Founded in 1880 at the crossing of the Colorado River and the Texas & Pacific Railroad right-of-way, Colorado City became a central shipping point and supply depot for the sprawling cattle ranches of West Texas and New Mexico. From 1880, when A.W. Dunn opened his dirt-floor, tent-roof general store, to 1890, the boisterous cattle town gained both notoriety and fame. The largest community between Fort Worth and El Paso, it had more millionaires than any other Texas town and the most saloons in the West. Law and order operated from a dugout at the edge of town, where a company of Texas Rangers required all men to check their guns, and the modest, courageous Ranger Dick Ware was elected first sheriff in 1881. In its first two years, the population surged from 700 to 5,000 as cowboys, cattlemen, merchants, and, as a visitor said, "any number of bummers," competed for space. The first sermon was preached in a saloon, the town jail was a chain attached to a mesquite tree, and citizens found beauty in the lantern glow from dozens of tents in the town center. Although drought and the passing of the open range soon diminished its glory, its first decade earned it the epithet "Mother City of West Texas."