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Walking Colorado: An Introduction to the Origins Section

Hundreds of generations of Native American ancestors are represented in Colorado by scatters of artifacts along with the less portable evidence of shelter, the warmth of hearths, storage needs, and symbolic expression. We learn about them through…

Ancestral Puebloans of the Four Corners Region

Formerly labeled Anasazi, the Ancestral Puebloan culture is the most widely known of the ancient cultures of Colorado. The people who built the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde and the great houses of Chaco Canyon were subsistence farmers of corn, beans,…

Apishapa Phase

The Apishapa phase is the name given to distinctive archaeological sites found primarily in southeastern Colorado that Native Americans occupied between AD 1050 and 1450. The Apishapa phase is related to both contemporaneous and more recent…

Barger Gulch Site

There are few places in western North America richer in Paleo-Indian archaeology than Middle Park, the valley that forms the headwaters of the Colorado River in Grand County. Within Middle Park, the Barger Gulch area preserves an impressive amount of…

Brunot Agreement

The Brunot Agreement between the Nuche (Ute) and the US government in 1873 led to the development of mining in the San Juan Mountains by taking 3.7 million acres (about 5,780 square miles) from the Ute Reservation in western Colorado…

Chaco Canyon

In the eleventh century, Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico was the center of a Native American cultural region about the size of the state of Indiana. It encompassed most of southwestern Colorado, from Chimney Rock National Monument on the east to…

Chipeta

Chipeta (1843–1924) was a Ute woman known for her intelligence, judgment, empathy, bravery, and quiet strength, all of which made her the only woman of her time allowed on the Ute council. She was also the wife of Ouray, whom the United States recognized…

Cliff Dwelling

The cliff dwellings of southwestern Colorado are among the world’s greatest archaeological treasures. The term cliff dwelling can be applied to any archaeological site used as a habitation and located in an alcove or rock overhang; however, the most…

Clovis

The term Clovis refers to the earliest widespread archaeological culture to have occupied North and Central America, ca. 13,250–12,800 years ago. Since the discovery of the first Clovis artifacts in the 1930s, debate has raged over such fundamental…

Colorow

One of the best-known Nuche (Ute) leaders of the nineteenth century, Colorow (c. 1813–88) was involved in many significant events in Colorado history, from his first contact with white Americans during the Colorado Gold Rush to the Meeker Incident and…

Conejos Indian Agency

The Conejos Indian Agency was established in the San Luis Valley for the Ute Indians in 1860. It was an important place where annuity goods were distributed to the Utes and treaty negotiations took place. After the Treaty of 1868 established a…

Culturally Modified Trees

Culturally Modified Trees (or CMTs) are trees that exhibit peels, ax cuts, delimbing, wood removal, and other cultural modifications. Numerous CMTs are found in the foothills and mountains of Colorado. Research has shown that these trees are artifacts…

Dent Site

Early colonists occupied Colorado’s rich and ecologically diverse landscapes in the waning millennia of our planet’s most recent major Ice Age, the Pleistocene, between 14,000 and 12,000 years. Our best-documented evidence for Colorado’s earliest hunter…

Denver Special Indian Agency

The Denver Special Agency was established to provide goods and services to the Ute Indians visiting the plains of Colorado between 1871 and 1875. The agency served Utes who were accustomed to collecting supplies from Denver’s Middle Park Agency during…

Earth Lodge

An earth lodge is a distinctive type of timber-frame house built from the early 1400s to the late 1800s by a dozen different Indigenous nations on the Great Plains. These massive circular structures, often encompassing 1,500 square feet or more, featured…

Fluted Points

Fluted projectile points represent the earliest North American stone tool technology, although they comprise a small portion of the overall stone technology observed in the New World. These easily recognized spear points represent one form of technology…

Folsom People

Folsom groups, also called Folsom peoples or Folsom culture, occupied all of Colorado between about 13,000 and 12,000 years ago. They were not the first people in these areas, although they might have been the first in some newly unglaciated portions of…

Franktown Cave

Located two and a half miles southwest of Franktown, Franktown Cave is a prehistoric archaeological site in a large rockshelter that contained artifacts from prehistoric occupations over 8,000 years. Some of the findings include rare perishable artifacts…

Fremont Culture

Although it is on the eastern fringe of the area occupied by a people known to archaeology as the Fremont, Colorado is nevertheless important in the Fremont story, since clues to their origins and end are found there. Additionally, the presence of…

George Bent

George Bent (1843–1918) was a half-white, half-Native American soldier who fought in multiple battles for the Confederacy during the Civil War and for the Cheyenne people in various wars of the late nineteenth century. His life reflects the shifts in…

Ghost Dance

Ghost Dances are key ceremonies within a broader Indigenous religious movement that developed in the late nineteenth century in response to the brutal conquest of Native American nations by the US government and white settlers. By that time, most…

Grand Junction Indian Boarding School

The Grand Junction Indian School opened its doors to students in 1886 as the seventh school in the federal off-reservation residential boarding school system for Indigenous youth. The Grand Junction campus was the first boarding school in the mountain…

Hovenweep National Monument

Hovenweep National Monument is known for its prehistoric masonry structures clustered around small canyons along the Utah-Colorado border. To protect these unique archaeological resources, Warren G. Harding issued a Presidential Proclamation to establish…

Impact of Disease on Native Americans

Newly introduced diseases originating in Europe, Africa, and Asia swept what is now Colorado in the aftermath of Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage. While sparse historical and archaeological records make the effects of the earliest epidemics hard to…

Indian Annuities

Annuities were a fixed sum of money or goods that the US government paid to Indigenous people on a regular basis for the sale of their lands. Treaties with Indigenous nations typically specified payments in dollar amounts over a period of years in return…

Kivas

Kivas were architecturally unique rooms or structures built by Ancestral Puebloans in southwest Colorado that served important ceremonial and social functions. Architecturally, they are recognized in the archaeological record in southwestern Colorado as…

Los Piños Indian Agency

After the Treaty of 1868, the Los Piños Indian Agency became the center of governmental authority for the Uncompahgre Utes on the Ute Indian Reservation in western Colorado. While largely forgotten after its abandonment in 1881, the site of the second…

Meeker Incident

The Meeker Incident (September 29–October 5, 1879) was a Ute uprising at the White River Indian Agency on the Ute Reservation in present-day Rio Blanco County. Tension had been building on the reservation for months as Indian Agent Nathan Meeker…

Middle Park Indian Agency

The Middle Park Agency was established in 1862 for the Grand River, Uinta, and Yampa Utes. One of many federal Indian agencies established in Colorado during the 1860s, the Middle Park Agency mostly operated from Denver. After the Treaty of 1868…

Mistanta (Owl Woman)

Mistanta (Mis-stan-stur, ca. 1810–47), also known as Owl Woman, was the Southern Cheyenne wife of the American trader William Bent. Born about 1810, she is credited with helping maintain good relations between the white settlers and the Native Americans…

Niwot (Left Hand)

Niwot (c. 1820s–64), known to English speakers as "Left Hand," was a prominent Arapaho leader in the mid-1800s. The tumultuous period in Colorado history followed the 1858 discovery of gold near present-day Denver, on the traditional lands of the Arapaho…

Northern Ute People (Uintah and Ouray Reservation)

Although the Ute Indian Tribe (Uintah and Ouray reservation) is the official designation of the tribe today, its members are frequently referred to as Northern Utes to distinguish them from the Southern Ute Indian Tribe and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe…

Origins of Mesa Verde National Park

Mesa Verde National Park was established in 1906 as the country’s ninth national park. The site was visited and considered sacred by multiple Indigenous nations before it began attracting interest from white Americans in the late nineteenth and early…

Ouray

Ouray (1833–80), whose name means “Arrow” in the Ute language, was a leader of the Tabeguache (Uncompahgre) band of Ute Indians in Colorado during the late nineteenth century. Even though Ouray had no ultimate authority over Colorado’s Utes and spoke…

Paleo-Indian Period

The Paleo-Indian period is the era from the end of the Pleistocene (the last Ice Age) to about 9,000 years ago (7000 BC), during which the first people migrated to North and South America. This period is seen through a glass darkly: Paleo-Indian sites…

Plains Woodland

The Plains Woodland period covers approximately a thousand years of Colorado prehistory across a large portion of the state. Plains Woodland describes the groups of people occupying much of the western plains from present-day Nebraska and Kansas, west of…

Pueblo of Santa Ana–Tamaya

The Pueblo of Santa Ana is one of the seven Keres-speaking Pueblos that currently inhabit the state of New Mexico. The homes of the current inhabitants’ ancestors can be found in what is now Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado…

Rock Art of Colorado

Colorado is home to a rich variety of prehistoric and historic art carved on cliff sides and boulders. Most rock art is found in river basins. The mountain areas that cut a wide vertical swath through the state are relatively devoid of rock art. There…

Sapiah

Sapiah (1840–1936) was the preeminent chief of the Muache band of the Southern Ute Tribe beginning around 1870. He was born to a Muache father and an Apache mother, perhaps in the vicinity of Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico. The origins of his English name, …

Saul Halyve

Saul Halyve was a Hopi distance-running champion raised near Grand Junction who exploded onto the athletic scene in the early 1900s. Although Halyve would never compete in an Olympics due to a multitude of factors, his accomplishments match and possibly…

Sopris Phase

Archaeologists use the term Sopris phase to refer to unique Native American sites found only on the Purgatoire River west of Trinidad, Colorado, and on the upper tributaries of the Canadian River west of Raton and Cimarron, New Mexico (Fig. 1). Sopris…

Sweat Lodge

Sweat lodges are structures built to contain steam, and they play an important role in the spiritual practices of Colorado’s Native American peoples. The Arapaho, Cheyenne, Navajo, Shoshone, and Ute are historic Native American groups in Colorado who use…

Teenokuhu (Friday)

Teenokuhu (ca. 1822–81), known to English speakers as “Friday” or “Friday Fitzpatrick,” was a nineteenth-century Northern Arapaho leader. As a boy, Teenokuhu (Arapaho for “sits meekly”) was separated from his band and adopted by Thomas Fitzpatrick, a…

The Archaic Period in Colorado

The Archaic period is an era in the human history of Colorado dating from ca. 6500 BC–AD 200. It is one of the three prehistoric periods used by archaeologists to characterize broad cultural changes that occurred throughout the Americas. It was preceded…

The Formative Period in Prehistory

The Formative is the last of several periods in a sequence of cultural development that traces the overall progression from stone-tool-using, hunter- gatherer societies to fully developed agricultural societies. The process that occurred is analogous to…

The Gateway Tradition

The Gateway tradition refers to a set of archaeological sites within western Montrose and San Miguel Counties, Colorado, that appear similar to Pueblo II–period (AD 900–1150) sites to the south in the core homeland of the Ancestral Puebloans (Figs. 1 and…

Tipi

The tipi, or tepee, is an iconic form of Native American housing. It has a long history of use throughout Colorado and the western plains of North America. Sturdy and secure yet portable, the hide-covered tipi has been an ideal shelter for millennia…

Treaty of Fort Laramie

Signed in 1851, the Treaty of Fort Laramie was made between the US government and several Indigenous nations of the Great Plains—including the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota—who occupied parts of present southern Wyoming and northern Colorado. The treaty…

Upper Republican and Itskari Cultures

Upper Republican is a name archaeologists use for a prehistoric cultural group that occupied the upper Republican River area in northeast Colorado, western Nebraska, northern Kansas, and southeast Wyoming from AD 1100–1300. As a phase of a larger…

Ute History and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe

The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe is one of three federally recognized tribes of the Nuche (Ute) people. Their tribal lands comprise 597,288 acres of trust land and 27,354 acres of fee land in southwestern Colorado, northwestern New Mexico, and small, isolated…

Ute Indian Museum

The Ute people, or as they call themselves, Nuche (The People), are Colorado’s longest continuous residents. Their rich cultural heritage and history is on display at the Ute Indian Museum. Nestled in the heart of traditional Uncompahgre Ute territory in…

Ute Treaty of 1868

The Ute Treaty of 1868, also known as the “Kit Carson Treaty,” was negotiated between agents of the US government, including Kit Carson, and leaders of seven bands of Nuche (Ute people) living in Colorado and Utah. The treaty created for the Utes a…

Vision Quest

The vision quest is a rite of passage practiced by Native American tribes of the Plains and Great Basin groups such as the Eastern Shoshone. Vision quests are not well documented for the Ute Native Americans, although a few shamans might have performed…

White River Ute Indian Agency

The White River Ute Agency at Meeker, Colorado was established at the same time as the first Los Piños Agency under provisions of the Treaty of 1868. The agency was intended to serve the White River Ute band as well as some of the other bands from…

Yucca House National Monument

Yucca House National Monument was established to protect and preserve a large Ancestral Pueblo village south of Cortez in the southwestern corner of Colorado. Yucca House is an important Ancestral Pueblo village based on its size, unique configurations,…

Zia Pueblo

The modern pueblo at Zia is one of nineteen in New Mexico that can trace some part of its history to residence in southwestern Colorado. Located on a mesa above the Jemez River about thirty-five miles northwest of Albuquerque, New Mexico, the pueblo of…