Colorado history

Thursday, September 17, 2026

A sandbar in Yuma County becomes a nine-day stand, a Dodger no-hits the Blake Street Bombers in the park that is not supposed to allow that, and a pizza-shaped building on Colfax starts letting people through the wormhole.

Forsyth's scouts dig into a sandbar and the Arikaree gets a name

1868 · Arikaree River / Yuma County, near Wray

At dawn on Sept. 17, 1868, Cheyenne Dog Soldiers, Arapaho, and Lakota warriors hit Major George Forsyth's fifty civilian scouts on the Arikaree Fork of the Republican River, about eighteen miles southeast of present-day Wray. The scouts waded onto a willow sandbar. Nine days later the 10th Cavalry rode in with an ambulance.

Forsyth had been trailing a small raiding party out of Kansas and camped on the north bank the night of the 16th, twelve miles from villages he did not know were there. At first light the horse herd started moving. Then several hundred riders came off the bluffs. The scouts crossed onto a low island in the Arikaree, piled saddles and dead horses into breastworks, and dug rifle pits with knives and tin plates.

Spencer repeating carbines did the rest of the talking. The Cheyenne war leader Roman Nose was killed in one of the first charges. Lieutenant Frederick H. Beecher, nephew of the Brooklyn preacher, was mortally wounded the same day, along with the command's surgeon. Forsyth took a broken leg and cut the bullet out himself. The scouts ate the horses. Two men slipped off at night toward Fort Wallace. On Sept. 25, Capt. Louis Carpenter's company of the 10th Cavalry — Buffalo Soldiers — arrived from Kansas with a field ambulance.

The Army called it a victory. Cheyenne and Lakota accounts treated it as a fight they chose to leave. Casualty counts still do not agree. A 1935 flood erased the original sandbar and swept the 1905 monument off the island. The stones were hauled to the north bank. Wray still holds a reunion on the date. The useful fact for a Thursday in September: the plains east of Denver have a battlefield with no island left on it, named for a lieutenant who did not walk off.

Sources: Wikipedia — Battle of Beecher Island · HISTORY — Cheyenne and Sioux at Beecher's Island · City of Wray — anniversary and reunion · University Press of Colorado — Monnett on the fight

Hideo Nomo no-hits the Rockies in the park that was not supposed to allow it

1996 · Coors Field, Denver

On Sept. 17, 1996, after a two-hour rain delay and a 46-degree night, Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Hideo Nomo threw a no-hitter at Coors Field. The Blake Street Bombers went 0-for-the-evening. It is still the only no-hitter in the building.

Coors Field in 1996 posted a 7.06 combined ERA, the highest single-season park mark in major-league history. Visiting starters that year completed nine innings exactly once, and it was this night. Nomo had already been knocked around in Denver — 12-10 and 16-15 in his two previous Coors starts — and the mound was wet enough that he abandoned the tornado windup after the first inning and pitched from the stretch.

He walked four, struck out eight, and needed 110 pitches. Ellis Burks, hitting .348, went down swinging in the ninth. Vin Scully, calling it from the visiting booth, said the thing that still gets quoted in LoDo: Nomo had done what they said could not be done, not in the Mile High City, not at Coors Field, and thank goodness they saw it in Japan. Official attendance was 50,066. About 30,000 stayed through the delay.

Mike Piazza blamed the humidity. The ball, he said, did not carry the way it usually does here. Nomo's career ERA at Coors, including the no-hitter, is 8.05. Without it, 9.74. Thirty years later the park has hosted one-hitters and a lot of 11-9 games. It has not hosted another no-no. September 17 is the date the thin air took a night off.

Sources: SABR — Nomo no-hits Colorado at Coors Field · MLB — remembering the unlikeliest no-hitter · Denver Post — Coors Field greatest moments · Baseball Almanac — box score

Meow Wolf opens Convergence Station and Sun Valley gets a wormhole

2021 · 1338 1st Street, Sun Valley

On Sept. 17, 2021, Meow Wolf opened Convergence Station in a four-story, 90,000-square-foot building wedged between I-25 and West Colfax. More than 110 Colorado artists helped build it. The architecture still looks like a pizza that fell asleep on the viaduct.

Santa Fe had House of Eternal Return. Las Vegas had Omega Mart. Denver got the largest of the three, on a leftover parcel in Sun Valley that used to be the sort of place you drove past on the way to the mountains. Tickets started at $35 for Colorado residents. Timed entry. A cafe called HELLOFOOD. A 450-person room named Perplexiplex that opened the next night with GRiZ.

The company spent three years and about $60 million, hired hundreds of fabricators, and asked visitors to treat the building as a transit station between worlds that had accidentally stacked on top of each other. You can follow the story or you can just walk into the swamp and the cathedral and lose the afternoon. Both are allowed. That was the point.

Five years later the line on opening weekend is a memory and the building is a regular stop on the visitor map, next to the museum and the ballpark. September 17 is the day Denver decided an art collective from New Mexico could put a portal under a highway and charge admission. The portal is still there. So is the highway.

Sources: Denver Post — opening date and name · 303 Magazine — Convergence Station announced · Denver Gazette — HELLOFOOD and Perplexiplex · Meow Wolf — visit Denver