Founded in 1865 as a Smoky Hill Trail station, Kiowa was originally named after its postmaster, Henry Wendling. Like many of Colorado’s frontier hamlets, its post office often was the town itself, a place where widely dispersed settlers gathered, usually in a ranch or general store, to keep in touch with one another and the outside world. As the community grew, residents relied on the local newspaper for news of hometown births, deaths, calvings, paintings, fence-mendings, and well-diggings as well as state and national events. Kiowa’s most notable publication was the Divide Review, which owner Floyd Lemon produced single-handedly from 1920 to 1960 without missing an edition. These forms of correspondence, along with the telephone, which went into service here just after 1900, eased the loneliness and isolation of rural life and helped create a sense of community among distant neighbors. Kiowa might have disappeared five years after its founding when the Kansas Pacific Railroad bypassed the town and made the trail obsolete, but enough ranchers had settled there to keep it alive. With plentiful pastures and growing markets in nearby Denver and Colorado Springs, the area became a stockman’s paradise. By the 1880s more than 150,000 cattle and sheep grazed there, and farmers also moved in, increasing Kiowa’s population to a few hundred. The town prospered until the Great Depression, survived the Dust Bowl and a devastating 1935 flood, and recovered after World War II with help from Denver’s suburban development. By 2000, however, that growth brought a new challenge: preserving western roots in the face of metropolitan encroachment.