Fred Kocherhans

Location of Name

Just above and to the right of Ketner's Cave on the west side of White Rock.

Condition of Name

The name is carved very deeply into the rock. Beneath the name is a year which, at first glance, appears to be "1785;" closer observation, however, reveals only a few stratchings and the date "85," none of which seem to belong to the Kocherhans name.

Biography of Fred Kocherhans

Fred Kocherhans seems to have been a bootmaker by profession. He left Plattsmouth, Kansas Territory on 20 September 1858 for the Cherry Creek diggings. With him was a wagon train of six wagons and nineteen men known as the Plattsmouth Company. They were joined at Fort Kearny by another twenty-six men and their nine wagons from Kansas and Missouri.

The combined party of forty-five men reached the mouth of Cherry Creek on 24 October 1858. Five days later, many of them were involved in the organization of the Auraria Town Company, and in the subsequent construction of log cabins on the west side of Cherry Creek.

Fred Kocherhans seems to have spent the winter of 1858-59 hunting and prospecting. In company with Anselm Barker and William Liston he traveled the Front Range, from Boulder Creek in the north to the head of Cherry Creek on the Platte-Arkansas Divide. The men later took credit for naming many of the streams: Clear Creek for its clear water, Ralston Creek becuse a man by that name had found gold there, Rock Creek for its many rocks, Boulder Creek for its boulders, Left Hand Creek because they found the Indian Left Hand camped there.

Fred Kocherhans seems to have supplemented any income he may have gained from the diggings by working at his trade of bootmaking. On 7 May 1859 he sold a pair of boots of his own manufacture to Anselm Barker for $7. Whether Kocherhans ever opend his own boot shop is not known. What is known is that he farmed for a time at the mouth of Cherry Creek, in present downtown Denver. There he was listed as a settler in the summer of 1859.

Kocherhans soon disappeared from Colorado history, and was forgotten. His name was mispelled as "Kockerhans" as early as 1859 in Anselm Barker's diary. By the time of the first annual reunion of the Society of Colorado Pioneers on 25 January 1881, the Kocherhans name was entirely unrecognizable. He was listed by keynote speaker, Professor F.J. Stanton, as "member of the Plattsmouth Company, Fred Kucherhautz." Only in the Garden does the name remain as the man himself spelled it.

1- Barker Diary. edited by Nolie Mumey. Golden Bell Press, Denver,1959.

2- "The Founders of Denver and their Doings," The Trail Vol. XIV, No. 12, May,1922.