Get an ADT-Monitored Home Security System in Rifle, Colorado

Rifle is a home rule municipality in and the most populous community of Garfield County, Colorado, United States. The population was 10,437 at the 2020 census. Rifle is a regional center of the cattle ranching industry located along Interstate 70 and the Colorado River just east of the Roan Plateau, which dominates the western skyline of the town. The town was founded in 1882 by Abram Maxfield, and was incorporated in 1905 along Rifle Creek, near its mouth on the Colorado. The community takes its post from the creek.

The land that Rifle resides upon was like in the heart of the Ute Nation, a classification of the Indigenous peoples of the Great Basin. The most common tribe in the Place were the Tabagauche, who hunted and lived upon the house slightly to the east of Rifle in the Roaring Fork Valley. Due to their location, the Tabagauche were somewhat less exposed to white settlers, and to some extent their ways remained less altered than other indigenous peoples. In 1878 Nathan Meeker was appointed as the director of the White River Ute Agency (the town of Meeker 40 miles north of Rifle was named after him). Meeker had no training or knowledge of Ute culture, and launched into a disturb centered upon sedentary agriculture and European-American schooling. As this clashed bearing in mind the culture of the nomadic Utes, he was met once resistance. It anything came to a head subsequent to Meeker had the pasture and racetrack for the Ute’s horses plowed under. The thing that followed is known as the Meeker Massacre in 1879, during which Meeker and his 10 employees were killed. The aftermath of the warfare resulted in nearly everything members of the Ute nation monster forcibly removed from Colorado into eastern Utah, although the federal dealing out had formerly guaranteed them the land on which they were residing.

Rifle became more and more fixed as the 19th century gave pretentiousness to the 20th. In 1889, the railroad cut through from the east and done in Rifle for a while back connecting lines were completed. This opened in the works the floodgates for extra travelers, settlers, and trade. Long drives of cattle higher than the mountains towards the Front Range and Denver became a event of the past. Rifle was now a flourishing hub for commerce. If it needed to be shipped east to a buyer’s market, or shipped west into ranching country, it came through town.