The Klan on a Ferris Wheel (1926)

A Snapshot of Their Power in Colorado

Sitting three abreast and taking up all 12 of the wheel's buckets, the hooded men face the camera. Like the five Klansmen standing below them, they all seem to emanate malevolence, creating a surreal juxtaposition of progressive and regressive symbols.

It's hard to overstate the influence of the Klan in Colorado during the 1920s. The governor, Clarence Morley was a Klansman. Senator Rice Means was openly endorsed by the Klan. Denver Mayor Benjamin Stapleton had KKK connections.

Yet, the Klan's hub of power was not in a state metropolis. From 1924 to 1928, Cañon City, a former mining town in the eastern half of the state that had become dependent on the jobs from the nearby state prison, was the Klan capital.

The Grand Dragon of the Colorado Klan was Reverend Fred Arnold, the minister of Cañon City's First Baptist Church and the chaplain of the prison. He ran the Klan offices from the Hotel St. Cloud across the street from the church downtown.

On April 27, 1926, the Cañon City Daily Record ran a surprising bulletin on its front page. Right under a notice that the local junior high school was putting together a variety show, the local newspaper of the small central Colorado town printed the headline "Klansmen pose for picture on merry-go-round," along with a brief, staid description of a parade of hooded locals that went from the Klan headquarters on Main Street to the traveling amusement park that had been set up a couple blocks away.

The photo itself, though, wasn't printed, as the photographer didn't share it with the paper. In fact, it didn't show up until more than 65 years later. And when it did, of course, it went viral.

By the time this photo was taken in 1926, the Klan's power was at its zenith. According to the Daily Record, the Klansmen were invited to pose for the portrait by the site's proprietor, William Forsythe, a Klansman himself, who brought his mini-carnival down south from Fort Collins

It's not surprising to learn that the photographer, Clinton Rolfe, likely had Klan ties as well. Like Forsythe, Rolfe originally came from Fort Collins, where he ran The Rolfe Studios.

After he set up shop in Cañon City, Rolfe was profiled in The Daily American, a new Klan-affiliated newspaper.

Rolfe's actual photo never seems to have ended up in any local paper, and may never have been published anywhere. Instead, it's likely that it was simply distributed to the Klan members pictured.

In 1991, a local family donated a copy to the Royal Gorge Museum & History Center, where it was kept in their archives along with scads of other information about the Klan's brief hold on power in Cañon City. In 2003, the then-director of the museum, LaDonna Gunn, wrote an essay called "The Protestant 'Kluxing' of Cañon City, Colorado" which featured the photo.

In the photo, the Klansmen of Cañon City Local Chapter 21 aren't posing on an Andean Staircase, or even a Merry-Go-Round, as The Daily Record headline stated.

They are on a Ferris wheel, a symbol of modern ingenuity, invented in Chicago in 1892 as America's response to the construction of the Eiffel Tower. By the mid-20's, the wheel was at the height of its popularity in the United States.

The Klan would soon lose its grip on the city, and Colorado in general. Its members were voted out of local and state office. And in 1928, Arnold died unexpectedly. With no succession plan in place, the Klan's local office folded.

The white hooded men who helped run the state slipped into the shadows, but photographic evidence of the Klan's power, obviously, remained. ~ The Story Behind This Mystifying Photo of KKK Members at a Colorado Fair / Atlas Obscura

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For more on the normalization of racism in America see KKK Summer Kamp