(gentle music) - Dark clouds hung low along the lofty range.

When broke the storm, hell's fury seemed unleashed to wreck and ruin all the universe.

The lightning played among the giant peaks, and crashing thunder smote the mountain side.

The awful din of elements at war was echoed from the canyon depths below.

Clouds burst asunder and a deluge came.

It was thus that nature in her maddest mood sent down the raging waters of the flood to scourge the fertile valleys of the plain.

Fair Pueblo man had builded there, was crushed and maimed, now prostrate bleeding lies but not for long.

The spirit that has made this wonder city of the west survives, and men will build with bigger, broader plans to meet the wrath of nature, unafraid.

Walt Drummond.

(film reel whirring) - [Narrator] In early June, 1921, a great flood struck the city of Pueblo, Colorado.

The mighty Arkansas River joined forces with a volatile Fountain Creek, to deliver a near fatal blow to this thriving community of immigrants and blue collar workers.

100 years later, we remember their stories.

- [Announcer] This program was made possible by the following.

The History Colorado State Historical Fund.

- [Announcer] Supporting projects throughout the state to preserve, protect and interpret Colorado's architectural and archeological treasures.

History Colorado State Historical Fund.

Create the future, honor the past.

- [Announcer] Pueblo county, promoting the health, safety, welfare and quality living environment of Pueblo county residents and visitors.

Encouraging compatible and sustainable land use development within unincorporated Pueblo county.

Pueblo Urban Renewal Authority.

Renewal through perseverance, preservation and partnership.

Celebrating the resilience of our community since 1959.

For more information, visit Puebloura.org.

The city of Pueblo.

From outdoor recreation to cultural traditions.

Offering opportunities for families to explore and create lifelong memories.

PB&T Bank.

Local people making local decisions since 1889.

And Wilcoxson Wealth Management.

With additional funding provided in memory of Deanna E. La Camera by Hassel and Marianne Ledbetter.

And by members like you.

Thank you.

With special thanks to the Denver Public Library, History Colorado and the Colorado Office of Film, Television and Media.

And to these organizations.

(soft music) (somber music) - [Narrator] The outpost known as El Pueblo was founded in 1842 at the confluence of Fountain Creek and the Arkansas River.

Diverse from the beginning, it drew traders from various countries whose wives included Native American, Spanish and Mexican women.

In 1848, after the Mexican-American War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Arkansas River ceased to be a national border, but it continued to attract the world to its banks.

- When you cross the Union Av Bridge and you see those flags flying over the bridge and over the historic Arkansas River channel, each of those flags represents a country that owned this land at some point in history.

Obviously, initially it was native Americans, and at one point in time, it was owned by the Spanish.

At one point in time, it was owned by the French.

It eventually became the United States of America.

- [Narrator] The outpost location at the confluence of two rivers was both highly convenient and incredibly risky.

In this semi-arid high desert ecosystem, even the moderate seasons are unforgiving, and given to sudden cataclysmic weather events.

So in the mid 19th century, at the base of the Rocky Mountains, life was difficult for early explorers, trappers, traders, and miners here.

And in 1869, Pueblo became home to Charles Goodnight, one of the most iconic cattlemen in the country and the inventor of the Chuck wagon; a kitchen on wheels and prototype for today's food truck.

- We have Goodnight bringing his cattle drive up here.

He established his headquarters here.

One of his barns still stands today.

And so it just, it started growing from there.

But the river always had its way.

(dramatic music) - [Narrator] Before the flood, Pueblo was quickly becoming a modern city.

A bustling center of industry and culture on the southern front range of Colorado.

Incorporated in 1870, Pueblo grew by absorbing local communities.

South Pueblo, Central Pueblo, and later Bessemer.

- Pueblo was more of a railroad town.

There was a meat packing plant here.

So cattle was brought in from all over.

Farmers locally would truck it in, but a lot of it came in by rail.

- [Narrator] By the early 1900s, Pueblo was home to the largest steel mill west of the Mississippi River.

- Was Colorado coal and iron in the early days.

We were known as the steel city of the west, or the little Pittsburgh of the west.

- When the steel mill gets there, then it becomes an actual city.

'cause you need lots of people that work in a steel mill.

And you need lots of people to work in the secondary industries that serve the steel industry and serve the people who work there.

- [Narrator] Originally established to produce steel rails for the Denver and Rio Grande railroads expanding narrow gauge empire, by 1910, Colorado Fuel and Iron was the largest employer in Southern Colorado, accounting for nearly 10% of the entire Colorado workforce.

- One of the reasons why CF&I was located in Pueblo was, it's in the middle of the basic materials needed to make steel.

Coal from the fields in Florence and in Trinidad.

Iron ore was mined in Orient in the San Luis Valley.

Water was fairly readily available.

And CF&I grew at a time when railroads were in need of rail, and railroad fastenings and spike and other building materials.

It kind of all came together at the same time.

- The steel industry really did change the face of Pueblo.

It also created the opportunity for all of the individuals to come from all over the world.

- You had a huge influx of immigrants in the early 1900s.

And my understanding is you could get free passage to Pueblo from your country of origin if you agreed to sign on to work at the steel mill.

And so thousands of people from all over the world basically came to Colorado with the understanding that they would work in the steel mill.

- There was a lot of industry that a lot of these immigrants moved here and came to the United States, but specifically to Pueblo because of the steel mill.

And a lot of agriculture out in the county.

So you had a lot of the Italian families, the Mexican families that farmed.

And so that's why they were all in Pueblo.

That's why we're such a great melting pot of everything.

It's what makes Pueblo so unique and so special.

- Yeah, well, Pueblo was a real boom town of course, at about that time.

It had been ever since the railroad came about 50 years before the flood.

Pueblo had really been on a roll.

Second biggest city in the state.

- [Narrator] With electric trolleys, paved streets, sewers and horseless carriages, Pueblo was transitioning from frontier town to modern city.

The wealthy class found sufficient resources to build landmarks, some of which remain today.

The Union Depot was built in 1890, as was the 1100-seat Grand Opera House.

A new home for city government, Memorial Hall, was built in 1919 to remember soldiers who perished in World War I.

The steel and cattle industries were enabled by a railroad hub that connected the region to an expanding Western empire.

In 1920, the 48 states that then made up the United States of America had more than 106 million residents.

The state of Colorado accounted for just under one million of those.

And the growing city of Pueblo was home to nearly 50,000.

Only 44 years old, the Centennial State was just beginning to find its place in the new modern era, just as Pueblo was defining itself too.

(menacing music) Despite their reputation as hardscrabble settlers, residents of Pueblo were unprepared for the misfortunes about to be visited on them.

A series of tragic and deadly events that would precede and follow the flood of 1921.

- If you think about the historical timeline for this, the First World War is from 1914 to 1918.

Spanish flu pandemic, which hit Pueblo particularly hard, was in 1918.

The flood was 1921.

In 1929, they had the Great Depression.

And in 1931, they had the Dust Bowl.

And the resilience of the community, the resilience of the people, I think is just really a testament.

And keep in mind there were no stimulus checks.

There was no unemployment.

The people just decided they were gonna rebuild their community.

- Pueblo before the flood was a city of juxtapositions.

There was this aspiration to be a progressive era model city, but at the same time, having a steel mill and having just some really extreme poverty in different neighborhoods.

We start off with this much more diverse history than a lot of other cities in Colorado and really in the United States.

- I think what's really unique when you look at the number one and number two employers, CF&I, and also the Nuckolls Packing Company, is they're fairly close to each other.

They're within about a mile and a half of each other.

And in between those two large employers, you'll find all of the ethnic neighborhoods.

From the Slovenians to Czechoslovakians, to Yugoslavians, to Hungarians, to Mexicans, to Italians.

All of them falling into their own unique kind of neighborhood kind of cultural subset.

- [Narrator] Colorado Fuel and Iron and the Nuckolls meat packing plant needed workers who could stand up to demanding physical labor.

Immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe streamed into the country, and made their way to Pueblo, where the jobs were plentiful.

- So unlike cities back in the Midwest or back east, Pueblo was micro segregated.

So if you were Italian, you might be comfortable living in the 1100 block of Elm, but in the 1300 block of Elm, you might have Greek residents.

And so we have these incredible groups that are coming from, actually first kind of Northern Europe and then Eastern Europe.

- Some of them, particularly Eastern Europeans, are specifically recruited, 'cause that is the kind of people who worked steel in the east.

And they figured that you might as well get them to do it out here.

A lot of people came north to work in the steel mill.

Mexican, Mexican-Americans, that sort of makes the community even more diverse than Pittsburgh or any of the Eastern or Midwestern steel towns.

- [Narrator] The ethnic diversity of Pueblo was evident in the fact that 40 languages were spoken by employees at the steel mill.

And more than two dozen foreign language newspapers were published in the city.

By the 1920s, immigrants accounted for nearly 20% of the city's population.

(suspenseful music) As spring gave way to summer in 1921, Pueblo's diverse communities were about to meet the unifying force of nature, in the form of a weather system rolling in off the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

- During the spring and early summer months, we have a lot of snow runoff from higher peaks just to the west across the continental divide.

And the mountains basically were acting as a lifting mechanism to get that air to rise quickly, generating showers and thunderstorms.

Lots of heavy rain fell on the second, even more so happened on the third and the fourth.

- Pueblo exists because it is where Fountain Creek meets the Arkansas River, or essentially where the Arkansas River intersects with the front range.

So the flood plain is at the intersection of those two bodies of water.

- [Narrator] The great flood of 1921 was not the first flood to hit Pueblo, only the deadliest.

Prior to 1921, at least 10 floods had been recorded, including one on May 30th, 1894.

The 1894 flood, which claimed five lives and caused $2 million of damage, prompted the building of levees 18 feet tall, that were designed to protect against flows as high as 40,000 cubic feet per second.

But it wasn't enough.

- Flooding was always a problem in Pueblo.

All along the front range, water comes out of the mountains very quickly during flood season.

- [Narrator] While there were no official measurements of rainfall during the 1921 flood, this was a weather event of epic proportions.

- Based on eyewitness accounts, you couldn't see across the road.

It was coming down in sheets.

One guy said he got five inches of rain in 30 minutes, which is 10 inches an hour.

That's unbelievable how much rain that actually is.

And some people were reporting that it had total rainfall depths of 14 inches.

When you look at modern day designs for engineering, you look at what they call 100-year storm, or a 1% annual chance of a storm and that's what we design most of infrastructure for.

You've heard reports of horses dying in a field just from drowning in the rain.

Well, if it's raining 10 inches in an hour, even if it's not a major tributary, 10 inches of rain is gonna make a huge impact on the field.

- [Narrator] First person accounts of that tragic weekend in June of 1921, survive in the form of letters and oral histories.

- Hazel Waldron had just graduated from Central High School.

And on June 7th, wrote a letter to her mother to let her know that she was okay.

- [Hazel] Dearest mother, I suppose that you, like everyone else, have heard that Pueblo is swept clear off the map.

But I want to tell you that the Mesa is still left here.

It is real hard to describe what an evening Friday night was, and no one who did not go through it can understand how terrible things were.

It began to rain about three o'clock, and then at five, it hailed.

At six o'clock, the whistles for high water began to blow and they blew until nine when the waterworks was underwater.

At 8:30, the lights went out and at nine the telephone connections were gone.

Hazel G. Waldron.

- [Narrator] Bernard Kelly had just completed his last day of eighth grade at St. Patrick's School.

At the time, his pressing concern was how he was going to acquire a new suit with long pants to wear to Central High School next fall.

But that was about to become the least of his concerns.

In his written account of the flood, Kelly remembers people rushing to see the swollen river as it approached the top of the levee.

- [Bernard] A kind of holiday spirit took over the town as if the banshee voice of the siren announced good tidings.

Hundreds of Pueblo-ans hurried from their homes to the river banks, thrilled at the sight of the angry, high water.

The scene was dramatic, no doubt about that.

Tree trunks, lumber, demolished houses and the bodies of animals swept by in the muddy water.

The water whipped by perilously close to the levee tops, but the crowd stayed on enchanted.

The Arkansas overflowed it's channel at 8:45 p.m. near Main Street.

The crowd on the Union Avenue viaduct saw the black water racing through the Depot yards.

The babble of excitement suddenly choking to a gasp.

Like a blast of canon, a crash of thunder came then a fresh deluge of rain.

The cloud burst, which had pelted the planes to the west all afternoon, finally had arrived over Pueblo.

It was almost impossible to breathe.

Our party of five ran toward the south bank, which was the long bluff on which our house stood.

We arrived home drenched, but we were able to tell the exciting story to the stay-at-homes.

"But look out there," my father said.

Out of our front window, I could see a red glare.

"That's a fire," he said.

Bernard Kelly.

- [Cora] Read the worst you can and believe it.

I shall not try to describe it, except to say the stricken district is utter disillusion.

The newspaper writers with their facts cannot give you half of the picture.

Fires lit up the scene, the roar of waters and crashing of timbers and cries of people for aid.

With lightning flashing and thunder rolling, it's no wonder people thought the end of the world had come.

They saw men shoot their families and then themselves.

Mrs. Cora Rockefeller.

- It's almost like before 9/11, you can't perceive of something of that magnitude until it happens.

And so people, will there be a flood and maybe there'll be some water in my house, but they didn't respond quickly, 'cause I don't think they could conceive of the order of magnitude of the disaster coming.

And so I think a lot of people did hear the warning sirens and they did hear the policemen warning them, and they just stayed behind 'cause they didn't wanna leave and they didn't think it was gonna be that bad.

So Pueblo had just done a huge flood control project, 15, 20 years before.

So if you're living down there, you assume that you were protected by the government, and they had already done levee walls and things were protected.

(soft music) - [Narrator] For those who ignored the warnings, the quickly rising floodwaters were unforgiving.

One victim of the flood was a German immigrant by the name of Wilhelm Korber.

His grandson, Pueblo historian, John Korber, remembers his father telling him about that night.

- The night of the flood, my father was on one of the last D&RG trains coming in from Salida, but the water was already about knee deep.

So he had walked across that and up at the blocks.

And when he got there, my mother told him that they were forecasting more water coming in, and that maybe he should go down and bring her father up to the house.

So he attempted it.

He went down and talked to him, but he was a stubborn old German.

He wasn't about to leave his house.

So the next time my dad saw him, they had bodies laid out at, I think it was 7th and Main Street.

My dad was looking around, but he could not spot the body.

One of the people from the mortuary says, "Well, did he have a ring or anything?"

"Yes, he had a ring."

So they started looking for his ring and that's how they identified the body.

He had not made it out of the flood.

The flood took him from his little house, and it floated over to where Pryor's Furniture used to be.

And that's where he was found.

- [Narrator] While estimates of economic loss were quickly assessed, human suffering and loss were much more difficult to quantify.

And while the actual death toll from the great flood continues to be debated to this day, early estimates range from dozens to thousands.

- The first thing you have to understand when you talk about casualties, is that the people who are running Pueblo had no interest in documenting the exact number of casualties.

The estimates that appear in the paper immediately afterwards, suggest that casualties run between about 150 and 250, which is obviously a terrible, terrible tragedy.

And I don't mean to say that it wasn't.

It's very important.

Any town that loses 150 to 250 people, something terrible has happened there.

- We had large neighborhoods like Peppersauce Bottom and the Grove.

We have lots of immigrant groups, people just settling in kind of barrios down by the river, and they couldn't speak English.

They couldn't understand the warnings.

- Many people here who are, I guess you'd call 'em undocumented now.

I don't think it mattered then too much.

And also what I found in the papers afterward, was for years, ads would pop up in the paper from other cities, looking for people who may have been in Pueblo during the flood.

People came through and disappeared.

And they might've been on a train that capsized, they might've been caught downtown at that very horrible first night.

And also they didn't really pay that much attention to minorities.

You would have, one of the entries said, "Colored family at 234, south fifth."

And they didn't know how many people were in the family.

So that was one of the reasons for the loss of life being so hard to pin down.

- People are still studying the 1921 flood to this day.

We have graduate students coming from universities who are still digging into the story and still not finding all of the answers.

- They were finding bodies up until, the last one I saw was 1929.

They found a skeleton.

And the skeleton still had a ring and it was a woman.

Mrs. Edward Kendall.

Woman in those days didn't have first names in the paper.

They were Ms., Mrs or a widow.

They found her 40 miles east of town, and it was a person who had been missing from the flood.

(menacing music) - [Narrator] As water surged through Pueblo Union Depot, two passenger trains were caught in the flood.

With an estimated 200 passengers onboard, the trains were trapped by the rising floodwaters and debris.

- The early descriptions is that the people who stayed on the trains was almost a party.

They thought this was quite interesting, that all this water was around them.

So they had no idea the danger they were in.

So you had train number 14 and train number three, basically parked side by side, right at the edge of the Arkansas River that was in flood.

And with all the wood and debris floating up against, next to the cars, it just kind of lifted them up off and then in slow motion, they began to turn over.

- And we have photographs of what looks like a toy train just flipped and twisted and turned.

And we've learned that approximately 200 passengers that were on that train.

I can't imagine that they were all rescued, but they do indicate that most of all of those passengers were rescued and put on the upper floors of the Nuckolls Packing Company.

- They lost over 1400 rail cars, I believe were destroyed.

Almost 50 locomotives.

It was the largest single monetary loss was to the railroads.

- Of all of them, the Rio Grande suffered the most damage.

Its Walker yard was pretty much totally destroyed, and that was their main switching yard at the time.

The tracks through Union Depot were buried in about 18 inches of silt, and piles of lumber stacked up underneath all of the railroad bridges.

It took about two years before the railroads got back to what they called normal activity.

- [Narrator] Union Avenue and Pueblo Union Depot remain landmarks of a time when the railroad was the heart and soul of the city.

Before the flood, hundreds of freight cars and eight to 10 passenger trains passed through the Depot each day.

And it was here that travelers from the east got their first glimpse of the Rocky Mountains and the mighty Arkansas River.

- [Wade] Pueblo before the flood, there is no I-25, there's no interstate.

You get into this city from the railroad.

And so that part of the city that is our main gateway now was non-existent back then.

- At the time of the flood, you had four major railroads serving Pueblo.

The Santa Fe-Rio Grande, Missouri Pacific and the Colorado and Southern.

Pueblo was a major railroad hub.

Just at CF&I, there was over 500 car loads a day delivered to the mill, loads in and out.

So it's hard for us to comprehend the amount of traffic that flowed through Pueblo.

- Union Avenue was a hotspot.

Partly because of the railroad, there were a number of hotels.

There were rooms available above every kind of establishment, but also rooms were for other uses.

This was also a big, red light district.

- Well, Union Avenue was more famous probably for its bars than anything else, but there were clothing stores that catered to the working class scattered along Union Avenue.

Restaurants, flop houses, other institutions were located there.

- Union Depot, which is another interesting picture with its tall clock tower.

After '21, the clock tower changed.

And if you were to step outside and look over there today, the clock face is even with the roof line that is behind it.

- And so as a result of the flood, it was determined that the depot tower would have to come down.

And so, they took that cantilevered section, the 15 to 20 feet out of the clock, that only became visible from three sides, not four.

- [Narrator] Just down the street from Union Depot, was the Mountain States Telephone & Telegraph office.

As the floodwaters continued to rise, the staff of young women stayed at their posts.

A simple act of duty that may have saved many lives.

- [Operator] Warn everybody.

Get them out of the low country.

- The phone company was on D Street.

So they're just a block off of the river.

It had been raining all afternoon.

- [Woman] I had been working for the Mountain States Telephone & Telegraph company for about two years.

When I heard the flood was coming, I was off duty on a date, but I rushed over to our office 'cause I knew I would be needed.

Sure enough, we started calling people who lived near the river and downstream, warning them to get out of their homes.

- They were making phone calls.

I mean, just to every single living human being that would pick up a phone and spread the word that water was on its way, and it wasn't just your typical rainstorm.

- The banks had already overflowed.

And so water started coming into the building.

The switchboards are all run on electricity, and the girls were getting kinda nervous.

And then the power went out.

- [Woman] We helped so many people get out in time.

We called until the phone lines went down.

By then, we were stuck in the building as the whole first floor was underwater.

- And so they grabbed what they could.

Records, books, things like that, and moved up to the second floor.

In all of the madness, somebody noticed over in the corner an old Victrola.

And of course a Victrola doesn't need electricity.

It's hand powered and it has the big megaphone.

So they decided to keep themselves sane, little entertainment.

They crank the Victrola and put that record on, and this would kinda help get them through the night.

- [Woman] In late June, the city awarded all of us operators, a bronze star medal for our valor on behalf of the whole city of Pueblo.

- [Narrator] At the time of the flood, Rush's lumber yard was one of five lumber businesses operating in downtown Pueblo, founded by Josiah Rush in 1909.

Now, his great grandson, David Rush runs the business.

- Mainly what was sold here were building materials and mainly lumber.

And then along came the flood 1921, and that business was just wiped out.

And this is a page of the general ledger recovered from the company safe after the flood.

It went through the flood, and so there's mud on the top of it.

And the entry on the top is June 3rd.

And then the next entry there is June the 30th.

The swirling muddy waters just wiped everything out.

And a lot of that lumber simply got washed downstream, along with the other lumber companies that were down here.

They had to literally go downstream and recover what they could in the way of material and then bring it back here and get started over again.

And there was no nice FEMA program from the federal government then.

They simply had to do the best they could and start over.

- [Narrator] In the midst of pouring rain and rising flood waters, fires breaking out might seem to be a most unlikely scenario.

But in this case, sadly, fires became a serious problem.

- When the water hit, what was stored here and at the other lumberyards, a construction material called lime, hot lime, then that's a very dramatic reaction, generates a lot of heat.

And so it actually would catch whatever's nearby on fire.

So lumber would catch on fire and then it would go floating down through town on fire, and it would catch other things on fire.

So during the early stages of the flood that evening when all the lights went out, the electricity in the town was out.

It would have been totally dark except for these floating barges of fire.

So that had to add to the surreal scene that was downtown, and had to terrify the people who were on top of buildings trying to get away from the water.

It was a traumatic scene.

- [Narrator] Local attorney, John A. Martin witnessed the flood and fires from the tower of the Grand Opera House.

- It seemed like the crack of doom, like the end of the world, like that first great flood in Genesis when the waters prevailed exceedingly on the earth.

I've often heard the expression, hell's broken loose.

That's just what it looked like.

When great burning rafts of lumber began to twirl through the streets on the fast rushing waters.

I never saw anything so sinister in my life as that procession of burning rafts, jamming against buildings or going silently on their way to join the vast, mass of wreckage and debris into which the heart of Pueblo was being converted.

John A. Martin.

- [Narrator] Visitors to Pueblo may see a mural depicting flooding, toppled buildings, and oddly, a horse, high in a cottonwood tree.

But many don't realize that the mural tells the story of the great flood and one of its most famous survivors.

- Before the First World War, Pueblo was one of the premier saddle making capitals in the world.

A guy named Artie Frazier started mail order catalog.

And that was one of the reasons Pueblo's industry in particular really took off.

And he was filling orders for nobility in South America and in Europe and things like that.

Lucky, the horse, so far as I know, the first instance we have of him was in 1919.

We have a photograph of him in Frazier's.

And in 1921, like several of these buildings on June 3rd, the cloudburst just west of town came through.

- As the water rushed in, there were saddles and harnesses, everything, all kinds of tack that you would need and this big paper mache horse.

The water goes in, sucks everything out including the horse and away it goes on down the river.

A number of weeks later, he gets a message from a farmer out east of town about in the Avondale area.

But he asked him, "Mr. Frazier, do you know where that darned ol' horse of yours is, that one that was in the shop?"

And Frazier says, "No, he's a total loss."

We don't know where he is.

We haven't located him."

The guy says, "I think you need to come out to my place out here to Avondale."

And darned, if that paper mache horse wasn't caught up in a big old cottonwood tree.

So they got block and tackle and hoisted him down to the ground, brought him back into town.

His ears were missing, his mane and tail were just clogged with mud.

His glass eyes were gone and he was pretty scraped up.

- Frazier passed in the '30s and his wife continued running the business.

And then in the '50s, she sold all of her inventory and Lucky went up for auction.

And by that time, people already knew kind of his story.

And so another saddlery, McConnell's Mack Saddlery bought the thing from Kitty Frazier.

And then in 1989, the carpet factory next to Mack Saddlery caught fire.

And the firefighters, knowing the story of this horse and how it survived the flood, before they turned their hoses on or did anything, they were gonna pull the horse out of the store.

So yeah, we say survived hell and high water.

So the mural over there on Main Street is done on Frazier's old shop and it was done by Matte Refic and Mike Strescino to commemorate that event.

- We saw that the call for artists for that mural and both decided that we definitely wanted to do it.

It was such a big wall, such a cool project.

- [Spencer] It shows some of the ruin of our city, some of the buildings that got destroyed and it shows Lucky up in the cottonwood tree with everybody kind of staring up in awe at him having survived the flood.

- Even after we were done painting it, I would just see people every single day stopping and taking pictures of it.

And almost every single person asked me why the horse is in the tree.

So I don't think too many people were or are aware of that story still.

(gentle music) - But I do know in the last 25 years, Lucky was actually remodeled, spruced up, made to look a little fancier by a local artist named Deanna Davis.

And we found out a lot of cool things about Lucky.

Everybody says, paper mache, he's actually a hemp mache.

We also learned his midsection is basically a wine barrel, that they mached over, his legs are solid wood.

So my theory is just that he's super airtight.

And when the floodwaters came through, he was just really buoyant and probably bouncing on the surface of the water.

How he climbed the tree, nobody's really sure.

(laughs) - [Narrator] in the aftermath of the flood, the cleanup effort required everything that Pueblo could muster, and then some.

Volunteers were joined by others who were motivated by law enforcement officers who demanded, go to work, go to jail or get out of town.

Frank Cirullo was 14 years old at the time, and remembers doing his part to contribute to the effort.

- [Frank] Everyone went to work to try and clean up the devastation that the flood left.

My dad had a crew of 200 men who shoveled the mud, clearing out and around the Union Depot.

My dad signed a release for me to be hired as a water boy for 43 cents an hour.

I was only 14 years old and wore a yoke around my shoulders, and carried two buckets of water from the other side of West 4th Street Bridge to the Depot, just so the men could get a drink of water.

The men worked 10 hours a day.

You can't even imagine the dead cattle, horses and bodies we saw.

Frank Cirullo.

- [Narrator] Concerns over looting led to the enactment of strict law enforcement policies.

Martial law was declared.

1500 local men were deputized, and state and national troops were summoned to secure the business district.

- I'm not sure who made the decision to declare martial law, but it was made because of the manpower issue.

We had very few people in the police department, the fire department, the Sheriff's department.

you needed more manpower.

And that's when martial law was declared.

The National Guard was brought in, the Colorado Rangers.

I think even the Army sent people in at one point in time.

It was mostly for the manpower, to protect the properties that were left devastated.

- [Narrator] Meanwhile, the world was waking up to news of the terrible tragedy that had fallen on Pueblo.

- Once the photographers were able to shoot the destruction, it made headline news in most of your major newspapers, both in the United States and overseas.

Once word got out, of course in New York, the stock exchange, everyone else looking at how did this impact steel?

How did this impact the rail?

How did it impact distribution?

Because once things stopped and you couldn't get through Pueblo, that meant that industry was gonna be pretty much in a stalemate.

- I don't know if it's as bad as the San Francisco fire, but it definitely crippled the city.

And the neighborhoods down in Union Avenue don't get fully restored until the 1980s.

Till the kind of the renaissance that happens down there.

So you have an entire main, commercial, beautiful, historic district, that's really just kind of devastated by that.

And you have some business come back, but really, a whole central portion of the city just gets dislocated.

Luckily because of the progressive era, and because of this idea of boosterism and wanting to create this amazing city, we created these massive parks and created these just regal, large parks and Mineral Palace was one of them.

So we had lots of public space to kind of spread out and you see these pictures of tons of linens and carpets and things being laid out to kinda dry out.

And another thing is that there's this long period of people looking for loved ones.

- [Narrator] In addition to dispensing food and medical care, relief workers were given permission to distribute something else.

Medicinal alcohol to those in need.

This was unprecedented during prohibition, which for Colorado had begun in 1916.

Five dry years before the flood.

- Almost immediately after the flood, a call came from Washington, D.C. to Denver, where the administration of the whole prohibition, they actually authorized a lift.

They cite that it's for emergency health reasons to quell any type of disease or anything of that sort.

Of course, we all kind of question whether Pueblo just needed a drink, but apparently railway cars were loaded with whiskey barrels and they were brought to Pueblo, and this ban then was lifted for 30 days.

- [Narrator] As word of the flood got out, help came from far and wide.

Tulsa sent $6,300 and Johnstown, Pennsylvania, which had suffered a tragic flood in 1889 sent $2,000.

Jewish congregations from back east sent funds for the Jewish community in Pueblo, as did many other religious organizations.

Once roads and rail lines were restored, shipments of food and clothing arrived at distribution centers set up by the Red Cross, Elks Club and other aid organizations.

The military also came to the rescue.

- A long mule train came from Fort Russell and Wyoming.

And they used those mules and the carts that they carried that they pulled to put our mud in.

Mud and debris and take it back to the river.

So those mules from Fort Russell were excellent.

- Today, we have payloaders, we have skid loaders we have all kinds of equipment.

Can you imagine cleaning that mess up with a shovel?

In their backs, that's how they did it.

- But they did put many, many people, forced many men to work.

And it wasn't a choice.

If you were out of your job because of the flood or you out of a job, period, you were working on the streets, digging mud, cleaning debris, and you weren't asked, you were told.

They had a shift they called the drop shift.

You worked until you dropped.

So, everybody was doing something.

- In some aspects, Pueblo never recovered.

Economically, if you look at statistical data, it's not until World War II, where Pueblo sees the kind of growth that it had enjoyed before the flood.

It's not until the 1950s when you see the community really start to have suburbs and spread out like many other communities.

A lot of businesses here in the community, of course, never recovered.

- [Joseph] They say within three or four years, they had pretty much cleaned it up.

It was never what it was.

Whenever you have that kind of a catastrophic event, you're gonna lose things and you're not gonna get them back.

- [Narrator] It doesn't take a 100-year flood to affect poor and minority communities.

In June of 1965, stormwater overflowed the banks of Fountain Creek, causing extensive damage to homes in Pueblo's east side neighborhood.

The 1965 flood was a reminder that economically depressed areas near the river continued to bear the brunt of extreme weather events.

This flood covered an area of 53 city blocks, and forced the evacuation of more than 1,000 residents.

Even then, it would take more than 20 years for a levee to be built on Fountain Creek to protect this neighborhood from further devastation.

The policy of red lining started with the new deal in the 1930s, a decade after the 1921 great flood.

Some of Pueblo's still struggling neighborhoods were classified as hazardous, making them unable to qualify for loans, insurance and other financial services.

Maps of Pueblo from 1934 show the ongoing damage imposed by red lining.

Effects that are still felt today.

- [Jonathan] The areas of those maps that have a lot of poor people and a lot of racial minorities are shaded in red.

The 1934 map from Pueblo, all the red areas are the areas where ethnic minorities and racial minorities are still living, and all of them are along the water.

- [Narrator] Economic segregation of neighborhoods was suddenly becoming evident on a statewide level.

As Pueblo's recovery began to lag behind expanding communities to the north.

- In 1920, before the flood happened, a lot of the people who ran Pueblo had aspirations that this would be the great economic hub of Southern Colorado.

And it never was, because by the time the recovery came in, there's another place called Colorado Springs, which is attracting most of the government investment during World War II and afterwards.

And we've lived in the shadow of that expansion ever since it happened.

- Prior to that flood, Pueblo was one of the largest rail yards west of the Mississippi.

After that flood, and after everything that occurred after that flood, Pueblo lost its prominence throughout the nation as one of the largest rail yards and intersections of rail lines in the whole United States.

So that changed the commerce in the United States.

It changed the way people did business in Pueblo, Colorado.

- You're asking me, do I think that they've ever fully re covered from the flood?

Yes, I'm just gonna say, yeah, I think they've recovered.

I think the community came together as a whole and did what they could, and I think they've certainly recovered from the flood.

I mean, it made a huge impact, but yeah, I think they recovered from the flood but it was a big community involvement.

I think they all came together to help one another.

- But I think in some ways people enjoy that and they're kind of proud of being in the town that fights back that is still around.

In some ways, some cities may have actually kind of folded after some event like that, or really just, there's steel mill towns that are now almost defunct back east.

And the fact that we still would manage to gain population and grow in the '50s and '60s, I think is kind of a testament to overcoming kind of one of the worst disasters that's occurred in the United States.

- I really feel like Pueblo responded very well to the flood, and I think that was due to the people that were here.

They were just very determined to carve out a life for themselves and they just pitched in and did whatever they had to do.

- [Narrator] Once the initial wave of relief got the city back on its feet, the citizens of Pueblo realized that they needed a longterm flood solution, and it needed to be a massive undertaking.

- They wanted some guarantee this will never, ever happen again.

That was the first thing that people wanted.

And you think about it, there is no FEMA at that time.

There's not a lot of agencies that have that type of money to build that type of concrete.

- [Narrator] But before they could begin to alleviate the threat, Pueblo officials understood that they were going to have to lobby state politicians to rewrite the rules that governed how cities respond to a disaster of this magnitude.

They wanted the Colorado legislature to give the city of Pueblo, the autonomy to create a conservancy district and begin a flood control project, but it would require old-fashioned horse trading and a sacrifice.

- The Denver legislators, they wanted something too.

And they had wanted it for a significant amount of time.

They wanted a tunnel through the Rocky Mountains for rail traffic out of Denver, going west.

And the pebble legislators for years had been able to block that proposal.

- [Narrator] Prior to the mid 1920s, all rail traffic heading west over the Colorado Rockies had to travel through Pueblo.

From Denver's perspective, that was a 173-mile detour.

But now Pueblo faced a difficult decision.

In order to get the Colorado legislature to pass a bill allowing for the creation of the Pueblo Conservancy District, Pueblo had to support Denver's building of the Moffat Tunnel.

- Pueblo was on a level with Denver as far as a number of legislators.

So we were very strong in state house.

But when the flood occurred, Pueblo needed the votes to set up all the flood controls that came after, and they had to trade those votes for the bond issue for the Moffat Tunnel.

- [Narrator] At over six miles, the Moffat Tunnel was at the time the longest railroad tunnel in the Western hemisphere.

This engineering marvel would open up rail traffic west of Denver, eventually allowing railroads to completely bypass Pueblo, changing everything.

- I believe today, railroad employment in Pueblo County is about 500 people.

And probably in 1921, it probably was more like 2,500.

So a big impact.

- The legislation that these attorneys created was presented to the legislature and both houses unanimously passed it.

There was quite a struggle.

And the reason there was a struggle is because the Pueblo community felt it needed legislation so powerful that it could move railroads.

So powerful that it could move streets.

So powerful that it could subdivide property.

So powerful that it could condemn property, and so powerful that it could raise money through a mill levy.

There wasn't a district in existence at the time that was that powerful.

The main purpose of the Conservancy Law of Colorado, flood control is flood control.

It's to keep downtown from being flooded.

- [Narrator] The newly appointed directors hired an engineering firm out of Dayton, Ohio, the Morgan Dayton Company, which had recently completed a massive flood control project in Ohio.

Their engineers created a number of different proposals to address Pueblo's flooding issue.

- Finally, the plan that was adopted is called the Bluff Plan, and that was to move the river next to the bluff and build a levy to form an Eastern or Northern bank to the river.

It was controversial.

A lot of people in town, a lot of the business leaders felt it was way too expensive.

The levy itself is, if you think about it in Pueblo history is probably one of the biggest construction projects the community ever saw.

- [Narrator] One advantage provided by the conservancy is that downtown businesses are now protected by the two and a half mile levee, making flood insurance unnecessary.

- And the businesses that are in the area that are paying the highest assessment, all recognize this is less expensive than flood control insurance.

- [Narrator] The Conservancy District also oversaw the reconstruction of seven bridges that were destroyed by the flood.

Another significant component was the construction of the Rock Creek barrier dam, several miles upstream of Pueblo.

- [Michael] The logic behind the Rock Canyon dam was that it would help slow water coming down the Arkansas, which was the major flood component in 1921.

- [Lawrence] The Rock Creek dam, by the way, is still there.

It's underwater behind Pueblo dam.

- That was a serious effort to contain it, which of course has worked that and in conjunction with the big barrier dam, which now holds back Lake Pueblo.

Why, that should protect us from any more flood.

- [Narrator] The Historic Arkansas River Project, or HARP, was built where the old river channel used to flow through downtown Pueblo.

Referred to locally as the Riverwalk, this is a future for the Arkansas River that would have been hard to imagine in 1921.

- I think the HARP, the urban renewal project and the Riverwalk project is the other kind of source of pride of Pueblo-ans.

We go anywhere, we always talk about our Riverwalk.

And I think people don't even put one and two together that that was literally the actual river.

And so Pueblo doesn't even respond to the effect of the flood until they gather the Riverwalk project, and which is now kind of our main success story.

It was a artifact of the flood.

- We're taking a bad piece of history and turning it into a positive place.

So that would be a thing to tell people about Pueblo's flood.

Come see what we've made of the disaster.

Come see the beautiful Riverwalk we have today.

- [Narrator] After the failure of levees during Hurricane Katrina, the Federal Emergency Management Agency required recertification of flood control structures across the country, including Pueblo's levee along the Arkansas River.

This requirement actually provided an opportunity for the Pueblo Conservancy District to reevaluate the 90-year old levee, and design a new structure that would continue to provide protection for Pueblo, while opening up access to new recreational opportunities.

- We did a lot more than just replace the levee.

We made it safer.

We made it more available for the public.

We did a lot of things that had to be done just to mechanically fix the levee.

And again, we're talking about a 2.5 mile long earth levee with a concrete face.

So it was a pretty significant construction project.

- When it was originally designed, it was 40 feet tall.

Since the construction of the Pueblo dam, that reduced that overall need from 110,000 cubic feet per second down to the range of 60 to 70,000 cubic feet per second.

- [Narrator] the newly designed levee has a wider top that will serve as a pedestrian path, with increased access for cyclists, joggers, kayakers and river surfers.

- [Donald] The levee will be a two and a half mile long bike path, jogging path, walking path, right through the center of the city with no intersections.

- There's two bridges planned.

One at 4th Street and one at Main Street.

That provides huge access from a trail head at 4th street across to the levee.

People right now could take their lawn chairs and sit there and watch.

But eventually there'll be some stadium seating inbuilt into the face of the levee, so you can hold events at that drop one where the wave shapers plan to go, and you could hold national events.

It's a central facility for the city of Pueblo, to prevent it from being flooded, but at the same time, it was an opportunity to take advantage of it and create another recreational component to the city of Pueblo.

- I think we're a community where we're not afraid to roll up our sleeves and meet the challenges that the future will bring up.

And I think that started with the 1921 flood.

- [Narrator] In remembering the great flood, we remember the lives lost during a catastrophic weather event in June of 1921.

The loss of lives included natives and immigrants, rich and poor, and too often those who found themselves on the margins of society.

- We lost, probably a lot more people died in the Pueblo flood than will ever be documented.

Whole families were washed away.

And so sometimes we have no record of those people.

So in that respect, it's horrible, and then it's also horrible because we don't even know what we lost in some ways.

And we'll never know.

- [Narrator] But in remembering the loss, we also celebrate the resilience of people who found the strength to get back up and rebuild stronger.

To the victims lost to the flood and the survivors who rebuilt Pueblo, we honor your memory.

(gentle music) (gentle music)