ALTHOUGH mining is often presumed to be Colorado's basic industry, agriculture produces almost twice as much of the State's yearly income. The mines have yielded more than $3,000,000,000 since the gold rush of 1859, but agriculture has done quite as well within the past twenty-five years. In a larger sense, however, the two are complementary; neither could have achieved its present development without the other. Together, they have shaped the pattern of the State's transportation network and laid the foundation of its manufacturing. Both extend into widely scattered sections of the State in a giant patchwork of irregular boundaries and striking contrasts. Coal, the State's chief mineral product today, is mined amid rural scenes on the rolling plains along the eastern foothills and in the northern mesa country on the Western Slope. Cripple Creek, once the world's richest gold camp, shot up like a mushroom on the range of a great cattle ranch.

Colorado is notable rather for the diversity than the individual or aggregate quantity of its products. Head lettuce thrives in high mountain meadows; peaches, apples, and pears are grown in the large orchard section along the Colorado and Gunnison Rivers on the Western Slope; carnations from greenhouses in the vicinity of Denver are shipped as far as the London market; Colorado beet sugar, pascal celery, honey-dew melons, and Rocky Ford cantaloupes are known and consumed throughout the Nation. Colorado fattens more spring lambs than any State in the Union. Gold still accounts for a fifth of the value of the State's mine products, but of greater significance industrially is the extraction of two rare metals, molybdenum and vanadium, used as alloys in the making of hard steel. Four-fifths of the world's supply of molybdenum is mined at Climax, near Leadville, and three-fourths of the Nation's supply of vanadium comes from mines around Uravan, near the Utah border. Great coal fields have stimulated the production of steel— Colorado's foremost manufactured article. But mining and agriculture remain the two basic industries.