Brief by Central Staff
Local History – June 1998 – Colorado Central Magazine
Along the Arkansas River between Salida and Cañon City abides the settlement of Cotopaxi, which inspired a recent call inquiring if we knew how it came by its unusual name.
“How Cotopaxi got its name is unknown,” according to historian Virginia McConnell Simmons in The Upper Arkansas Valley, but we can start speculating in Ecuador, home of the above Cotopaxi.
At 19,347 feet, it’s the highest active volcano in the world, and the second-highest mountain in Ecuador. According to Mountain Names by Robert Hixson Julyan, Cotopaxi comes from two Quecha words, ccota pasca, which mean “shining pile.”
Rather than apply their own name, the Spanish adapted the local name after conquering the area in 1551. Quecha was spoken by the Incas, and the language remains in wide use in the Andes. The locals, we are told, now call the mountain the “Shy Lady” because it is generally hidden behind clouds.
As for our Cotopaxi, the name must have come from the volcano, but how and why?
One good possibility is that it started with a mining claim in the 1870s, named Cotopaxi by prospector Henry Thomas. We don’t know anything about him, but the Andes were considered a rich mining area, and prospectors sometimes named their claims and mining districts for places that were rich either in legend or in fact — i.e., California Gulch, or Ophir, the biblical site of King Solomon’s mines and “rich in gold.”
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Another theory says a hill south of town was named Cotopaxi first, on account of its resemblence to the volcano, and that the rest followed. We confess we don’t know the back roads in that area as well as we should, but we’ve never seen anything resembling a well-formed volcanic cone like Ecuador’s Cotopaxi. Plus, we haven’t found a Cotopaxi Hill or the like on any of our topographic maps.
We do know that the name was in use when the railroad came through in 1880, when it appeared on a state list of post offices. In 1885, a guidebook described it as “a small post office town of 200 people…. The principal mines are Cotopaxi, and the Lynn Company’s mines.”
We’d love to publish further information about the origin of the only Quecha place name in Colorado, so if you have some at hand, please send it to us.