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Colorado: An Overview

Colorado, “the Centennial State,” was the thirty-eighth state to enter the Union on August 1, 1876. Its diverse geography encompasses 104,094 square miles of the American West and includes swathes of the Great Plains, southern Rocky Mountains, and the…

Ellison Onizuka

Ellison Onizuka (1946–86) was an astronaut for the US Space Shuttle program who earned degrees at the University of Colorado in Boulder before perishing in the 1986 Challenger shuttle disaster. Onizuka was Colorado’s highest-profile astronaut and is…

John C. Frémont

John Charles Frémont (1813–90) was an American explorer and cartographer for the US Topographical Engineers who crossed Colorado on various expeditions. Between 1842 and 1853, Frémont led five western expeditions with numerous objectives. He was…

John W. Gunnison

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…

Juan Antonio María de Rivera

Juan Antonio María de Rivera (1738–?) was a Spaniard and the first Euro-American to intensively explore the territory that eventually became the state of Colorado. In 1765 he made two trips into western Colorado from New Mexico, traveling as far as the…

Kit Carson

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,…

Louis Vasquez

Louis Vasquez (1798–1868) was a fur trapper and mountain man active in Colorado during the 1820s and 1830s. He reportedly constructed Fort Convenience and a hunter’s cabin that predated the majority of settlement in the region. One of the Colorado fur…

Mary Cronin

Mary Cronin (1893–1982) was an active member of the Colorado Mountain Club (CMC) and the first woman to summit each of Colorado’s Fourteeners. Today, Cronin is best known for her accomplishments in the backcountry, and the CMC she helped develop…

Stephen H. Long

Stephen Harriman Long (1784–1864) was an American military explorer best known for leading an expedition into present-day Colorado in 1820. On his expedition map, he famously labeled the arid Great Plains as a “Great American Desert” where agriculture…

Zebulon Montgomery Pike

In 1806–7, Captain Zebulon Montgomery Pike (1779-1813) led a US Army expedition to the southwestern reaches of the Louisiana Purchase, including the area that is now Colorado. Along with Lewis and Clark’s famous journey to the Pacific in 1804–6, Pike’s…