Historic Tales of Colorado’s Grand Valley: Heroes, Heroines, Hucksters and Hooligans

By Kate Ruland-Thorne

Colorado's Grand Valley has an extensive geological and human history going back millennia. Franciscan priests worked in tandem with the native Ute people to plot passage through the territory, opening the valley to unprecedented settlement. The region became the playground of enterprising visionaries, murderous outlaws, hooligans and harlots alike. From the gruesome Meeker massacre and its tragic consequences for the Ute nation to the mysterious murder of Sam McMullin and a showdown with the Ku Klux Klan in 1925, uncover the engrossing stories of an unyielding land. Author Kate Ruland-Thorne recounts many of the defining and damning moments throughout Grand Valley history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Sep 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9781439657669

Kate Ruland-Thorne

A Southern Methodist University alumn, Kate Ruland-Thorne's thirty-year career in journalism has included roles at the Denver Post, Directions magazine, Sedona Red Rock News, Sedona magazine and Art-Talk (Arizona). She has served as president of the Sedona Historical Society, vice president of the Denver Women's Press Club, owner of Sedona Books and Music, local TV and radio show host in Sedona and feature writer for Grand Valley Magazine. This is her tenth book on regional history.

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INTRODUCTION

Anglo-Americans are latecomers into this vast area known as the Grand Valley. For almost one thousand years, this was the home of the Nuches—or the Utes, as we call them. Migrating with the seasons and following the herds was a way of life for these people, who became mighty warriors after being introduced to the horse in the late 1700s.

Evidence of Spanish explorers has been found on the Grand Mesa and elsewhere. Their encounters with the Utes were not always amicable. The Utes did tolerate the mountain men and fur traders at first because they brought desirable trade goods and treated the Utes with respect. But as white infringement increased, the Utes became alarmed. They burned down the trading posts and went on the attack. Their resistance to white intrusion lasted for one hundred years.

At the end of Civil War, the Utes were hard-pressed to hold back the tide of settlers and soldiers, whose sheer numbers became overwhelming. Describing this invasion into Ute country, an Uncompahgre chief, Commatttoo- its Red Moon, remarked, I know the white man. I know they are like flies in the summer—you kill them all day, but tomorrow they will be back in larger numbers.

Chief Ouray of the Uncompahgre Utes signed treaties that protected the Utes’ land in the Grand Valley until a series of unfortunate incidents occurred in 1879 that ended the Ute presence in western Colorado forever.

This story and the stories of the people who took over the land afterward—from ranchers, farmers, entrepreneurs, dreamers, heroes and heroines to outlaws, murderers, hooligans and harlots—are the stories that compose this book.

1

ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE GRAND VALLEY

Once upon a time, about 225 million years ago, prehistoric monsters roamed the Grand Valley. Some were as tall as a three-story building and others so small they are only now being discovered. Two thousand years ago, a prehistoric people known now as the Fremonts hunted in this valley, planted corn and built pit houses. Four hundred years ago, Spanish conquistadores ventured into our area seeking the lost city of gold and instead encountered hostile Ute Indians.

By the early 1800s, explorers and mountain men were traversing the Grand Valley. Pioneers, cowboys, ranchers, farmers, sheep men, outlaws and lawmen soon followed. And then came the visionaries: entrepreneurs, city planners and our founding fathers.

We know all of this because of the Museum of Western Colorado, now celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. The museum is a repository of the evidence of what took place once upon a time in our area, and it continues to make new discoveries on a regular basis.

We find out about what’s here from people bringing in artifacts and discovering sites we would never have thought of, says the museum’s director, Peter Booth.

The museum also works closely with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the U.S. Forest Service, which send boxes of artifacts and specimens for the museum’s experts to examine and classify. Phil Born, an anthropologist and archaeologist, is one of those experts. He’s in charge of the BLM archaeology collections. I personally wouldn’t give you a nickel for a wheelbarrow full of the stuff the BLM sends me, says Born. It has no monetary value, but it’s invaluable for researchers. As Born sifts through boxes of debris, he often finds evidence of early plant and animal life, pollen samples, charcoal and early tools like projectiles and ancient pottery shards, all of which contribute to the knowledge of our heritage. His greatest frustration is when folks cart away these things for themselves. It’s against federal law, by the way, he warns.

A volunteer giving a cooking demonstration at Cross Orchards. Museum of Western Colorado.

Tyrannosaurus rex holotype specimen at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh. Photo by Scott Robert Anselmo.

The Museum of Western Colorado has become the largest multidisciplinary museum between Salt Lake City and Denver. It includes four major museum facilities: Cross Orchards Historic Site, Museum of the West, the Whitman Educational Center and the Dinosaur Journey Museum in Fruita. There are four outdoor paleontology sites, the Loyd Files Research Library and a multitude of programs and services, including dinosaur expeditions and gift shops.

Dinosaur Journey is the most popular of the museum’s tourist attractions. Dr. Julia McHugh is the curator of paleontology for the museum. She came from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she was the senior research assistant for the Oklahoma State University Center for Health Sciences Anatomy and Vertebrate Paleontology program.

Paleontology is going through a second Golden Age, says McHugh. There are tremendous amounts of new discoveries being made because of advanced technology: CT scanning, 3D imagings, computers that run huge mathematical analysis have all created a rebirth for paleontology, allowing us to look at old problems by using these new techniques.

For example, a fossil snake discovered in the Fruita paleo area thirty years ago by George Callison was reanalyzed along with three other primitive snake fossils by researchers in Europe, and the result has pushed the origin of snakes back seventy million years. Because of new analyses on old bones, a long-standing controversy has been resolved about whether the brontosaurus discovered on Riggs Hill in the early 1900s was of the same species as the apatosaurus found in the same area. New analysis proved they are of a different genus. This was exciting news among paleontologists.

New species, like Callison’s snake, are still being found in our Fruita paleo area, says McHugh. "Discoveries include a meat-eating dinosaur, the Ceratosaurus magnicornis; the smallest dinosaur herbivore, Fruitadens; a rare mammal, Fruitafossor; and a small crocodile, Fruitachampsa. McHugh says that scientists from all over the world come to study their specimens. The Fruita Paleo Area is one of the best places in North America to study the smaller creatures of the late Jurassic period."

From 1896 to 1923, the historic Cross Orchards fruit ranch was a part of a 243-acre agricultural showcase, one of the largest in the state. Most of its acres were planted in apple trees, but when the moth blight wiped out most of the crop in the 1920s, the Cross family found fruit farming no longer feasible. The Museum of Western Colorado acquired the ranch in 1980 after a community-wide fundraising campaign to save it.

We open the first weekend in May [each year], says director Booth. There are costumed volunteers demonstrating everything from blacksmithing, gardening and cooking on a wood-burning stove to carving wooden toys. We have a steady supply of 150 volunteers who are here doing something every week and another 200 plus who volunteer for special events.

Booth points with equal pride at the Loyd Files Research Library. We have over 3,500 oral interviews there and files on people who came to or from Western Colorado and made a name for themselves.

The museum itself offers both permanent and revolving exhibits. A recent temporary exhibit was called Work. Ten different museums and libraries on the Western Slope provided an exhibit of what work represents historically to their area. Each museum took a look at their individual story, said Booth. The buffalo was the key for the Ute Museum in Montrose, tanning hides and making tools from the buffalo. For Palisade, it was fruit and coal. In a town with a population of five hundred, the fruit growers in Palisade hired six to nine thousand workers for three weeks to pick fruit. For Craig, leather makers are represented, and so on.

Annually, over 100,000 people visit the museum facilities and participate in their programs. It is the most significant cultural institution on the Western Slope and one of Mesa County’s most popular tourist destinations. Reader’s Digest recently listed the Museum of Western Colorado as one of the five best family summer destinations in the United States. Since 1971 the American Alliance of Museums has regularly accredited the Museum of Western Colorado as being in the top 1 percent of museums nationwide.

As Peter Booth says, If you haven’t visited one of our museums or participated in one of our numerous programs, then you haven’t experienced the Grand Valley.

2

IN SEARCH OF THE OLD SPANISH TRAIL

Two young, brash, cigar-smoking Franciscan priests set out in 1776 on an expedition for the Spanish government. Their mission: to find a strategic route from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Los Angeles, California. Silvestre Vélez de Escalante and Francisco Antanasio Domínguez left Santa Fe wearing sandals, long robes and broad-brimmed hats. They carried no firearms. For the next five months, they walked more than two thousand miles through New Mexico, western Colorado, Utah and Arizona, at times subsisting on meals of porcupine.

The Utes, on whom Escalante and Domínguez relied for direction, found them so entertaining and naïve that they purposely led the friars astray. As winter approached, their expedition ended near the Great Salt Lake. Although the Franciscans did not accomplish their goal, they drew maps and kept careful notes on all they experienced. Their information proved invaluable in the development of the Southwest, and a large portion of their route became known as the Old Spanish Trail.

Spain had begun colonizing much of the New World eighty years before the first pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. The Spanish considered the West their personal property. After the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, their empire was threatened as the mad contest for imperial stakes in land and commerce intensified. To protect that empire, Spain banned foreign travel into its domain. But the European demand for beaver hats inspired a new breed of men who ignored Spanish threats and sneaked into their territory anyway: the fur trappers.

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