Pueblo, Colorado: Named for a Fort Made of Mud

Pueblo, Colorado, is named for an adobe trading post that had stood empty for years by the time the town was laid out in 1860. Pueblo is Spanish for “town” or “village,” and on the Arkansas River in the 1840s, the traders’ little mud fort was simply known as “the Pueblo.”

The Pueblo on the Arkansas

Wilbur Fisk Stone’s 1918 History of Colorado describes the post as a “habitation built in the style of Bent’s Fort, of adobe.” Who built it is a little murky. Stone says most writers credit an Indian trader named George Simpson and two partners, Doyle and Barclay, in the summer of 1842. The mountain man James Beckwourth claimed he put it up himself around October 1 of that year, but Stone notes that Beckwourth’s “veracity in this and other matters has been seriously doubted.”

You don’t have to take anyone’s word for what the place looked like. Francis Parkman stopped there in August 1846, and in his book The Oregon Trail he described “the low mud walls of the Pueblo” rising among cornfields and meadows. He wasn’t impressed: “It was a wretched species of fort, of most primitive construction, being nothing more than a large, square inclosure, surrounded by a wall of mud, miserably cracked and dilapidated.” Frederick Ruxton, who came through a year later, called it “a small square fort of adobe with circular bastions at the corners, no part of the walls being more than eight feet high.”

Abandoned, then remembered

The Pueblo’s run ended in an attack around Christmas 1854. Stone says that afterward the fort was “deserted and shunned,” and he’s honest that “accounts of this massacre differ materially,” with as many as half a dozen versions. Frank Hall’s 1891 history seems to tell the same story under another name: he calls the adobe fort Nepesta and says it was attacked and dismantled in 1854.

The empty walls still had uses. When settlers formed a town company for Fountain City, about half a mile east, in the winter of 1858, Stone says some of the material for their adobe cabins “was taken from the old Pueblo trading-post.”

Naming the new town

The town that lasted came together in 1860. Stone quotes Milo Lee Whittaker’s 1917 book on Pueblo pioneers, which draws on the records of the Southern Colorado Pioneers’ Association. A first meeting was held on May 22, 1860, and on July 1, 1860, the town was “formally ‘laid out’ and named Pueblo in honor of the old fort which had stood for so many years on the opposite bank of the Arkansas.” Fountain City was soon swallowed up and became East Pueblo.

The U.S. Geological Survey’s Henry Gannett, back in 1905, and the federal government’s current record both give the plain translation: “town” or “village.” So the founders named their town, literally, Town. They just meant a particular one.

Hall says that in his day you could still see the outline of the old fort. The “quadrangular foundations of the adobe walls,” he wrote, were “still visible on the west side of Union avenue, a few rods southeast of the depot of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway.”

Sources & further reading

• Wilbur Fisk Stone, ed., History of Colorado, vol. 1 (1918). “The Pueblo,” its founding in 1842, Simpson versus Beckwourth, and the visits of Francis Parkman (1846) and Frederick Ruxton (1847) (pp. 118–120); the Christmas 1854 attack and its many versions (p. 120); Fountain City and the adobe taken from the old post (p. 146); the meetings of May 22 and July 1, 1860, quoted from Milo Lee Whittaker, and East Pueblo (pp. 152–153).
• Frank Hall, History of the State of Colorado, vol. 3 (1891), pp. 446–447. The adobe fort he calls Nepesta, its destruction in 1854, and the foundations still visible on Union Avenue.
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 255. “A Spanish word meaning ‘town’ or ‘village.’”
• GNIS feature 204798, Pueblo (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record: “A Spanish word meaning ‘town’ or ‘village.’”