The Royal Gorge is a geographic fact before it is a historical one. The Arkansas River here occupies a canyon so narrow at the bottom that in the deepest sections the original railroad bed was cantilevered out from the canyon wall because there was no floor to set it on. The granite walls are Precambrian—among the oldest exposed rock in Colorado—and they produce acoustic effects that have been noted by everyone who has spent time in the gorge from the earliest written accounts forward. Sound in the canyon does not behave the way sound behaves in open country. It reflects, concentrates, and arrives from directions that do not correspond to its source.
The archive is interested in the canyon as an acoustic and geographic phenomenon, and as a documentary one. The railroad war that was fought here in 1878–79—between the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe and the Denver and Rio Grande Western over the right of way through the only practical rail route between eastern Colorado and the silver camps of the San Juans—produced a body of conflicting records that neither company was interested in preserving in full. Court filings survive. The financial settlement that ended the conflict survives. What does not survive cleanly are the records of what actually happened in the gorge during the months when both companies had armed men occupying sections of the canyon simultaneously.
The archive is also interested in the gorge as a site of acoustic anomaly. The canyon geometry creates resonance effects that engineers and physicists have studied in limited ways. What the technical literature does not fully account for are the reports of sound behavior in the gorge that predate the railroad and persist through the present: sounds that arrive without a visible source, sounds that are heard by some people in a group and not others, sounds that are described consistently across accounts separated by decades.
Branch Investigations
The Royal Gorge archive is in early development. The following threads are identified for investigation.