of Arapahoe County, then six years later the Territorial Capital. By 1881, Denver had become the permanent state capital, having survived the fire of 1863 that destroyed most of downtown, the flood a year later that devastated cattle and crops, and a final attack by swarms of grasshoppers that stripped away the remaining vegetation.