June Nineteen Twenty-One, Pueblo

The Arkansas River had been running high for days. In the first weeks of June nineteen twenty-one, heavy rains across the southern Colorado mountains sent water into the river faster than anyone upstream had measured before. On June third, the Arkansas broke its banks at Pueblo.

The flood killed approximately two hundred forty people. It destroyed thousands of homes and businesses. The downtown business district was inundated. The steel mill, whose furnaces were linked to the river for cooling water, sustained enormous damage. It was one of the deadliest natural disasters in Colorado history.

The Bessemer neighborhood, south of the mill, was the working-class core of Pueblo, and it was where the city's Mexican American community had built its life. The families there were not newcomers. Many were descendants of people who had been in the Arkansas River valley before Colorado was a state, part of the older Hispanic settlement that ran from Pueblo south to the New Mexico border. Others had come more recently to work at the mill. They lived in the neighborhood closest to the river, on the land that flooded worst.

Post-flood reconstruction in Pueblo was not neutral in where it went and who it served. The mill and its operations were prioritized for repair. The management districts recovered. The Bessemer barrio, in the form it had taken before the flood, was not rebuilt in the same way. The records of that reconstruction, documented in the El Pueblo History Museum's collections, describe a pattern that historians of industrial-era disaster have come to recognize: the working poor whose neighborhoods lie in the floodplain sustain the damage, and the recovery flows uphill.

The flood is remembered in Pueblo. The specific story of what happened to Bessemer afterward is less widely told.