Montana City: Denver's Forgotten First Settlement

Before Denver existed, before Auraria existed, there was Montana City. In the summer of eighteen fifty-eight, a party from Lawrence, Kansas arrived on the east bank of the South Platte River just north of where Little Dry Creek flows in, and laid out the first settlement in what would eventually become the Denver metropolitan area. They called it Montana City, and they began digging for gold.

The placer deposits turned out to be thin, the ground disappointing, and within a few months the group abandoned the site in favor of Auraria a short distance downstream. Montana City lasted only a few months. Today the ground it occupied lies within the Denver city limits, in a city park.

The brief camp is remembered mainly by historians as a footnote to the Pike's Peak Gold Rush, the first in a sequence of short-lived camps that eventually accumulated enough permanence to become a capital city.