William Bent built what came to be called “Bent’s New Fort” at this location, just west of Lamar, Colorado, and near the Arkansas River, when circumstances rendered Bent’s Old Fort unusable.
As you can see in the photo above, today there is little here to commemorate the fort’s existence. There are some National Park Service signs, explaining that Bent’s New Fort was a trading site on the Santa Fe Trail beginning in 1849.
Even though William Bent maintained good trading relationships with Native Americans at his fort, exchanging goods and food for buffalo hides, changes in the fur trade and the ecology of the area limited his financial success. He sold the fort to the U.S. Army in 1860.
In 1905, John Squire Semmons purchased four and a half acres here, including the site once occupied by the fort. He made a down payment of $5.00 and paid a total of $46.60. His descendants have said they plan to preserve the site because of its archeological importance.
This is the Arkansas River, which flows out of the Rocky Mountains. Route 50, visible in the photo above, follows the river through the western high plains and along much of the highway’s climb to the Continental Divide.
Kayakers ride the river, rafters float it, and Christo, the artist known for wrapping buildings in fabric and other large fabric-based installations, once wanted to “wrap” it.
He called his project “Over the River” and planned to suspend almost six miles of translucent fabric panels above the Arkansas between Salida, Colorado (upstream from these photos) and Canon City (downstream). There are 42 miles of river between those two cities, and the installation would have covered eight different parts of the river.
Drivers on Route 50 would have looked down at the top of the fabric, while kayakers and rafters would have floated under it. The installation would have taken two and a half years to build and been in place for two weeks.
The project won approvals from federal, state, and local governments, but there was also determined opposition, and legal challenges delayed planning and installation for five years. This despite Christo’s willingness to pay all costs through sales of his art, including, as his website explained at the time, “all direct expenses to create the temporary work of art, as well as costs that result from it (e.g. environmental analysis, traffic control, trash removal and sanitation).”
The installation was originally planned for the summer of 2011, but the conception, planning, and proposal process spanned twenty years, and Jeanne-Claude, Christo’s wife and artistic collaborator, passed away during that time.
Christo turned 80 in 2015, and in early 2017, he announced he was dropping the project. His stated reasons were the legal delays, the total length of time the project consumed, and, because the installation would have been on federal land, his personal distaste for benefiting, as he saw it, the project’s new “landlord,” recently elected president Donald Trump.
Salida, Colorado is just 23 miles from Monarch Pass, where Route 50 crosses the Continental Divide.
The Arkansas River flows through Salida, 60 miles from the river’s headwaters, formed by Rocky Mountain snow melt near Leadville, Colorado. The Arkansas is the sixth-longest river in the U.S., and 1,400 miles downstream the water you see passing through Salida will flow into the Mississippi River.
There’s already plenty of water for kayaking in the river, though, so head on over to the Boathouse Cantina, where you can watch the kayakers while you munch.
