Colorado State...
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Colorado Counties
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Kiowa County, Colorado
Kiowa County History, Geography, Demographics, Cities and Towns, and Education
Kiowa County is the second least densely populated of the 64 counties of the State of Colorado of the United States. The county population was 1,622 at the 2000 census. The county seat is Eads. The county was named for the Kiowa Nation of Native Americans.
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Named: The county was named for the Kiowa Nation of Native Americans. State & County QuickFacts:
History
On November 29, 1864, more than a decade before Colorado became a state and long before Kiowa County was formed, a massacre of Native Americans, a group of old men, women, and children, occurred on Sand Creek that initially was greeted as a victory in the
Colorado War against hostile Indians; within months, Congressional inquiries revealed the truth, and a national scandal erupted. It happened in what is now Kiowa County, and is known as the Sand Creek Massacre.
Territorial Governor John Evans eventually lost his job for his part in setting up the incident, and Colonel John Chivington, commander of the U.S. forces, was castigated by the United States Congress and the scandal followed him for the rest of his life. Evans would go on to make significant
important contributions to the early Denver community and while Chivington also made some, his reputation remained tainted while Evans is still honored today.
In 2005, final land acquisitions by the National Park Service allowed official designation of the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site, but no park facilities have yet been erected. Only a plaque in the ground acknowledges the site, and it appears that this stone plaque is located in the wrong
place.
In the late 1880s, eastern Colorado attracted a lot of attention by farming interests who didn't yet know that long-term agriculture was unsustainable in this arid landscape, and the railroads were snaking west across the plains towards the gold fields of the Rocky Mountains during the Colorado Gold
Rush. The Missouri Pacific Railroad crossed into what would soon become Kiowa County, Colorado from Kansas in 1887.
Several small camps for railroad workers were established just over the border from Kansas, and beginning after the town of Sheridan Lake, new towns and camps were sequentially named, alphabetically, starting with "A" and proceeding westward along the
railroad line.
Arden, Brandon, Chivington, Diston, Eads, Fergus, Galatea, Haswell, Inman, Joliet, and Kilburn appeared one after another, some developing into towns, others being only a pipe dream in the eyes of developers. Chivington was intended as a major watering stop for the railroad (a 60-room, $10,000
"crown jewel" hotel was initially built there), but the water was too alkaline to use and the trains instead stopped in Kansas to tank up. The hotel was soon torn down, its materials shipped to other Colorado locations to use in constructing other facilities — a common occurrence in late 19th
century Colorado, as boom towns went bust.
Kiowa County was established in 1889, taking its name from the Kiowa Indians who lived in eastern Colorado before the Europeans arrived. Sheridan Lake was the county seat of Kiowa County, and was not at first a stop on the railroad line; only after local citizens built a railroad depot and turned it
over to the Missouri Pacific did the railroad build a telegraph station and make Sheridan Lake a stop. The county seat moved to rival Eads in 1902.
Kiowa County Courthouse, 1903Agriculture in eastern Colorado collapsed in the dust bowl days of the 1930s, today mostly dry-land farms and some ranching interests survive. Colorado's Front Range cities and agriculture interests upstream have acquired most of the water rights, and the groundwater
aquifers are drying up; Kiowa County faces ever-decreasing water supplies and further economic decline.
It is conceivable that much of the county will eventually revert to its original sparse grassland and prairie conditions of the pre-1880s.
Today only Eads along the old railroad line remains as a town of much significance, Eads is the Kiowa county seat and serves the surviving farming and ranching interests, and hosts the county's largest high school. Sheridan Lake does have a combined junior-and-senior high, and still surviving in
some form are Towner, Arlington, Brandon, Chivington, and Haswell.
Neighboring Counties:
- Northeast: Cheyenne County
- East: Greeley County, Kan.
- Southeast: Hamilton County, Kan.; Prowers County
- Southwest: Bent County; Otero County
- West: Crowley County
- Northwest: Lincoln County
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County Resource Guide
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The history of our nation can be seen as a prolonged struggle to define the relative roles and powers of our governments: federal, state, and local. And the names we’ve given our counties, our most locally based jurisdictions, reflects the “characteristic features of
our country!”
But age, size and colorful names of our counties isn’t the only reason to explore counties’ role in American history, or the history of county government itself. In fact, the story of county government reflects the larger meanings of American history.
Today’s counties are the most flexible, locally responsive and creative governments in the US. They are the most diverse, varying in size, population, geography, and governmental structure. In their politics and policies, they express a 1990’s political slogan “Think globally, act locally.” |
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Penn Foster High School
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