Cañon City occupies a position between two forms of confinement: the prison to its east, which has held the state’s most serious offenders since before Colorado achieved statehood, and the Royal Gorge to its west, where the Arkansas River has cut a canyon a thousand feet deep through granite that was already old when the first human beings walked this ground. The archive does not treat this as metaphor. It treats it as geography, and geography determines what gets in, what gets out, and what stays.
The prison record is among the most extensive in the state. What the archive is reviewing is not the criminal record itself but the labor record—specifically the practice of leasing convict labor to private enterprises, which in the cañon country meant principally the railroads and the coal operations. Convict leasing was standard practice in this period and was used, among other places, on the construction and maintenance of infrastructure in the Royal Gorge corridor. The labor records for this period are incomplete in ways that are not entirely explained by archival loss.
The Royal Gorge railroad war of 1878–79 was fought between the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe and the Denver and Rio Grande over the right to lay track through the only practical route between Cañon City and the silver camps to the west. The conflict involved hired guns, court injunctions, and the occupation of the gorge by both sides at various points. It ended with a financial settlement. The records that each company produced during the conflict do not agree on the sequence of events, and there are periods in the documentary record where both sets of records go quiet at the same time. The archive considers this more interesting than the gun battles.
Branch Investigations
The Cañon City archive is in early development. The following threads are identified for investigation.