Arriba developed on Colorado’s arid plains after Charles Creel founded the town in 1888 to meet the advancing Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad and enforced a strict liquor ban that led to a long feud with neighboring Frontier City, established across the street in 1907, until after Creel’s death in 1918 locals voted 90-1 to absorb Frontier City and end prohibition; long before that, the Cheyennes had prospered in the nearby Republican River basin, where rich grasslands supported their horses, buffalo hunts, and trade, until gold-seeking emigrants began crossing the Smoky Hill Trail through their preserve in 1859 and escalating conflict brought in the U.S. Army and helped begin the Indian Wars. Settlement of this dry region accelerated only after federal land policies and farming methods adapted to the plains, as the Homestead Act of 1862 proved too limited for arid country, later laws offered larger claims, settlers arrived in increasing numbers in the 1890s and after 1900, and scientific dryland techniques introduced by Hardy Webster Campbell in 1902 helped farmers harvest crops from land once thought barren, though the Dust Bowl of the 1930s exposed the limits of such farming on marginal soils. Life in the region also included recreation and roadside enterprise, from sheep-pasture golf near Hugo and public gatherings at Walk’s Camp Park beginning in 1915 to C. W. Gregory’s six-story Genoa Tower, built in 1926 along U.S. 24 as a tourist stop, observation point, dance venue, and local landmark.