Cañon City: The Royal Gorge and a Town Built Around Captivity

Cañon City sits at the eastern entrance to the Royal Gorge, where the Arkansas River has spent millions of years cutting a canyon a thousand feet deep through Precambrian granite. The gorge is one of the most dramatic landforms in Colorado, and it was once the prize in one of the most bizarre railroad wars in American history.

In eighteen seventy-eight, both the Denver and Rio Grande Railway and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway simultaneously decided they needed to run a line through the Royal Gorge. There was only room for one track. Both companies hired armed crews and sent them racing to occupy the canyon. Rival work gangs built fortifications, exchanged gunfire, and waged a months-long territorial dispute while lawyers fought in court. The Santa Fe actually had its crews inside the gorge building grade when the courts ruled in favor of the Denver and Rio Grande. The dispute was eventually settled by lease agreement in eighteen eighty, but not before it had drawn in gunslingers and injunctions in roughly equal measure.

Cañon City became the railroad's base of operations and grew quickly. But the city's most enduring identity comes from a different kind of institution. In eighteen seventy-one, Fremont County donated land to persuade the Colorado Territory to locate its penitentiary here rather than in Denver. The bet paid off. The Colorado Territorial Penitentiary opened in eighteen seventy-one and has expanded ever since. Today the greater Cañon City area hosts at least thirteen federal and state correctional facilities, making incarceration the region's dominant industry.

The Royal Gorge Bridge, a suspension bridge strung across the canyon in nineteen twenty-nine, was for decades the world's highest suspension bridge at nine hundred fifty-five feet above the Arkansas River. A wildfire in two thousand thirteen destroyed the amusement park that surrounded it but left the bridge itself intact.