Rifle: The Gun Nobody Found

The town of Rifle takes its name from the creek, and the creek takes its name from a firearm that nobody has ever found. According to local tradition, during a federal survey in eighteen seventy-six, a surveyor named A. C.

Peale wrote the word rifle on his map to mark the spot where someone had left a gun leaning against a tree. The gun disappeared; the name stayed. Abram Maxfield founded the town itself in eighteen eighty-two along that same creek near its mouth on the Colorado River, and it incorporated in nineteen oh five.

President Theodore Roosevelt made it famous in nineteen oh five when he came to Garfield County on a bear hunt. A century later the town's name appeared in headlines again when the natural gas boom of the Piceance Basin made it a hub of western Colorado's energy economy.