Gunnison County, named for the American explorer John W. Gunnison, is a large, mountainous county in west-central Colorado. A sparsely populated county of 3,260 square miles, it includes some 1.5 million acres of national forest and wilderness lands,…

John Williams Gunnison (1812–53) was a nineteenth-century US Army officer and explorer. In 1853 he was charged with finding a railroad route across the Rocky Mountains, and while carrying out his mission he explored the Western Slope of Colorado. His…

The Leslie J. Savage Library at Western State Colorado University in Gunnison is a Spanish Colonial Revival–style building designed by Temple Hoyne Buell and built in 1938–39. Funded in part by the Public Works Administration (PWA), the library included…