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…

When Denver was founded in 1858, the city’s wood-frame buildings and the windy, arid nature of the surrounding plains made fire a constant concern. Despite the threat that fire posed to the budding city, early efforts to form an official fire department…

One of the most destructive wildfires in Colorado history, the East Troublesome Fire began on October 14, 2020, in the central Rocky Mountains east of Troublesome Creek in Grand County. A week later, high winds whipped the fire into a 100,000-acre…

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…

On March 23, 1895, a blaze at the St. James Hotel in Denver killed four firefighters, three of whom were black. Despite ongoing racial tensions that had intensified during the depths of an economic depression, the city mourned all four men together,…

In 1894 a fire at Denver’s original Union Depot destroyed much of the building within an hour. The burning of the railroad station, which had been completed in 1881 and was regarded as one of the largest and grandest in the West, shocked Denver citizens…

Coloradans have coevolved with fire. From early indigenous people to Euro-American colonizers, to modern government agents, humans have influenced the direction of fire as much as fire has influenced the course of people. The fire-adapted landscapes we…