El Corazon de Trinidad (“the heart of Trinidad”) National Historic District covers a particularly well-preserved portion of downtown Trinidad that includes many blocks of adobe and brick buildings from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries…

Established in 2019 as Colorado’s forty-second state park, Fishers Peak State Park covers 19,200 acres south of Trinidad near the New Mexico border. The mountainous area includes a cluster of hills and mesas that give way to the Colorado plains to the…

Huerfano County, named for the Spanish word for “orphan,” covers 1,750 square miles in south central Colorado, east of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and south of the Wet Mountain Valley. The southern part of Huerfano County is part of the Raton Basin, a…

The life of Christopher “Kit” Carson (1809–68) represents a broad sweep of Western American history in the early-to-mid nineteenth century. Carson was a Rocky Mountain fur trapper, a guide and scout for the US Army Corps of Topographical Engineers,…

At an elevation of 7,798 feet in the Raton Range on the border between Colorado and New Mexico, Raton Pass has served as an important transportation corridor since at least the start of the Santa Fé Trail in 1821. Despite being on the less popular…

The Santa Fé Trail was an international overland route of both commerce and social interaction, joining the US prairie state of Missouri with the province of México Nuevo, Mexico, through much of the nineteenth century. Though its specific date of origin…

Colorado’s role in the American Civil War (1861–65) was part of a broader geopolitical contest: control of the American Southwest. The war began in 1861, just two years after the Colorado Gold Rush and mere months after Congress established the Colorado…

William Bent (1809–69) played a pivotal role in the early development of Colorado. He initially came to the area as a fur trapper but became a liaison between whites and Native Americans via his trading fort on the Arkansas River near present-day La…