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Beef Industry on the Colorado Plains

Colorado’s beef industry traces its roots back to the latter half of the nineteenth century, when cowboys drove cattle across the plains in some of the most iconic imagery of the American West. However, the state’s modern beef industry did not begin…

Boggsville

Founded in 1866 near the confluence of the Arkansas and Purgatoire Rivers, Boggsville became the first permanent settlement in southeastern Colorado. Its residents pioneered irrigation and large-scale farming and ranching in the Arkansas Valley. The town…

Bridger Fire

On June 10, 2008, lightning sparked the Bridger Fire in a US Army training area in southeast Colorado, about twenty-five miles south of La Junta. Also known as the Piñon Canyon Fire, the blaze went on to become a significant wildfire, burning 46,612…

Brush

Brush is an agricultural community in Morgan County on the plains of eastern Colorado. It is located just east of Fort Morgan at the convergence of US Highway 34, US Highway 6, and State Highway 71 and is situated along the historic Texas Montana Trail…

Colorado’s Great Plains

Eastern Colorado, bordered by the foothills of the Rocky Mountains on the west, Kansas on the east, and the corners of Nebraska and Oklahoma, constitutes a portion of the Great Plains. It is the agricultural heartland of Colorado. This semiarid region is…

Douglas County

Douglas County covers 843 square miles between Denver and Colorado Springs on the western Great Plains along the Front Range. The county was established in 1861 as one of the original seventeen counties of the Colorado Territory. It is bordered to the…

Front Range

The Front Range is a corridor of the Rocky Mountains and surrounding land stretching 200 miles from the Wyoming border on the north to the Arkansas River on the south. The western border of the Front Range consists of a collection of high mountain ranges…

Godfrey’s Ranch

On January 14–15, 1865, immigrant Holon Godfrey found his family homestead in Colorado Territory under attack by about 100 Indigenous warriors engaged in a campaign of reprisal attacks after the Sand Creek Massacre of November 1864. The fierce battle at…

Gunnison County

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,…

The Great Die Up

“The Great Die Up” is one of three nicknames for the winter of 1886–87, when hundreds of thousands of cattle across the Great Plains died in harsh weather. The event changed the cattle industry forever, ending the practice of open-range grazing. Ranchers…