The Fort
other, that passion turned to hate with the financial strain of trying to pay the bills. Now my mother’s scrubbing pots at 3 in the morning, begging creditors not to shut us down. Dad refused to go bankrupt,” says Kinney.
Determined to salvage the project, Sam Arnold went on to host “Frying pans West” on PBS, and wrote “Eating Up the Santa Fe Trail” and “The Fort Cookbook.”
He brought a showman’s flair to history and a historian’s mind to developing a menu. Arnold amassed more than 3,000 historical cookbooks and translated that cultural history into menu items such as roasted bison marrow bones and the Hailstorm whiskey cocktail, based on an 1830s recipe.
The original fort that stood from 1833-49 near the Arkansas River was a “combination frontier hotel, fortified castle and a kind of merchandise mart,” says Jay Gitlin, associate director of Yale University’s Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers & Borders.
“It was a place for cultural exchanges, a crossroads of native cultures— Comanches, Pueblos— and Spanish and French cultures,” says Gitlin. “Looking at The Fort restaurant, you’ve done more than re-create a building— you’ve recreated the whole ethos of the original Bent’s Fort. Food, after all, is a kind of exchange of cultures.”
In keeping with that heritage, The Fort hosted President Bill Clinton’s state dinner during the 1997 “Summit of the Eight” in Den--- ver. Guests, including Boris Yeltsin, Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac, dined on whiskey-sauced buffalo, mesquite-grilled quail and cinnamon-smoked lamb.
In a 2003 review, notoriously tough critic Kyle Wagner gushed: “The Fort has managed to keep from being a caricature of itself, which is why a meal there can be such a gosh-darned delight. The setting is warm and inviting, with white linens and dark-orange tile floors, furniture patterned after New Mexican antiques, antlers and flickering candles everywhere, and the smell of beef and buffalo just emanating from every adobe pore.”
That’s just what Kinney spent the first half of her life trying to escape from.
“I never thought in my wildest dreams I’d ever come back and run it,” says Kinney, who forged her own path, attending Penn State and raising her son, Oren. She eventually returned to Denver and, like her father, started her own advertising agency.
“My mother always said that red rock is a spiritual magnet— anyone who built there will always be drawn to it,” says Kinney, who found herself drawn back into the family business when her dad considered selling in 1998 after his second wife, Carrie, died. Father and daughter ran the restaurant together until he died in 2006. Kinney now works in offices that used to be her and her brother Keith’s bedrooms.
You might say the chile hasn’t fallen far from the ristra. Kinney seems to have fully embraced her father’s vision for The Fort, beyond dressing in buckskin and shouting the mountain man’s toast, “Waugh!” She founded the Tesoro Cultural Center, a nonprofit that sponsors an Indian market and powwow and other cultural events, including a lecture series in partnership with the Lamar Center at Yale.
After her dad died, Kinney spent three years writing “Shinin’ Times at the Fort: Stories, Celebrations and Recipes from the Landmark Colorado Restaurant” (Fur Trade Press, 2010).
“My parents wanted to teach the public about this fascinating history, and they always said ‘the best way to keep history alive is take a bite of it,’ ” says Kinney.
Sam and Betty Arnold reconciled in 2004. “My mother came back on my 50th birthday. She hadn’t been back in 35-40 years. She just had tears in here eyes, she was so proud.” Both are buried at The Fort.
“I go out by the rock, and there is my mother, my father, my brother and Sissy the bear and our dog Lobo. Going to work every day at The Fort, it’s just a magical place. My mother was right— it’s the rock, the earth, the adobe and the water— it’s just magical.”
Sam Arnold could have been giving advice to his daughter when he wrote the preface to “Fryingpans West” in 1968: “Recipes are only like road maps. How you travel and where you end up depends on you.”