On September 8, 1908, a fire broke out on the second floor of Denver’s Belmont Hotel, claiming as many as fifteen lives and injuring several others in one of the city’s deadliest fires. After the fire, authorities suspected that theft may have been a…

The Columbine High School massacre occurred on April 20, 1999 in Columbine, Colorado. The shooting was perpetrated by two students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who killed 13 people and wounded 24 others before taking their own lives. At the time, it…

The 1891 Cotopaxi train robbery typified a new era of crime in the American West—robbing trains carrying railroad and federal property—and set off one of the highest-profile manhunts of the era. The robbers, Peg Leg Watson and Bert Curtis, took thousands…

The Denver Police Department is the primary law enforcement apparatus for the city of Denver. Officially formed in 1859 as a small group of marshals, today’s Denver Police Department consists of more than 1,500 officers in sixteen units active in a…

The Denver Police Department was formed in 1859 to bring order to a rowdy, dusty mining camp. The department grew up with the city and with broader trends in American policing. Denver Police spent most of the late nineteenth century focused on drunks,…

Elijah McClain (1996–2019) was a massage therapist in Aurora who was walking down the street when approached and killed by Aurora Police and Aurora Fire Rescue officers on August 24, 2019. The death of McClain, a young Black man whom his family described…

The so-called "Bloody Espinosas" were two brothers—some contend they were cousins—and a nephew who terrorized southern Colorado in the early 1860s. On their vengeful rampage, Felipe, Vivian, and José Espinosa killed dozens of people and remain Colorado’s…

In October 1875, the mutilated bodies of four Italian men were discovered in a house on Lawrence Street, shocking Denver citizens. Police eventually captured and charged nine members of a gang known only as the “Italian Banditti,” all of whom pled guilty…

The Lake County War of 1874–75 grew out of a personal dispute over land and water rights in an area where increasing settlement was making both resources relatively scarce. The conflict ultimately turned into a test of law, justice, and state legitimacy…

Lynching, a form of vigilante punishment involving mob execution, has an active history in Colorado. Between 1859 and 1919, Coloradans carried out 175 lynchings. Lynching is usually associated with the Reconstruction Era in the American South, but before…

The so-called Nude Duel was a legend that sprouted from a drunken brawl involving two well-known madams—Mattie Silks and Kate Fulton—at Denver Gardens in 1877. Although the original accounts of the fight are hardly remarkable, the story took on a life of…

On November 16, 1900, a white mob in Limon chained Preston Porter, Jr., a fifteen-year-old Black railroad worker, to a vertical steel rail, slung a rope around his neck, and burned him alive. Porter was accused of raping and murdering a local white girl;…

Alcohol prohibition in Colorado (1916–33) was a Progressive Era experiment, based on reform-minded and religious sentiments, to completely ban the sale and transport of alcohol. While the intention of reformers was to reduce violence, drunkenness, and…

The Reynolds Gang, formally members of Company A of Wells’s Battalion, Third Texas Cavalry, was a group of about fifteen Confederate cavalrymen who conducted raids and robberies in the South Park area near the end of the Civil War. Initially considered…

Seeing them as public nuisances that bred sin, enraged citizens burned down several saloons and dance halls in Denver during the 1860s. One of the first and most significant of these attacks was the burning of the River House Saloon on Ferry Street on…

Thomas “Black Jack” Ketchum was a famous outlaw in the late 1800s who, along with his brother Sam and their gang, was responsible for a number of high-profile robberies and murders. While his criminal career achieved great notoriety, it was Ketchum’s…

William Barclay “Bat” Masterson (1853–1921) was a US marshal whose life and work in the American west during the mid-to-late 1800s granted him legendary status in the region’s folklore. In Colorado, where he spent several years during the 1880s,…