Tuesday, October 6, 2026

The People's Court hangs James Gordon, because Leavenworth would not

1860 · Denver City

On Oct. 6, 1860, Denver hanged James Gordon for killing a German immigrant in a saloon. A Kansas judge had already let him go. The city still had no real court, so it built one behind a stable.

Denver in the fall of 1860 had a population the city later counted at 4,749, and a theory of justice that fit in a vacant lot. James Gordon, 23, educated as an engineer and the owner of a saloon, had a reputation the execution catalogs summarize as three or four men already dead before he got here. In late July he got drunk in a Denver bar and killed an unarmed German immigrant. Wikipedia's Denver timeline calls the man Jacob Gantz. The Arapahoe County sheriff history, in the paragraph about the bottle and the hair, calls him John, and at least one catalog of Colorado executions does too. The bullet is not in dispute. The first name is.

Gordon ran for Kansas. Sheriff William Middaugh went after him. In Leavenworth a lawyer told the court that Denver City sat in Montana County, not Arapahoe, and the judge decided no United States court had the case. Gordon walked out. A crowd of German residents, furious at the killing, nearly lynched him in the street. Middaugh got him back, and the two of them came into Denver on the morning of Sept. 28. The People's Court sat that afternoon behind the Express Coach Company stables. Twelve jurors. About a thousand people watching. The defense was insanity and drunkenness. It lost. The sentence was the next Saturday.

That Saturday was Oct. 6. Alice Polk Hill, writing the pioneers' version, put the hour at sunset, the mountains in the kind of light people use when they want a hanging to sound like a painting. The Rev. Dr. Rankin prayed. Gordon knelt. The crowd, several thousand by the catalog's count, stood with hats off. He thanked the people who had tried to get him banished instead, asked them to speak kindly to his mother, and asked Middaugh to set the knot so it would break his neck. Earlier he had written the line the sheriff's office still quotes: to whiskey he attributed all his troubles, and what he had caused other people.

The Denver timeline names Alexander Cameron Hunt as the judge. Hunt later became territorial governor, from 1867 to 1869, and the state archives remember him first as judge of the vigilante committee, the man the camps picked when the desperadoes got ahead of the statutes. A study of the case says the first panel resigned after Hiram P. Bennet refused to prosecute in front of them. The useful fact is the coarser one. The nearest real courtroom was about 700 miles east. On this date Denver did the job itself, in the open, and called it a court.

Sources: Wikipedia — Timeline of Denver, Oct. 6, 1860 · Arapahoe County Sheriff — Middaugh and the Gordon case · Alice Polk Hill — Colorado Pioneers in Picture and Story · Colorado State Archives — Alexander Cameron Hunt

Loveland spins Chair 1 and declares the ski season open

2009 · Loveland Ski Area

On Oct. 6, 2009, Loveland opened on Catwalk, Mambo, and Homerun, the first resort in North America to start, and the hill's earliest day in 40 years. A handful of people had slept in the lot. Arapahoe Basin waited until Friday.

The lifts started and the argument started with them. The Denver Post called Loveland the first ski area in North America to open. The Associated Press, filing from Georgetown, was slightly more cautious and said it was believed to be the first U.S. resort to start. Las Vegas Ski and Snowboard Resort was opening the same Wednesday, four hours later, which is how a continental claim gets a footnote. More than 100 people were in line when Chair 1 began to move, about 50 miles west of Denver. A handful had slept in the parking lot for the first chair. The ticket was $44.

It was the earliest opening in 40 years, and it was not a gift from the sky. Trail crews had started making snow on Sept. 21, Eric Johnstone told the Post, because the nights had gone cold enough to use. They opened 1,000 vertical feet on Catwalk, Mambo, and Homerun, and planned to move the guns and open more. Arapahoe Basin announced it would open Friday, which would be the earliest day in A-Basin's 64-year history. The Front Range does this every autumn. It pretends winter is a rumor, then lets one hill charge you to ride a thousand feet of the rumor.

The morning in Denver helped. The airport-era table puts the low on Oct. 6, 2009, at 27 degrees, one shy of the date record. The National Weather Service keeps that record at 26, set in 1995. Either way it was a jacket morning on the plains and a workable morning for a snow gun above the tunnel. First chair does not care which book you trust. It cares that the snow stayed where they put it.

Sources: Denver Post — Loveland opens, Oct. 6, 2009 · Associated Press via Denver Post — first U.S. resort · NWS Boulder — Denver October normals and records

October 6 has been 87 degrees, and it has failed to clear 35

2020 · Denver

Denver's Oct. 6 record high is 87, tied in 1975 and 2020. The coldest high is 35, in 2000. The date has also smoked over from forest fires, gusted to 50 downtown, and managed half an inch of snow.

The National Weather Service October page for Denver gives this date a normal high of 70 and a normal low of 41. The record high is 87, set in 2020 and marked as tied with an earlier year. The airport-era daily table names the other year: 1975. Shorts weather, both times, a week into October. The other end of the closet is 2000, when the high only reached 35, the coldest maximum on the books. The record low is 26, in 1995. The wettest Oct. 6 is a modest 0.31 inches, in 1921. The snowiest is half an inch, in 2018. This is not a date that does blizzards. It does arguments.

The older narrative, the one the Weather Service wrote for the week, is mostly wind and a little theater. In 1900 northwest winds downtown held at 40 and gusted to 50. In 1903 they did it again, and the wind warmed the city to 71 with a low of only 46, which is a chinook doing a small impression of itself. In 1910 light smoke from forest fires drifted over town. In 1976 an arctic front put light snow on the foothills above 6,000 feet. None of this is the September snow of 1936. It is October being October, which in Denver means the coat and the T-shirt are both correct and you will pick the wrong one.

If you were at Loveland on this date in 2009, you already know which one the mountain picked.

Sources: NWS Boulder — Denver October normals and records · ThorntonWeather — Oct. 6 to 12 Denver weather history · Extreme Weather Watch — Denver on October 6