During the U.S. Geological Survey of 1876, A.C. Peale wrote “rifle” on his map to mark the location of a misplaced firearm, and although the gun was never found, the name endured. Founded in 1882, Rifle drew settlers with good land and railroad access, and tourism became another mainstay after President Theodore Roosevelt’s well-publicized 1905 Garfield County bear hunt. In the twentieth century, the area saw brief mineral rushes, and uranium processed nearby was used in the atomic blasts that ended World War II, but Rifle avoided some of the boom-and-bust turmoil that affected neighboring towns and remained rooted in agriculture, hunting, and recreation. The area also became the site of Christo’s Curtain, a 360-foot-high, quarter-mile-wide translucent orange fabric installation spanning Rifle Gap; after winds destroyed an initial attempt in October 1971, a second effort on August 10, 1972 succeeded briefly before canyon gusts forced its dismantling after twenty-eight hours. Oil shale brought repeated hopes of great wealth to western Colorado, especially during World War I, when thousands of claims were filed in and around the Piceance Basin and two hundred companies formed, but the high cost of refining kept the resource largely beyond reach and by 1930 the first boom had collapsed. A later revival ended even more abruptly on May 2, 1982, when Exxon canceled its project and dismissed 2,100 workers, helping bring down the regional oil shale industry and costing Garfield County thousands more jobs. White River National Forest, created in 1891 as one of the nation’s original woodland preserves, became an important arena in the history of conservation as local resistance gradually gave way to acceptance of regulated use. In 1919, Forest Service official Arthur Carhart argued that the pristine Trappers Lake area should remain undeveloped, and in 1920 it became the nation’s first wilderness preserve, launching the American wilderness system.