Colorado: A History of the Centennial State, Fifth Edition

By Carl Abbott, Stephen J. Leonard and Thomas J. Noel

Since 1976, newcomers and natives alike have learned about the rich history of the magnificent place they call home from Colorado: A History of the Centennial State. In the fifth edition, coauthors Carl Abbott, Stephen J. Leonard, and Thomas J. Noel incorporate recent events, scholarship, and insights about the state in an accessible volume that general readers and students will enjoy.

The new edition tells of conflicts, shifting alliances, and changing ways of life as Hispanic, European, and African American settlers flooded into a region that was already home to Native Americans. Providing a balanced treatment of the entire state’s history—from Grand Junction to Lamar and from Trinidad to Craig—the authors also reveal how Denver and its surrounding communities developed and gained influence.

While continuing to elucidate the significant impact of mining, agriculture, manufacturing, and tourism on Colorado, the fifth edition broadens and focuses its coverage by consolidating material on Native Americans into one chapter and adding a new chapter on sports history. The authors also expand their discussion of the twentieth century with updated sections on the environment, economy, politics, and recent cultural conflicts. New illustrations, updated statistics, and an extensive bibliography including Internet resources enhance this edition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Release date: Jun 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781607322276

Carl Abbott

Carl Abbott is professor emeritus of urban studies and planning at Portland State University. He is the author of the prize-winning books The Metropolitan Frontier: Cities in the Modern American West and Political Terrain: Washington DC from Tidewater Town to Global Metropolis, as well as Frontiers Past and Future: Science Fiction and the American West.

Book preview

COLORADO

A History of the Centennial State

Conejos, a Hispanic town in the San Luis Valley, ca. 1860. (Colorado Historical Society, Denver.)

COLORADO

A History of the Centennial State

FIFTH EDITION

Carl Abbott | Stephen J. Leonard | Thomas J. Noel

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF COLORADO

Boulder

© 2013 by University Press of Colorado

Published by University Press of Colorado

5589 Arapahoe Avenue, Suite 206C

Boulder, Colorado 80303

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State University, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Metropolitan State University of Denver, Regis University, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, Utah State University, and Western State Colorado University.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Abbott, Carl, 1944–

  Colorado : a history of the Centennial State / Carl Abbott, Stephen J. Leonard, and Thomas J. Noel. —

Fifth Edition.

      pages cm

   Includes bibliographical references and index.

   ISBN 978-1-60732-226-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-60732-227-6 (ebook)

1. Colorado—History. I. Leonard, Stephen J., 1941 – II. Noel, Thomas J. (Thomas Jacob) III. Title.

  F776.A22 2013

  978.8—dc23

                                              2013003148

Design by Daniel Pratt

22   21   20   19   18   17   16   15   14   13                           10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

Contents

List of Maps

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Mountains and Plains

2. The First Coloradans

3. New Mexico’s Northern Frontier

4. The Pikes Peak Gold Rush

5. The Era of the Booster

6. Exterminate Them!: Natives 1850s–90s

Interlude: Coloradans in 1876

7. The Bonanza Years

8. The Businessman’s State

9. A Generation of Industrial Warfare

10. Farming and Ranching in the American Desert

11. Women in Politics and Society

12. A Diverse People

13. Scenery, Health, and Tourism

14. Denver and the Reform Crusade

Interlude: Coloradans in 1917

15. The 1920s

16. The Great Depression

17. World War II

18. Postwar Boom

19. Postwar Politics and Other Diversions

20. Troubled Times

21. Environmental Challenges

22. Economic Peaks and Valleys

23. Sports

24. Cultural and Political Wars

Colorado Chronology

Colorado Biographies

Colorado Officials

Colorado Population and Economic Statistics

Colorado Facts and Symbols

Notes

Further Reading

Index

Maps

Colorado Base Map

Stages of Native American Occupation, AD 1100–1820

Nineteenth-Century Hispanic Colorado

Colorado Core Region, 1858–72

Major Colorado Railroads

Major Colorado Mining Towns

Average Annual Stream Flows

Acknowledgments

Many people—librarians, colleagues, students, friends, family, and other scholars—helped the authors with the research that led to this book. Still others read portions of the manuscript or earlier versions of the book and made suggestions. To mention everyone who has helped would be impossible. With apologies to those we may have overlooked, we thank the following and the others whose names appear in earlier editions.

Librarians are often taken for granted until they retire, die, or migrate to greener gardens, taking with them years of specialized knowledge. The voids left by the deaths of Don Dilley, Eleanor Gehres, and Augie Mastrogiuseppe of the Denver Public Library’s Western History and Genealogy Department prove this point, as does the migration of Barbara Walton. Many others in that department, shepherded by Jim Kroll, as well as librarians in other sections of the Denver Public Library, have assisted us over several decades. They include Dana Abby, Lisa Bachman, Marilyn Chang, Nancy Chase, Wendell Cox, Kellen Cutsworth, Erin Edwards, Coi Drummond Gehrig, Bruce Hanson, Joan Harms, Abby Hoverstock, John Irwin, James Jeffery, Brian Kenny, Colleen Nunn, Phil Panum, Janice Prater, Trina Purcell, Rose Ann Taht, Brent Wagner, Kay Wisnia, James Woods, and Ellen Zazzarino, as well as shelver James Wood and guards David Bustamante and Marty Lister.

We also thank Rebecca Lintz, former director of the Stephen Hart Library at History Colorado, and Margi Aguiar, Barbara Dey, Karyl Klein, Debra Neiswonger, and Ruba Sadi of that library. Over the years History Colorado state historians Maxine Benson, William J. Convery III, David Halaas, and Modupe Labode, as well as staff members Larry Borowsky, Ben Fogelberg, Steve Grinstead, Moya Hansen, Stan Oliner, Eric Paddock, Keith Schrum, Clark Secrest, and David Wetzel, have added to our knowledge of Colorado.

At the Auraria Library archives Rosemary Evetts, Mike Gryglewicz, and Frank Tapp assisted us. We also appreciate librarian Ellen Metter’s and library director Mary Somerville’s interest in and support of Colorado history collections at Auraria. Joanne West Dodds of the Pueblo Library District has been of help on this and other projects, as have Terry Ketelsen and his staff at the Colorado State Archives. Many thanks to the libraries, museums, and photographers mentioned in the image captions for the images they have provided. Similarly, we are indebted to the late Anne Ferril Folsom for permission to quote from the poems of her father, Thomas Hornsby Ferril. Photographers Glenn Aultman, Glenn Cuerden, Sandra Dallas, Michael Gamer, Virginia Simmons, and Roni Bell Sylvester and mapmakers Ken Erickson and Nicholas Wharton kindly allowed use of their art.

At Metropolitan State, History Department students, faculty, and staff have shared knowledge and offered help. Thanks to faculty members Thomas Altherr, Charles Angeletti, Vincent C. de Baca, Owen Chariton, James Drake, Peg Ekstrand, Derek Everett, Debra Faulkner, Dolph Grundman, Monys Hagen, Frank Harper, R. Todd Laugen, Laura McCall, John Monnett, Frank W. Nation, Kevin Rucker, Richard Scheidenhelm, Ellen Slatkin, and Donald Wall. By fostering scholarly endeavor, Metropolitan State president Stephen Jordan, provost Vicki Golich, dean Joan L. Foster, and administrative assistants Donna Potempa and Sharon Roehling helped make this book possible. Students from both Metropolitan State and the University of Colorado–Denver who read and commented on earlier editions caught errors and made suggestions.

Students and former students at the University of Colorado–Denver—Jasmine Armstrong, Kathleen Barlow, Dana EchoHawk, Abby Fisher, Marcia Goldstein, Abby Hoffman, Craig Leavitt, Kara Miyagishima, Judy Morley, Katie Ordway, Nicholas Wharton, and Amy Zimmer—helped refine this work with their critiques. University of Colorado–Denver faculty members Chris Agee, Thomas Andrews, Ryan Crewe, Jay Fell, Mark Foster, Rebecca Hunt, Pam Laird, Myra Rich, Jim Walsh, and Jim Whiteside also enhanced our knowledge of Colorado.

The debt we owe to others is partially acknowledged in the notes and in the sources section. Among those many scholars, Phil Goodstein, one of the most knowledgeable, has given us tips and sometimes called errors to our attention. We thank him and all who have done or may do that.

Finally, we thank the patient people at the University Press of Colorado, including Director Darrin Pratt, Laura Furney, Daniel Pratt, Jessica d’Arbonne, and Beth Svinarich, who, along with copyeditor Cheryl Carnahan and indexer Linda Gregonis, have made a manuscript into a book.

Introduction

The United States is a plural society. Its peoples have defined themselves as members of communities within a larger nation. They remember the histories and extol the accomplishments of their particular ethnic groups. They sing the praises of their regions, states, cities, or towns; and they cheer their local sports teams. They identify themselves as members of the leisured or laboring classes and as representatives of specific industries. The nation’s history, in large measure, has been made by the interaction of such groups—their conflicts, their cooperation, their occasional blending under the unifying pressures of commerce, communication, and common causes.

As much as any other state, Colorado has grown within this multicultural framework. It has witnessed deep divisions among Native Americans, Spanish-speaking Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and the heterogeneous assemblage sometimes labeled Anglo-Americans. The split between entrepreneurs and working people and the contests between economic regions have been equally important. The state’s political divisions have often reflected the conflicts among its social and economic groups.

Just as diversity has provided much of the catalyst for historical change in Colorado, its cities and towns have provided the context for much of that change. Cities—engines of growth, change, and progress throughout the United States—played an especially important role on the American frontier. During the years of pioneering, the frontier city was an advance base of supply, furnishing food, clothing, and tools. When settlers began to produce a surplus of goods, the city provided credit and transportation and found outside buyers. Because the interregional and international exchange of agricultural and mineral products for manufactured goods was the foundation of US economic growth during the first three centuries of settlement, the frontier city was vital not only to the surrounding area but also to the development of the nation as a whole.

Certainly, in the trans-Mississippi West the urban frontier and the frontier of settlement were nearly synonymous. Credit, capital, and supplies for the development of the plains and mountains came initially from cities such as St. Louis and Chicago and a host of smaller urban centers such as Omaha and Kansas City. Cattle towns, farm-market centers, and mining towns soon sprang up in Colorado. Even after the initial excitement of settlement, the new towns and cities provided the money and leadership to develop regional resources.

Within Colorado, Denver monopolized these metropolitan functions after 1859. At the end of the twentieth century the Denver metropolitan area counted a population more than four times that of Colorado Springs and fifteen times that of Pueblo. Denver served similarly as a channel for eastern capital and influence during Colorado’s development as a supplier of raw materials for eastern consumption. If Colorado and other western states have been economic colonies of the East, as numerous writers have complained, then Denver for much of Colorado’s history has been one of the colonial capitals.

This description remains accurate in the twenty-first century, but with modifications. The shift of population and economic activities to the suburban counties that ring Denver has changed the balance of power within the region. Although the city of Denver gained population between 1990 and 2010, other communities grew even faster. Cities such as Aurora are now large enough to pursue independent development. Colorado Springs has come into its own as a nationally connected city and a rival to Denver. Development north of Denver in Greeley, Loveland, Longmont, and Fort Collins has made the northern piedmont another focus of growth and political power.

Another characteristic plays a special role in the history of Colorado—the land itself. The opportunities and constraints offered by the land have shaped the development of mining, tourism, and agriculture. Those who chronicle Colorado must borrow from the expertise of the geologist, geographer, botanist, and zoologist. The historian must also examine the ways Coloradans have reacted to their land and record the deep affection for the topography most residents have shared. In the nineteenth century pioneers explored the land and learned to appreciate the scenery. Since the 1960s many Coloradans have fought to save a landscape threatened by rapid development.

Historians also observe changes in the ways Coloradans have perceived both their environment and themselves. Men and women in the 1860s or the 1890s did not react to problems and choices the same way citizens in the 2000s do. Each generation views the world with different perspectives and operates on the basis of different assumptions. Over the years Coloradans have valued different elements of their scenery. They have approached the natural resources with changing ideas about their proper uses. They have rethought their positions about the spheres of activity for men and women and have sometimes haltingly come to appreciate the contributions of differing cultures.

The movement of Anglo-Americans westward across the continent was the central experience of US nation building. When we examine that great adventure, we can still feel the sense of possibility on each new frontier. Historians, however, also need to recapture the conflicts and failures as well as the excitement and progress. Economic and personal success for some Coloradans has come at the expense of others. Native Americans, Hispanics, European immigrants, and women have all struggled to assert control over their own lives. Historic decisions have also closed off possibilities never tried, narrowing as well as expanding the state’s future through conscious and unconscious choices.

This book explores Colorado’s rich, varied, and sometimes contentious history with chapters on Native Americans, Hispanic settlers, women, and the diverse people who make up the state. It treats mining entrepreneurs and mine laborers, city dwellers and farmers. It singles out the varied contributions of mining, agriculture, tourism, and urban finance to the state’s economic growth. It looks at Colorado’s development as it has been affected by decisions in world capitals and New York boardrooms. The book also follows a broad chronological pattern. Chapters 1 through 5 cover the period of exploration and initial settlement that ended in the 1870s. Chapter 6 focuses on the fate of Native Americans. Chapters 7 through 14 deal with the era of rapid economic growth from the 1870s through 1920. The remaining ten chapters describe the emergence of the modern state.

FIVE EDITIONS OF COLORADO …

Carl Abbott began Colorado: A History of the Centennial State when he was on the faculty at the University of Denver, and the first edition appeared in 1976, marking Colorado’s centennial as a state. For the second edition (1982), Abbott invited Stephen J. Leonard of Metropolitan State College to supply sections on women, as well as immigrant and ethnic groups. David McComb of Colorado State University was enlisted to update material from the 1970s and 1980s. In 1994 Abbott, Leonard, and McComb revised the book for its third edition. For the fourth (2005) edition Leonard added much new material, particularly covering the post-1945 period. David McComb left the project, and Thomas J. Noel of the University of Colorado–Denver became part of it, principally as photo editor.

For this fifth edition Leonard created a new chapter ‘Exterminate Them!’: Natives 1850s–90s that focuses on the clash between Native Americans and Anglo-Americans. Much of the chapter comes from earlier editions, where it appeared as subsections in chapters on "The Era of the Booster and The Businessman’s State. Leonard has expanded the chapter formerly titled Measuring the Limits of Growth and renamed it Environmental Challenges. A new chapter, Sports," largely written by Noel, includes new material and consolidates information from chapters in the fourth edition. Leonard has updated and revised the final chapters on the economy and cultural and political wars. Other chapters have undergone minor revisions. The sources section adds recent scholarship and provides a guide to Internet resources. Photo editor Noel has included some new photos and maps.

COLORADO

A History of the Centennial State

Colorado Base Map. Original map by Kenneth A. Erickson, Department of Geography, University of Colorado–Boulder, modified to include Broomfield County and the expansion of Denver County.

1

Mountains and Plains

These vast plains of the western hemisphere may become in time equally celebrated as the sand desarts [sic] of Africa.¹

—ZEBULON M. PIKE, 1810

When our small party arrived on the hill they with one accord gave three cheers to the Mexican mountains.² It was 2:30 in the afternoon on Saturday, November 5, 1806. Zebulon Pike and his fifteen companions, trekking westward along the Arkansas River, had just glimpsed the peaks of the Rockies clinging to the distant horizon like small blue clouds. Four months earlier the men had left eastern Missouri to explore the southwestern reaches of the vast Louisiana Territory the United States had purchased from France in 1803. To every weary soldier, from Lieutenant Pike himself to Privates Thomas Daugherty and John Sparks, the sight of the mountains signaled that they had almost crossed the barrier of the hot, dry plains.

By November 26 Pike and his party were climbing a pine-clad shoulder of the great peak that would eventually bear his name. After forty-eight fatiguing hours of wading in deep snow, Pike abandoned his hopes of conquering Grand Mountain. Instead, he turned south to explore the Arkansas River. Mistakenly thinking he had found its source near present-day Cañon City, he then wandered for weeks looking for the Red River, part of the boundary of the Louisiana Purchase. In February 1807 he built a small stockade in the San Luis Valley on what he apparently thought was the Red River. Actually, he was on the Conejos, a tributary of the Rio Grande, on land long claimed by Spain. Arrested by Spanish troops, he was taken to Santa Fe and later deeper into Mexico. The Spanish returned him to the United States nearly a year after he left Missouri.

The next US exploration of portions of what would become Colorado, a twenty-man expedition led by Major Stephen H. Long in 1820, branded the high plains a Great American Desert, almost wholly unfit for cultivation, and uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for their subsistence.³ More than two decades passed before the US Army again mounted significant explorations of the region. In 1842 John C. Frémont traveled from Fort Laramie in Wyoming to Fort St. Vrain on the South Platte twenty miles south of modern-day Greeley. The next year he crossed Kansas to Fort St. Vrain and journeyed southward along the base of the Rockies to Fort Pueblo, a trading post on the Arkansas River, and then north to Wyoming. During the remainder of 1843 and the spring of the following year he toured Utah, Idaho, Oregon, Nevada, and California before returning through the mountains of central Colorado in June 1844. In the winter of 1848, financed by St. Louis businessmen who wanted him to find an all-weather railroad route from their city to the Pacific Coast, he led another party into the Rockies. He lost ten of his thirty-three men to exposure and starvation in the San Juan Mountains.

Frémont characterized Colorado’s plains as a parched country of sand hills with an appearance of general sterility.⁴ Early tourists such as Thomas Farnham, Rufus Sage, and Francis Parkman repeated Pike’s, Long’s, and Frémont’s descriptions of sandy, arid wastes. In the late 1850s, fortune hunters and journalists trying the shortcut to the Pikes Peak goldfields across the plains of western Kansas and eastern Colorado raised the same bitter complaint. We seem to have reached the acme of barrenness and desolation, wrote Horace Greeley, the widely read editor of the New York Tribune. Wood and water fail, and we are in a desert indeed.⁵

For such travelers, their first sight of the mountains was sweet relief. The grand outline of the immense mountain wall cheered Long’s party and delighted Frémont with its beauty. As it emerged into view from a vast pile of thunderheads, Longs Peak astonished Parkman. By the 1860s the contrast between the mountains and the plains had become an artistic cliché. Illustrators and artists such as Albert Bierstadt emphasized the sublime, the grand, the picturesque, and the uplifting. In portraying the plains they tended to show the hardships of travel—buffalo skulls, storms, people digging for water.

In contrasting the plains and the mountains, explorers oversimplified the complexities of Colorado’s geography. Compared to the mountains, the plains appear flat. In fact, they are far from uniform. On Colorado’s eastern plains the land is relatively level. Early travelers noticed, however, that the terrain became more broken as they worked their way westward. In present-day Douglas, Elbert, and El Paso Counties, they discovered that the Rockies throw out a wedge of high land to divide the basins of the South Platte and Arkansas Rivers, a geographical feature that causes Cherry Creek to flow northwest toward the mountains. To this day, newcomers—who assume that elevations rise slowly and uniformly as they approach the mountains—are surprised to learn that Limon, seventy miles east of Denver, is several hundred feet higher than Denver. South of Pueblo, as early users of Ratón Pass recognized, a similar salient of rough land breaks the Colorado piedmont with lava-capped mesas and buttes, eroded plateaus, and mountain spurs covered with ponderosa pine and juniper.

Zebulon Pike, who explored Colorado in 1806–7, became a brigadier general during the War of 1812. He was killed while attacking the British at Fort York (Toronto), Canada, April 27, 1813. (Denver Public Library, Western History Collection.)

Before the advent of the railroad, slow-moving travelers treasured wood and water as necessities for survival. In the spring, budding cottonwoods, flowers, and plentiful grass made the bottomlands of the Arkansas and South Platte into elongated gardens one-half to two miles wide. In 1846 the grass along the Arkansas sustained the horses of Stephen Watts Kearny’s entire army en route to occupy New Mexico and California. Sensible gold seekers who followed the courses of the rivers in 1859 reported few of the hardships suffered by those who foolishly followed more direct routes.

Observers have recognized that prairies are more than brown grass, gray soil, and an occasional hawk. In the nineteenth century the artist Thomas Worthington Whittredge wrote, Whoever crossed the plains could hardly fail to be impressed with its vastness and silence and the appearance everywhere of an innocent, primitive existence.⁶ Two generations later the poet Thomas Hornsby Ferril described the delicate beauty of the plains in The Prairie Melts, which begins:

The prairie melts into the throats of larks

And green like water green begins to flow

Into the pinto patches of the snow.⁷

Mount Sneffels in southwestern Colorado’s San Juan Range is one of fifty-four Colorado peaks over 14,000 feet high. (Photo by Russell Lee, Farm Security Administration, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.)

Mapping the complexities of the mountains was more challenging than describing the plains. Zebulon Pike and Stephen Long were among the first to make mistakes about Colorado’s high-country geography, including giving wildly inaccurate estimates of mountains’ heights. Pike thought Grand Mountain was 18,581 feet high; Long judged it to be 11,507.5 feet. Later, better-equipped surveyors declared that Pikes Peak was 14,110 feet high, and they revised their figures in 2002 to add 5 feet to its height.⁸

Traders and trappers knew far more about the mountains than Long or Frémont did. By the 1830s, scores of trappers carried maps of portions of Colorado in their heads. Although their knowledge might have spread from friend to friend in St. Louis saloons, it was not public knowledge. Further, eighteenth-century Spanish maps were unknown to Anglo-American mapmakers. Consequently, in 1836 Albert Gallatin used guesswork to fill in the details of the Rockies on his map of the West. A few years later Frémont said of the Colorado mountains that the coves, the heads of the rivers, the approximations of their waters, the practicability of the mountain passes … although well-known to hunters and trappers, were unknown to science and to history.⁹ As he set out on his first expedition into the West in 1842, Frémont wisely hired the seasoned mountain man Christopher Kit Carson for $100 a month to be his guide.

The Rocky Mountains, an 1871 engraving from a painting by Thomas Worthington Whittredge, shows Indians camped along the South Platte River with Longs Peak in the background. (Library of Congress, Washington, DC.)

By the 1840s Spanish, French, and Anglo-American trappers and explorers had named many prominent features on the Colorado landscape. They had labeled the high mountain valleys or parks behind the Front Range and the Sangre de Cristo Range—San Luis Park or Valley, Bayou Salado or South Park, Middle Park, and North Park. Not until after Frémont’s 1844 expedition, however, were the great parks represented on a published map. His description of beautiful high valleys walled in all around with snowy mountains, rich in water and with grass, fringed with pine, and his somewhat misleading map showing basins as level as pool tables, surrounded by narrow mountain palisades, molded the popular image.¹⁰

Within ten years of the 1859 gold rush, Colorado’s range and park system was well-known, if still imperfectly mapped. The Front Range, the Park Range, the Sawatch, and the fringes of the San Juans were cut by trails and dotted with mining camps. Parties of gentlemen and ladies had begun to take summer camping trips to Hot Sulphur Springs and South Park, and topographical survey parties in the early 1870s sometimes found empty whiskey bottles on high peaks.

The western third of Colorado was the last to be carefully explored. From 1867 to 1869, John Wesley Powell traced the drainage system of the Western Slope following the paths of the Colorado, White, and Yampa Rivers through their canyons and valleys. In the early 1870s, parties of surveyors, artists, and scientists directed by Ferdinand V. Hayden fanned out across Rocky Mountain Colorado—measuring heights and distances, climbing peaks, photographing natural features, describing the geology, evaluating the resources, fixing contour lines, and sketching the topography. Hayden’s 1877 Geological and Geographical Atlas of Colorado and Portions of Adjacent Territory was of practical value to railroads, mining companies, and real estate promoters. Thanks to Hayden and his predecessors, the geography of Colorado was well-known by 1900. Modern mapmakers have drawn contour lines more precisely, colorfully delineated geological formations, and refined the nineteenth-century maps in numerous other ways, including subdividing the flatlands into the high plains and piedmont and separating the Wyoming Basin in the state’s northwest corner from the western plateau.

Settlers have built a superstructure of human activities on the foundation of the natural environment. Colorado’s resources, natural transportation corridors, and topographical divisions have all influenced its growth. Different sections have received people at different times, from different places, and for different reasons. The result has been an evolution of human regions shaping parts of a single commonwealth in different ways.

The state is the meeting point for three major sections within the American West. Historians have portrayed US history in terms of sectional differences between North and South, Atlantic Coast and Mississippi Valley, Massachusetts and Virginia. The trans–Mississippi West invites the same theme, for the lines of contact between distinct and competing regions within the West have had as much importance as state borders. Colorado’s sections follow the great rivers as they diverge from its mountains. The Rio Grande ties the state to the Southwest, the Colorado to the range and plateau country of the Mountain West, the South Platte and Arkansas to the Great Plains.

Farmers in eastern Colorado turn their backs on the mountains, finding compatriots in the vast sweep of grassland between Texas and the Dakotas. For the past century the common theme of the plains has been agricultural problems, in particular adjustment to scarce rainfall. From 1850 to 1920, Americans viewed the plains as an area unified by unique opportunities. Since that time the area’s slow growth, its lack of manufacturing, and the absence of cities have caused both outsiders and residents to think of it as a region defined by a peculiar set of social and economic problems.

Today, as a century ago, eastern Colorado is a country of small towns stretching along railroad tracks and highways, of ranches and wheat fields bathed in dry wind. The South Platte River runs through the northeastern Colorado plains and the Arkansas River through the southeastern plains. Both rivers support irrigated farms whose products are marketed through towns such as Greeley, Fort Morgan, and Sterling on the South Platte and Rocky Ford, La Junta, Las Animas, and Lamar on the Arkansas. Flanking the valleys is a land where grain elevators stand as sentries guarding the march of civilization. Often, however, civilization has marched right through eastern Colorado seeking the cities at the base of the mountains.

Topographically, the cities from Pueblo in the south to Fort Collins in the north belong to the eastern flatlands of Colorado, although they prefer to stress their connections with the mountains. Denver is often photographed with the mountains forming a backdrop, and Colorado Springs advertises its closeness to Pikes Peak. Home to more than 80 percent of the state’s population, the cities, towns, and unincorporated places along Interstate 25 are coalescing into a megalopolis nearly 175 miles long.

For much of its history, western Colorado shared its problems and opportunities with the sparsely populated portions of Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Theodore Roosevelt described Garfield County as a great, wild country. In the creek bottoms there were a good many ranches; but we only occasionally passed by these, on our way to our hunting grounds in the wilderness along the edge of the snowline.¹¹ Eventually, so many visitors flooded parts of western Colorado that along major highways time-share condominiums and vacation homes gobbled up the wilderness and befouled the air. Beyond the mountains, the irrigated lands along the Yampa, Gunnison, and Colorado Rivers grow peaches, apples, vegetables, and winter fodder. Without irrigation, the plateau and desert land remains much as it was a century ago.

The southern counties constitute another distinct region. The valleys flanking both sides of the Sangre de Cristo Range form the northern fringe of the American Southwest, a part of the Spanish borderlands—the northernmost provinces of Mexico. After 1850 this became a zone of cultural contact between Anglo-Americans and Spanish-speaking and Native American peoples. Like the eastern plains, southern Colorado has not enjoyed the prosperity and population growth that have rained upon the Front Range and favored mountain towns such as Aspen, Breckenridge, Crested Butte, Steamboat Springs, and Telluride.

Colorado’s division among several larger regions has contributed to its fragmentation and its contradictions. Its people have fought over water, conservation, and political representation. They have divided along regional, economic, ethnic, and political lines. They have done good works by building churches, hospitals, and schools. They have massacred, lynched, and deported those they feared. They have dug mines, watered and plowed the plains, built cities. They have savaged their environment and tried to save it.

Many newcomers and native Coloradans are unaware of the state’s rich story and of the distortions it has suffered at the hands of boosters who like to fluff up the past for the sake of tourists. For those willing to take the time to look beyond the simplifications, Colorado offers a complex historical drama, a saga of more than 10,000 years, set in a land as harsh and fragile as it is bountiful and beautiful.

2

The First Coloradans

In the beginning the creator made first the earth, then the trees and the grass, and afterward he made the animals and people and put them on the earth.¹

—CHEYENNE CREATION ACCOUNT

For much of their history, Anglo-Americans have contemplated the westward movement of their frontier. From their eastern perspective, they have often characterized the West as a relatively empty space, a vast land of scattered, often nomadic peoples. That view has changed as scholars have recognized that Anglo-Americans were late arrivals in the American West. Hundreds of years before Missouri traders trekked westward to reach the Rockies, Hispanic Americans had moved from Mexico northward into New Mexico. For more than 11,000 years before any European set foot on the plains or in the mountains, Native Americans had shaped the region’s history.

Prehistoric Peoples

Archaeologists speculate about the origins of people in the Americas. One respected theory suggests that hunters from Siberia crossed into North America around 15,000 years ago and over many generations worked their way south, reaching Colorado at least 11,000 years ago. Evidence of those early people was unearthed in 1932 at Dent, a rail stop forty miles northeast of Denver. There the Reverend Conrad Bilgery, SJ, and a group of his Regis College students found a spearhead along with the bones of the long-extinct woolly mammoth. A few years before the Dent discoveries, Denver archaeologist Jesse D. Figgins had excavated spear points near Folsom, New Mexico, that led him and other archaeologists to conclude that people had lived in North America for thousands of years. The Dent finds confirmed that view. E. Steve Cassells, in The Archaeology of Colorado, noted that Dent put Colorado on the map for the first site in the New World with firm evidence for the association of man and mammoth.² Eventually, scientists dated the bones as around 11,000 years old. They concluded that the spearhead, a type called Clovis, was equally ancient, making it older than the Folsom artifacts and among the oldest evidence of people in North America.³

Dent is only one of more than 50,000 prehistoric sites found in Colorado. The Lamb Spring site southwest of Denver appears to be as old as Dent. At the Lindenmeier Ranch, twenty-eight miles north of Fort Collins, artifacts demonstrate that people frequented the area for thousands of years. At Gordon Creek, also north of Fort Collins, the bones of a woman who died more than 9,000 years ago were found in 1963. In 1981 archaeologists unearthed the crumbled remains of stick and mud structures in Middle Park that are at least 3,000 years older than the famed cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde. In the 1990s Stephen Chomko, working with students from Fort Lewis College, saved artifacts found in Piñon Canyon northeast of Trinidad. That same decade students from the University of Northern Colorado, directed by Bob Brunswig, studied ancient rock shelters on the Pawnee National Grasslands north of Fort Morgan. In 1998 Larry Todd and his Colorado State University students collected bones of dozens of bison (sometimes referred to as buffalo) killed by hunters who trapped the beasts in an arroyo west of Windsor more than 2,000 years ago. In the summer of 2001 Western State College students in Gunnison investigated rock shelters and fire pits on nearby Tenderfoot Mountain, where their professor, Mark Stiger, suspects Folsom-period people resided.

Through painstaking digging, sifting, collecting, cataloging, and analyzing of evidence, archaeologists have sketched the broad picture of stone-age life in Colorado.⁴ For thousands of years, nomadic hunters and gatherers stalked large animals such as the mammoth. As those behemoths disappeared around 7,000 years ago, perhaps as a result of overhunting, hunters turned to bison and smaller game. The hunting-gathering way of life persisted for more than 10,000 years. Indeed, many of the western Native Americans, such as the Utes, encountered by Europeans in the 1600s were hunters. Others were agriculturalists by that time. Although traces of rudimentary agriculture dating back around 1,500 years have been found in eastern Colorado, most agricultural sites are in the Southwest, where people tended crops as early as AD 500.

Frémont and Ancestral Puebloans (Anasazi)

The Frémont people who foraged, hunted, and farmed in northwestern and central western Colorado between around AD 650 and 1200 left symbols and art on rocks and canyon walls. Yet their lives remain largely a mystery. Better understood are the Ancestral Puebloans, also referred to as the Anasazi (the word means ancient enemy in Navajo), who for more than a thousand years lived in southwestern Colorado and adjacent areas in New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah. These predecessors of the cliff dwellers were a gardening and gathering people. As the influence of the higher culture of central Mexico filtered north, they learned to grow beans in addition to corn and squash, to make pottery, and to hunt with bows and arrows. They constructed villages with pit houses and storage bins arranged in regular patterns.

Between AD 750 and 900, the Ancestral Puebloans shifted from dwelling in pit houses to living in surface buildings. In front of the structures they constructed subterranean circular kivas, reminiscent of the pit houses, which were used for ceremonial purposes. They built some of their villages in river valleys and others on the tops of mesas in western Colorado, northern New Mexico, southern Utah, and northern Arizona.

The most extensive development of the Ancestral Puebloan culture dates from around 1050. Mesa Verde’s Cliff Palace, constructed about 1175, may have housed 400 people in its 200 rooms. The villagers planted crops on the mesa tops and on terraces along the canyon beds below. They made reservoirs and dug ditches to channel water to their fields. They used tools of bone, stone, and wood. They carefully decorated their pottery and wove elaborate cotton textiles. They wore sandals made from yucca leaves and ornaments of beads and turquoise. They used woven blankets, mats, baskets, and bags. The richness of their possessions as well as the plastering and painting of their interior walls suggests that they enjoyed an economic surplus.

Material wealth did not guarantee a placid existence. The remains of burned villages tell of chronic warfare before 900. After that there may have been less warfare but more cannibalism. Archaeologists Christy and Jacqueline Turner suspect that warrior-cultists migrating north from central Mexico brought ritual butchery, which they used to terrify and control the people of northwestern New Mexico and southwestern Colorado.⁵

Cliff Palace, the largest of the Native American cliff dwellings preserved in Mesa Verde National Park, caught the attention of photographer William Henry Jackson. (Colorado Historical Society, Denver.)

A combination of drought, war, soil exhaustion, and deforestation may explain the disappearance of the Puebloans from southwestern Colorado in the late 1200s. By 1300 the builders of Cliff Palace had left that splendid structure. Three centuries later, Spanish explorers encountered pueblo dwellers in Arizona and New Mexico who could lay good claim to being the descendants of the people who made the great cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde.

Utes, Apaches, and Navajos

The Utes, a loose confederation of nomadic hunters, replaced the Puebloans as the dominant people of southern Utah and western Colorado. Ute families spent each summer and fall hunting deer and elk in the mountains and gathering nuts and berries. Usually wintering in the river valleys of western Colorado, they assembled briefly into larger bands each spring before fanning out again in their search for food. Although the Utes were probably not a military threat sufficient to drive out the Puebloans through open warfare, their competition for scarce resources and their raids on food caches may have hastened the abandonment of the cliff and mesa villages. Successful hunters for centuries, the Utes retain two reservations in Colorado to this day.

Wickiups, such as this one photographed around 1900 in what is now Rocky Mountain National Park, are among the few traces left by the Utes who occupied Colorado’s high country for hundreds of years. (Tom Noel Collection.)

At probably about the same time the Utes were moving eastward into Colorado, Indians speaking various Athapascan dialects began to migrate south from Canada. Apache bands reached the plains of Kansas, eastern Colorado, and northeastern New Mexico by the late 1500s. A related group, the Navajos, may have split from the Apaches around 1400, and by the late 1500s some Navajos probably lived in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. During some years they raided the New Mexico pueblos for maize and squash and for luxury goods such as cotton cloaks, feather work, jewelry, and pottery. In other years they traded with the pueblos, camping outside village walls and offering dried meat, deer, bison, and antelope skins.

Spanish New Mexico and the Natives

In 1540 a thirty-year-old Spanish adventurer, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, led an expedition of more than 1,300 people, including 1,000 allied Indians, from central Mexico into New Mexico. Although he did not enter Colorado, did not find cities of gold, and left after two years, Coronado’s incursion foreshadowed vast changes for the Native peoples of the region.⁶ In 1598 Spanish officials dispatched Juan de Oñate to establish a colony 1,500 miles north of Mexico City. His conquest of New Mexico disrupted the lives of the pueblo peoples. After the pueblos at Acoma resisted Spanish demands and killed some soldiers, Oñate made slaves of many of the Natives and cut off one foot of each male over twenty-five. Spanish governors extorted labor and confiscated food from the pueblos. Missionaries built churches and labored to convert the Natives to Catholicism.

In 1680 the pueblo peoples staged one of the most successful Native American revolts in North America’s history, killing 400 Spanish and forcing the rest to flee south to the site of El Paso. Spanish reconquest of New Mexico between 1692 and 1696 ended the rebellion. Yet European settlement was still confined to the Rio Abajo, or lower river, along the Rio Grande around Albuquerque and to the mountain valleys of the Rio Arriba, the upper river country around Taos and Santa Fe. Commerce southward to Chihuahua remained so dangerous that New Mexicans traveled south only in large caravans under military escort. Messages and orders from officials in Mexico City did little to change the isolation of a province left to itself and to the protection of a handful of soldiers.

Those soldiers had their hands full. By introducing horses to the Southwest, the Spanish had transformed tribes such as the Utes and Comanches into fleet fighting forces. George E. Hyde described the impact of the horse on the Apaches. Before they had horses, the Apaches came to the pueblos afoot and very poor … to beg or barter for a few simple needs. After they obtained horses, they came to the trading fairs at Pecos, Taos, and Picurís in strong mounted bands, haughty and fierce … and demanded of the Pueblos and Spaniards, first of all, metal weapons: long, ugly Spanish daggers, hatchets, and sword blades, which they used as points on their lances.⁷

The Utes, who lived in close contact with the Spanish, had horses by 1675. They pursued bison in the autumn and returned in the early winter with more than enough meat and skins to feed and clothe their families. An economic surplus created by more efficient hunting made it possible for scattered families to group together in larger bands under stronger leadership.

North of the Utes lived their distant kin, the Shoshones and Comanches. Originally mountain dwellers like the Utes, they found their lives changed when they started using horses in the late 1600s. The Shoshones moved from Idaho onto the plains of Wyoming and Montana. The Comanches migrated southward from Wyoming into the Apache lands of eastern Colorado. They are identified in Spanish records as early as 1705, occupying the territory north of the Arkansas River. The Comanches may have moved under pressure from other tribes that were also pushing onto the plains. Just as important was their desire to follow the bison herds on the southwestern plains and to locate closer to the supply of horses.

Spain faced a threat it had created. In 1675 the Utes had pledged friendship to Governor Antonio de Otermín at Santa Fe. Within twenty years, however, they were raiding Spanish villages and Indian pueblos for food, horses, and slaves. The Comanches began to harass New Mexico early in the eighteenth century, putting New Mexico’s farmers in constant danger.

At the same time, distant French rumbles disturbed New Mexico as French traders from Illinois country and Louisiana worked their way westward among the Comanches and other peoples of the plains between French Louisiana and Spanish New Mexico. Juan de Archuleta, who led an expedition northward into Colorado from New Mexico sometime between 1664 and 1680, found French influence among the Pawnees. By the late 1690s, reports reached New Mexico of Frenchmen in what are now Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Sitting in low adobe rooms smoky from piñon fires and sputtering candles, New Mexican officials must have pondered maps and rumors, wondering about a French-Pawnee alliance and speculating on the spread of firearms among the tribes.

The Spanish reacted to both dangers by playing European-style power politics, maneuvering through war and negotiation to establish a balance of forces on New Mexico’s periphery. To counter the threats, the Spanish used the tactic of reconnaissance in force. With scores of isolated villages and pueblos in danger of attack from mounted nomads, static defense would have required far more resources than the small Spanish settlements had available. As an alternative, strategists in Santa Fe hoped periodic military expeditions could defeat or overawe the Native Americans and keep southern Colorado safe from French influence.

When New Mexico governor Don Diego de Vargas made a short foray into southern Colorado in July 1694, he demonstrated that the Spanish valued the lands to the north of their settlements.⁸ Twelve years later Juan de Ulibarrí, who styled himself General Juan de Ulibarrí, sergeant-major of this kingdom, traveled with forty soldiers and a hundred friendly Indians north from Taos, probably over the Sangre de Cristos, north along the foothills of the Rockies, and east along the Arkansas to El Cuartelejo, a group of Apache villages.⁹ There Ulibarrí found sixty refugees from Picurís Pueblo who had fled after the reconquest but now wanted to return to New Mexico. There, too, were tribes of plains Apaches still friendly with the Spanish. Occupying at least a dozen small villages, they grew crops and had begun to learn the arts of building, making pottery, and irrigation.

Because permanent settlement and the accumulation of stores of food made the Apaches attractive targets for raids, they sought Spanish protection. Ulibarrí nominated one of their chiefs as a representative of Spanish authority, heard worrisome reports of French traders among the Pawnees, and claimed formal possession of the region. One bright day in August 1706 he mounted a low hill to intone the formula Knights, Companions, and Friends: Let the broad new province of San Luis, the great settlement of Santa Domingo of El Cuartelejo be pacified by the arms of us who are the vassals of our monarch, king and natural lord, Don Philip V—may he live forever.¹⁰

In the following decade southern Colorado became familiar ground to New Mexico’s soldiers. Expeditions penetrated the mountains there in 1714 and 1719 to make war on the Utes. In the latter year Governor Antonio Valverde Cosío (often referred to as Valverde) led 60 soldiers from Santa Fe, 45 Spanish settlers, 465 Pueblo warriors, and 165 Apaches against the Comanches. Although he failed to catch the raiders, Valverde assured the Carlana Apaches of the Arkansas Valley that they would have Spanish support against the Comanches. It was a hollow promise that gave the Apaches no real protection. Under pressure from the Comanches, most Apaches had left Colorado by 1730.

The fate of the Apaches perhaps did not concern Valverde as much as the troubling news he received that the French were influencing the Pawnees and other tribes to the north and east. Valverde sent a follow-up expedition to seek further evidence of intruders. Crossing through southeastern Colorado in June 1720 under the leadership of Pedro de Villasur, the forty-two soldiers and sixty allied Indians dispatched by Valverde found a Pawnee village along the Platte in western Nebraska. After failing to post night sentries, Villasur and most of his Spanish comrades were killed by the Pawnees, who may have been helped by the French.

Spain left western Kansas and eastern Colorado to the bison and the Comanches for the next several decades, which meant opportunity for the French. A small party of French traders, led by brothers Pierre and Paul Mallet, braved the wilds of Nebraska and Kansas and the dry reaches of eastern New Mexico to reach Taos in 1739.¹¹ Other French merchants appeared in each of the years 1749 through 1752—some by way of the Arkansas River through the country of their Comanche allies, some by way of the northerly route from the Missouri River. Given the vastness of the region, New Mexico could not effectively seal its borders. Instead, officials tried to wean the Comanches from their French connections by trading with the Natives.

The Spanish also tried to keep on good terms with the Utes, who often opposed the Comanches. After being defeated by Spanish troops in the late 1740s, Ute bands turned to peaceful trade with the Spanish. They had been at war with the Comanches since 1727, bellicosity that probably gave rise to the name Comanche, a Spanish adaptation of the Ute word Komantcia, which means anyone who wants to fight me all the time.¹² After the Comanches drove the Apaches from the Colorado plains, the Utes continued to fight the Comanches for control of the Arkansas River basin.

Even after France temporarily gave up its claim to the heartland of North America in 1763, Spain fought the Comanches. From the 1750s onward the Comanches raided Taos and other vulnerable towns, and the Spanish responded with forays into the lands south of the Arkansas River. In 1768 a Comanche chief wearing a leather headdress with a green horn (cuerno verde in Spanish) led an attack on the New Mexico town of Ojo Caliente, in which he was killed. The chief’s son adopted the same headdress, and New Mexicans learned to fear the raids of Cuerno Verde.

To control the Comanches, Spanish officials turned to one of the great captains of their eighteenth-century frontier, Juan Bautista de Anza—founder of San Francisco, explorer of California, and now governor of New Mexico. In 1779 he led several hundred men northward from Taos through the San Luis Valley and South Park. In the foothills between Walsenburg and Pueblo, where Greenhorn Mountain now overlooks the plains, de Anza ambushed Cuerno Verde. The Spanish killed him, his son, four of his war chiefs, a medicine man, and ten warriors. They took back a hundred mules loaded with spoils.

Stages of Native American Occupation, AD 1100–1820. (Map by Kenneth A. Erickson, Department of Geography, University of Colorado–Boulder.)

Anza continued to harass the Comanches until they made peace in 1786. For the first time in a generation, the Comanches traded peacefully at Spanish settlements. Others requested Spanish help with building a village, San Carlos, on the Arkansas River a few miles east of the current site of Pueblo. For four months the settlement seemed a success, until Comanche uneasiness about living where a member of the tribe had died emptied the first adobe town in Colorado.

Cheyennes and Arapahos

Anza’s skillful handling of the Comanches helped to calm New Mexico’s turbulent northern and eastern frontiers—a calm that was extended in 1789 when the Utes signed a treaty with the Spanish. In 1806 the Comanches made peace with the Kiowas, a plains tribe with whom they soon allied. The connection was valuable because the Cheyennes and the Arapahos, newcomers from the Northeast who migrated into Colorado around 1800, were threatening Comanche dominance on the eastern plains. In the 1600s the larger of the two groups, the Cheyennes, had lived in the Red River country of Minnesota and North Dakota, where the Sheyenne River still bears their name. In the 1700s they pushed onto the open plains, secured horses, and reached the Black Hills in southwestern South Dakota.

In the Black Hills the Cheyennes met the Arapahos, another Algonquian group, who had adopted the plains culture and ranged as far west as the Rockies. The two tribes became firm friends, camping together for long periods, intermarrying, and uniting in war. Early in the 1800s, segments of the Cheyennes followed the Arapahos south across the Platte in search of wild horses and the great southern bison herd. One result of the move was the division of each tribe into northern and southern groups using lands north and south of the Platte.

A second result was the renewal of warfare on the plains in the 1820s and 1830s, as the Southern Cheyennes pushed the Utes back into the Rockies and forced the Comanches south of the Arkansas. Yet despite the Cheyenne victory over the Comanches in the 1838 battle of Wolf Creek in Oklahoma, the tribes made peace in 1840. They met on the Arkansas River where they sealed their truce with presents, including guns and horses.¹³ Perhaps the Natives settled their intertribal differences because they feared a new and more powerful enemy—the Anglo-Americans who had already established several fur-trading forts on the plains. Perhaps, too, the tribes, plagued by smallpox, decided not to waste their strength fighting each other.

The Southern Cheyennes and Arapahos led lives typical of the plains tribes, which had abandoned their woodland and village origins. With horses for transportation and the tepee as a shelter, they could follow the two great bison herds that roamed north and south of the Platte River. Bison provided for the Native Americans’ needs—meat and fat; horn and bone for tools and utensils; tanned skins for bedding, clothing, and shelter; rawhide for shields, buckets, and bindings. Men hunted; women cleaned and cured the skins and prepared the meat.

Warfare was less a tribal undertaking than an elaborate ritual played out by individuals and small bands. The focus of attention was on the young man and the status he could acquire—the number of his bison robes, his horses, his feats against the enemy. Like other plains tribes the Cheyennes counted their coups, relating to each other how they had touched this enemy with a bare hand, how they had killed that one, how they had ridden down an armed man on foot, how they had captured a shield and a lance. War parties took vengeance on enemies and, if successful, captured their horses, the measure of wealth among plains tribesmen. Fast, nimble ponies ensured success on the hunt, feasts to publicize the family’s prestige, and the means to start offspring on the path to war glory. The relationship of war and its fruits was obvious to young Cheyenne men, who saw that battle exploits led to preferment within the tribe.¹⁴

The band, rather than the whole tribe, was the community unit during most of the year. To find enough grazing for their ponies, the Arapahos split into four distinct groups for the winter, each with its own chief and headmen. Membership in the Long Leg (Antelope) band, the Greasy Face band, the Beaver band, or the Quick-to-Anger band was determined largely by birth; but one could move from one to another. By tradition, the head chief of the tribe was the most widely respected of the Antelope leaders. The Cheyennes at the beginning of the nineteenth century counted ten bands, each with four chiefs. When the bands assembled in the spring, their leaders constituted the tribal council with the addition of four elder priest-statesmen. Before making major decisions, the council sampled popular opinion to find acceptable positions.

The long summer days before the annual hunt when the chiefs met were also the time for rituals of renewal. The Sun Dance, common to almost every plains tribe, originated with the Cheyennes and Arapahos in the eighteenth century. Held in June or July when the grass was lush and the cottonwoods were in leaf, the Sun Dance—a multi-day festival—offered a chance for shared experiences, an opportunity to fulfill vows, and a time to reaffirm the harmonious relationship with the sun and earth. Each band raised its tepees in a meticulously arranged circle, which might spread to a mile in diameter. The center of activity was the Sun Dance pole, a tree felled and raised again in the camp circle with a Sun Dance lodge built around it. Some participants fasted or tortured their bodies as a means of sacrificing to bring good fortune. The ceremony ended with rituals of purification. The Cheyenne name for the Sun Dance indicates its original purpose—new-life-lodge, or renewing the earth.¹⁵

This Indian petroglyph near Del Norte in the Rio Grande Valley depicts highlights in tribal history such as the acquisition of horses. (Denver Public Library, Western History Collection.)

In their mid-teens, most Cheyenne men joined military organizations. Each group had its own symbols, rituals, and leaders and felt a strong sense of comradeship. The organizations took the lead in warfare and maintained order in the camp. Without the cooperation of the Wolf Soldiers, the Bull Soldiers, the Bowstrings, the Fox Soldiers, or the Dog Soldiers, the council of forty-four had no way to enforce its decisions. The result was often an uneasy balance between the warrior societies and chiefs, between impulse and caution, between war and peace.

The adoption of the horse not only revolutionized relations between Native Americans and the Spanish but also profoundly changed the Natives’ lives. Steam, electricity, and gasoline, wrote historian Walter Prescott Webb, have wrought no greater changes in our culture than did horses in the culture of the Plains Indians.¹⁶ So rapid was the cultural change among many Natives that old traditions often disappeared. Tribes on the high plains forgot how to make pottery and how to farm, and they lost some of the stable ways of their earlier culture. Anthropologist Ruth Underhill called them the new rich and pointed out that a special belligerency existed among them because each individual had to establish his own worth by feats of bravery or special visions.¹⁷ Many of the troubles Anglo-Americans later faced in dealing with the Cheyennes and other plains tribes arose from the lack of clear lines of authority and from the need of individual warriors to prove themselves.

Horses allowed the Natives to range over wide areas and opened the way for huge population shifts. On the Great Plains, a sea of land across which mounted peoples moved like waves, currents of migration converged from every direction. On those plains Spain faced an unstable vortex as dangerous as any tornado. As late as the autumn of 1819 a war party—probably Pawnees—attacked a Spanish fort near Sangre de Cristo Pass, a little north of the current Highway 160 route over North La Veta Pass. The Spanish abandoned the small post soon thereafter. More than a century of fighting proved that Native Americans on horseback were the equal of Spanish troops and that Spain, whose small population base in New Mexico provided limited resources, lacked the power to take the Great Plains or the Rockies from the Indians.

At best, all Spain could do was try to control the Natives on New Mexico’s northern periphery. If that meant leaving the lands of Colorado ungrazed by Spanish sheep, unscratched by Spanish plows, and untouched by Spanish settlement, that was a small and necessary price to pay for a measure of peace. More than 200 years after Juan de Oñate established Nuevo Mexico, the plains, mountains, and plateaus of Colorado still belonged to the Utes, the Comanches and Kiowas, the Cheyennes and Arapahos, and to a lesser degree to Pawnees and Lakota (Sioux), who—although centered farther north and east—occasionally hunted in Colorado.

3

New Mexico’s Northern Frontier

A place has as many histories as it has had peoples. Each individual and each culture understand that place and history differently.¹

—VIRGINIA McCONNELL SIMMONS, 1979

In the 1600s and 1700s the province of New Mexico stretched as far north as military expeditions could enforce recognition of Spanish power among the Native Americans. To the east it reached into Apache and Comanche country until it encountered the sphere of influence of the French settlements at New Orleans and St. Louis. After France ceded its claim to middle America to Spain in 1763, French lands became Spanish territory. In 1800, when France took back what it had given up in 1763, the vast region known as Louisiana was left, as it had always been, with poorly defined boundaries.

Louisiana Purchase

When the United States bought Louisiana from the French in 1803, many Americans thought the noble bargain included the western drainage basin of the Mississippi; lacking an agreement with Spain and without precise maps, however, US officials were not sure of legal boundaries until 1819. That year the Adams-Onís Treaty set the border between Spanish and US territory along the Red River to the 100th meridian, north on that line to the Arkansas River, west again to