Welcome to the Wild West - Part#2: Before Colorado became Colorado

Colorado has a fascinating cultural heritage; a confluence of Native American, Spanish, French and ultimately US influence. The Native Americans inhabited the region for more than 13 millennia before the first Spanish explorers arrived. The Ancient Pueblo Peoples built settlements right into the rock of the valleys and mesas of the Colorado Plateau, the Ute Indians inhabited the mountain valleys of the Southern Rocky Mountains and the Western Rocky Mountains, and the Arapaho people and the Cheyenne people moved west to hunt across the High Plains.


Mesa Verde: ancient Pueblo settlement in southern Colorado
Picture: Wikipedia.org

[Insight Guides: Colorado]

"Spaniards and other strangers barged right in, reconfiguring the social landscape and rewriting a whole region's history."

As far as modern history goes, Colorado's is quite short. While the Spanish were the first foreigners to traverse the area, it was the French who first claimed the region east of the Rockies in 1682 as part of the Louisiana Territory. The Indians lived in relative harmony with the French who hunted and traded fur with the natives, but overall, their influence was minimal. Fearing a French advancement, the Spanish claimed the western portion of the region in 1706. They never established permanent settlements here but Spanish explorers broke a lot of ground and coined a number of place names, including that of "Colorado," which is a term to describe the red earth they beheld. They also introduced horses to buffalo hunters on the plains which revolutionised the enterprise.
 

Formal boundaries were never demarcated between the lands of French Louisiana and Spanish New Mexico since the areas only real inhabitants were "mountain men": the fur traders and trappers that roamed the countryside. Fur was big business at the time, and it was the trade which played a major role in opening up the American West.

Eventually, France sold their portion of the land to America in the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, yet eastern Colorado still remained a wilderness for the next few decades. Legends were made of the American traders and scouts such as Charles and William Bent, Kit Carson, Jim Baker and Jim Bridger who ventured into the still largely uncharted territory and inhospitable land, establishing trading posts and building friendly relations with the Indians.

Trading posts were established to exchange goods and gather supplies in central locations, as well as provide protection from Indian attacks. Many Colorado towns were created as a result of these trading posts. The first trading-post was established at the mouth of Clear Creek, a tributary of the South Platter River, near present day Denver in 1832, by Louis Vasquez, and named Fort Vasquez, after its proprietor, but never grew into much importance and was soon abandoned. The most famous is Bent's Fort built by the Bent brothers in south-east Colorado near present day La Junta and now a National Historic Site and Landmark.

America's western frontier grew by more than 500,000 square miles when the U.S. won the Mexican-American War in 1848 (Mexico having gained its independence from Spain in 1821). As the victor, the U.S. was ceded territory extending west from the Rio Grande River (which originates in southwest Colorado) to the Pacific Ocean. Americans were now free to settle the southern Rocky Mountain region and American explorers began surveying the area.   

The first American to formally explore the Colorado area was Lt. Zebulon M. Pike in 1806, who was commissioned to document the southern portion of the Louisiana Purchase and to find the headwaters of the Red River. With a party of 22 men he pushed into the mountains west of Pueblo and Colorado Springs and amongst other things discovered what would later be called Pikes Peak, although he did not manage to make the summit.  The next major expedition was by an Army force commanded by Major Stephen H. Long in 1820. His mission was to explore the southwest boundary of the territory and his report basically wrote off the plains as a "Great American Dessert" unfit for exploration. In 1853, Captain John W. Gunnison led an exploring party across southern and western Colorado territory searching for a railroad route westward through the Colorado Rockies before being slain in Utah in an Indian attack.

John Charles Fremont, an American military officer, explorer and politician played a major role in bringing the west to the nation's attention. His flamboyant personality and lively reports stimulated public interest in the American West but also managed to offend a few people. His reports countered a kind of badlands view of Colorado that had taken hold in the public imagination from the early explorers and the the stories of frontiersmen. It was also Fremont's memoirs that served to fix Kit Carson's place as an American Legend.

He's efforts in Colorado are largely forgotten as his two expeditions were never completed and considered failures. His fourth expedition, his first in Colorado, was to find a railroad route through the Rockies and demonstrate that a 38th parallel railroad would be practical year-round. However this expedition took a fearful toll in human life when he and his men became snowbound. His fifth and final expedition was also in Colorado and retraced some steps from Gunnison's expedition through the Gunnison River country and San Luis Valley. He travelled across Kansas, southern Colorado and Utah in search of another railroad route over the Central Rockies. The trip remained inconclusive when the group reached, and was saved by, a Mormon settlement in Utah. But his other accomplishments throughout the west, his lively egotistic nature and his drastic swings from poverty to wealth and back to poverty again make him one of the best known explorers of the 19th Century.

When the Fur Trade collapsed in the late 1830s, trading posts were generally abandoned while some became military forts along isolated frontier settlements and trading routes as relations with the native Indians were growing ever more hostile. It seemed that this land was about to fade into oblivion, and remain a wild wilderness only for the fearless. But some significant events were about to take place that would advance Colorado into the 38th State and accelerate its quick development.