Cañon City

A Claim Club at the Canyon Mouth

Cañon City stands at the eastern mouth of the Royal Gorge of the Arkansas River and has been the seat of Fremont County since 1862.¹ In 1806 Zebulon Pike and his men camped along the river at the entrance to the “Grand Canyon of the Arkansas.”⁴ The Colorado Magazine’s history of the claim club says the first permanent white settlement in the Canon City area was made sometime in October 1859.⁵ An item in the Canon City Times of November 10, 1860, gave another account, saying the town was laid out January 17, 1858, and jumped in the fall of 1859.⁵ Settlers adopted the constitution of the Canon City Claim Club on March 13, 1860.⁵ Club members staked the first claims on Coal Creek in April 1860, and Jesse Frazier found the county’s first coal deposits there that year.^1,5 Mat Riddlebarger, the first postmaster, joined J. B. Cooper, Anson Rudd, John Howard and others in a company that on January 10, 1862, filed a claim to ditch water from the canyon into Canon City.⁵ The Civil War cut the start short, when most residents left to serve and only a few, such as Anson Rudd Sr. and his family, stayed behind.⁴ Confederate and Union veterans settled here after the war, and on April 2, 1872, county commissioners meeting in a room above Murray’s Saloon at 305 Main Street accepted the citizens’ request to incorporate the town.⁴ The tilde over the first “n” is a Spanish mark that gives the name its pronunciation, “canyon,” and a town marker says the name likely came from pioneers who settled at the canyon’s entrance and knew the region had once been Spanish territory.⁴

Rails Through the Royal Gorge

General William Jackson Palmer brought his Denver & Rio Grande Railroad to Coal Creek in 1872, and in 1874 the line reached Cañon City, which remained its western terminus until the end of the Royal Gorge Railroad War.¹ In the summer of 1874 the Utah railroad photographer Charles Savage saw the canyon for the first time and exclaimed, “This is a Royal Gorge!”, and Henry Ripley, editor of the Cañon City Times, began using the name in print.⁶ When silver was found at Leadville in 1877, the D&RG at Cañon City and the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe at Pueblo raced to lay track through the gorge, which had room for one line.¹ In 1879, after gunfights between the crews and a legal fight that ended at the US Supreme Court, the D&RG won the primary right to build through.¹ The first dinosaur bone found in Colorado turned up near the town in late 1869 or early 1870, and in the 1880s Yale’s Othniel C. Marsh, helped by Cañon City resident Marshall P. Felch, named Stegosaurus stenops.¹

Old Max

On January 7, 1868, the territorial legislature placed its prison at Cañon City, which in return for Denver’s support voted for Denver over Golden as capital, and the prison opened June 1, 1871.^1,7 Convicts built it of stone quarried and cut on the site, and on June 13, 1871, John Shepler, convicted of larceny, was received as Prisoner No. 1.² When Colorado became a state in 1876, “Old Max” was deeded to it, and its inmates came to include Alfred Packer and Henry Starr, the bank-robbing nephew of Belle Starr.² In December 1947, 12 prisoners broke out together, an escape later put on film as “Canon City.”² The 2014 prison marker says Warden Roy Best built Cell house No. 4 in 1935 as the first women’s cell house outside the prison walls, in use until 1968, and it now holds the Museum of Colorado Prisons.² The Colorado Encyclopedia counts thirteen correctional facilities in Fremont County and reports that inmates make up 38 percent of the populations of Cañon City and Florence.¹

Main Street, 1870 to 1930

The downtown historic district holds eighty-one structures built between 1870 and 1930, when the town served as a regional trade center.⁸ First United Methodist Church, designed by D.A. Bradbury of Canon City for $12,000, was dedicated on September 17, 1899, and is a contributing building in the district.⁹ The Carnegie library, built in 1902 after a long effort by the Ladies Library Association, has native sandstone walls and stands within the district.¹⁰ The St. Cloud Hotel was built in 1879 in Silver Cliff and rebuilt in Cañon City in 1890, after mining there slowed, and public outcry stopped its demolition in 2012.¹¹ Dr. C.H. Graves, a Chicago physician, bought the Ward/Graves Hospital Building in 1904, and it operated as a hospital until 1966.⁸ The State Armory went up in 1922 for a National Guard unit and was the town’s only gymnasium until a high school was built in 1961, and its hardwood drill floor served as a roller skating rink.¹²