Julesburg: Four Towns, One Doomed Spot

The crossroads where you are right now has been erased and rebuilt four times. Julesburg, Colorado holds the unusual distinction of being the only town in the American West destroyed and relocated so many times that historians number its incarnations like sequels.

The first Julesburg grew up around eighteen fifty-nine, when a French Canadian trader named Jules Beni planted a saloon and way-station here along the South Platte River. Beni became stationmaster for the Overland Stage line, and by eighteen sixty Julesburg was the sole Pony Express home station in what is now Colorado, where riders changed horses, rested, and passed fresh mochila pouches of mail headed east or west along the Platte valley route.

The violence that defined the place started early. Beni was corrupt, so the express company sent a superintendent named Jack Slade to straighten things out. Slade fired him. In eighteen sixty-one, Slade tracked Beni down in Wyoming, shot him several times, and cut off his ears as trophies. Mark Twain later recorded meeting Slade on the overland coach and being warned that this was a man who wore human ears on his watch chain.

But the defining catastrophe came from the plains to the southeast. On November twenty-ninth, eighteen sixty-four, Colonel John Chivington's Colorado militia massacred peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho at Sand Creek, killing somewhere between one hundred fifty and five hundred people, mostly women, children, and elders. The survivors carried word to the allied Cheyenne Dog Soldiers, Brule Lakota, and Northern Arapaho camped on Cherry Creek in Kansas.

On January seventh, eighteen sixty-five, more than one thousand warriors surrounded the sixty-man garrison at nearby Fort Rankin, lured them into the open, cut them off, and plundered Julesburg at will. They returned on February second, burned what remained to the ground, and then swept one hundred fifty miles of the South Platte valley, torching every ranch and stage station in sight.

That was the second Julesburg. A third version was built further up the Platte. A fourth, and final, Julesburg was laid out in eighteen eighty-one when the Union Pacific railroad arrived, this time in Sedgwick County, where the town still stands today. Every iteration of this place carries the weight of what was done at Sand Creek, and what the plains tribes exacted in return.