Where Two Creeks Built a City: The Confluence

This is the spot. The South Platte River meets Cherry Creek right here, and the city of Denver began at this exact junction. The Cheyenne and the Arapaho had been camping at this confluence for at least a generation by eighteen fifty eight, under the territorial guarantees of the Treaty of Fort Laramie of eighteen fifty one.

When the first prospectors arrived in the summer of eighteen fifty eight, a Southern Arapaho chief named Little Raven negotiated a temporary coexistence rather than fight. The historian Tom Noel describes it simply, there were teepees next to town. The arrangement lasted months, not years.

By eighteen sixty one, the Treaty of Fort Wise had forced the Cheyenne and Arapaho to surrender their claim entirely. The first gold found here came in the first week of July, eighteen fifty eight, when a Georgia prospector named William Greeneberry Russell and a partner panned about twenty troy ounces from Little Dry Creek. The discovery launched the Pikes Peak gold rush.

Then twice the confluence nearly destroyed the city it had built. On the night of May nineteenth, eighteen sixty four, Cherry Creek rose in a thunderstorm flood and at least eight people drowned in Denver alone. The old City Hall on Blake Street collapsed and the safe inside it, containing Denver's earliest land records, was lost.

The Rocky Mountain News building, perched on stilts over the creek, went into the water. Years later, construction crews dug pieces of the newspaper's printing press out of fifteen feet of mud and gave them to the Colorado Historical Society. The second flood was on June sixteenth, nineteen sixty five.

Fourteen inches of rain near Larkspur sent a wall of water twenty feet high down Plum Creek into the South Platte. Twenty one people died across the basin. Five thousand structures were destroyed.

The damage came to five hundred and forty three million dollars, equivalent to about four point four billion today. That flood is the reason Chatfield Reservoir sits upstream of here now. The kayak chutes visible in the water as you pass were poured in nineteen seventy five, when Mayor Bill McNichols and Senator Joe Shoemaker built this park on the wreckage of an industrial dumping ground.

The water rushing past your window has buried, built, and been remade more times than the city it gave its name to.