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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…

Alferd Packer

Alferd E. Packer (1842–1909), also “Alfred,” was a prospector who became famous after confessing to eating his dead comrades while trapped in the San Juan Mountains in February 1874. With the group starving and disoriented, it appears likely that Packer…

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,…

Antiquities Act

The Antiquities Act, enacted in 1906, was the United States’ first federal law recognizing the importance and value of the places and objects that represent the country’s history and prehistory. The act provided for protection of archaeological and…

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…

Battle of Milk Creek

The Battle of Milk Creek was the major military engagement during the Meeker Incident, a revolt by a Nuche (Ute people) community in northwest Colorado in September 1879. The battle began on September 29, when Utes opened fire from the heights above Milk…

Bent's Forts

In the early and mid-nineteenth century, when the western United States was in a seemingly unending state of flux as people competed for dominance over the land and its resources, three men moved to what would eventually become southeastern Colorado and…

Bison

The American Plains Bison (Bison bison) are large mammals in the Bovidae family, recognizable for their large head, shaggy coats, pronounced hump, and close association with the American West. Bison are commonly and incorrectly referred to as …

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…

Buffalo Soldiers

The so-called Buffalo Soldiers were several African American cavalry and infantry regiments that operated in the American West during the late nineteenth century. While there is no evidence that the black troops themselves adopted it, the nickname…

Canyons of the Ancients National Monument

Stretching west and northwest from Cortez to the Utah border, Canyons of the Ancients National Monument was established in 2000 and boasts the densest collection of archaeological sites in the United States. An estimated 30,000 sites—including cliff…

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…

Chimney Rock

Located in the southwest corner of Colorado just north of the New Mexico border, the Chimney Rock Archaeological Area is home to hundreds of archaeological sites. One of these sites, the Chimney Rock Pueblo, is known for its dramatic setting high atop…

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…

Colorado Territory

The Territory of Colorado (1861–76) was the predecessor to the state of Colorado, created on February 28, 1861. The territory was formed in response to the secession crisis as well as a massive influx of white immigrants during the…

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…

Conejos Treaty

Signed in October 1863 at Conejos in the San Luis Valley, the Conejos Treaty was an agreement between the US government and the Tabeguache band of Nuche (Ute people). It granted the United States the rights to all land in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains east…

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…

Dawes Act (General Allotment Act)

Passed by Congress in 1887, the Dawes Act—formally known as the General Allotment Act—authorized the US government to survey and divide federal Indigenous reservations into private lots for individual tribal members. The Dawes Act’s central idea of …

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 Museum of Nature & Science

The Denver Museum of Nature & Science (DMNS) is the largest natural history museum between Chicago and the West Coast of the United States. Incorporated on December 6, 1900 as the Colorado Museum of Natural History, the museum was known as the Denver…

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…

Far View Sites

The Far View group at Mesa Verde National Park consists of more than twenty sites, five of which have been excavated. Far View House began as an eleventh-century Great House and part of the region centered on Chaco Canyon. Many of the surrounding sites…

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…

Fort Davy Crockett

Fort Davy Crockett was one of three known nineteenth-century forts and trading posts on the western side of the Rocky Mountains, in the drainage systems of the Green and Colorado Rivers. From the mid-1830s to 1840, Fort Davy Crockett, along with Fort…

Fort Jackson

In the summer of 1837, Henry Fraeb and Peter Sarpy arrived at a location on the South Platte River a few miles north of present-day Fort Lupton. They arrived with $10,909.75 worth of goods for trade with the Cheyenne and Arapaho who frequented the area…

Fort Lewis

Fort Lewis was a US Army post in southwest Colorado that operated from 1878 to 1891. The post had two locations: the first, Camp Lewis, in Pagosa Springs and the second south of Hesperus. Camp Lewis was founded in 1878 and moved to Hesperus in 1880…

Fort Uncompahgre

Fort Uncompahgre was constructed in 1828 by Antoine Robidoux, a trader based out of Mexican Santa Fé. The trading post was situated about two miles down from the confluence of the Gunnison and Uncompahgre Rivers near the present-day community of Delta in…

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…

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…

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…

Great House

“Great House” refers to a class of ancient Ancestral Puebloan structures from the ninth through thirteenth century. Great Houses were monumental, geometrically formal constructions, with thick stone masonry walls made with careful craftsmanship. While…

Gustaf Nordenskiöld and the Mesa Verde Region

In 1891 the young Swedish scientist Gustaf Nordenskiöld (1868–95) arrived in Colorado, seeking both a cure for his tuberculosis and a look at the wonders of the West. His experiences over the next two years set in motion a series of events that would…

Hannah Marie Wormington

As a pioneering woman in a field dominated by men, Hannah Marie Wormington (1914–94) carved a scholarly niche for herself on the frontiers of American archaeology. She was a larger-than-life figure whose impact went far beyond the dozens of publications…

Helen Hunt Jackson

Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–85) was an accomplished poet, author, and activist in the nineteenth century. Many of Jackson’s written works, notably A Century of Dishonor (1881) and Ramona (1884), spurred progress toward recompense for the mistreatment of the…

Homestead

Editor's note: This article was updated by CE staff on 5/19/20 to include impact on indigenous people Homesteading was the means by which large amounts of land in the Midwest and western United States came under private ownership after it was…

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 Agencies and Agents

Indian Agencies were established by the US government as part of the formal relationship with Indigenous nations as it acquired lands from them. Indian Agents were individuals responsible for cultivating relationships with Indigenous people and extending…

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…

Indian Appropriations Act (1871)

The Indian Appropriations Act of 1871 declared that American Indians were no longer considered members of “sovereign nations” and that the US government could no longer establish treaties with them. The act effectively made Indians wards of the US…

Indian Appropriations Act (1871)

The Indian Appropriations Act of 1871 declared that Indigenous people were no longer considered members of “sovereign nations” and that the US government could no longer establish treaties with them. The act effectively made Native Americans wards of the…

Indigenous Treaties in Colorado

Treaties with Indigenous people played a major role in the conquest and formation of Colorado. Backed by the constant threat of military force, the series of treaties and agreements signed between the federal government and various Indigenous…

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…

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,…

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…

Lafayette Head

Major Lafayette Head (1825–97) was an Indian agent to the Ute tribe for nine years after serving in the Mexican American War. In 1877, he became the first lieutenant governor of Colorado. He was influential in the early development of towns across the…

Lindenmeier Folsom Site

Lindenmeier is a large Native American archaeological site dating to the end of the Pleistocene epoch, or Ice Age, in northern Larimer County. The site contains stone tools and animal bones interpreted by archaeologists as the fragmentary remains of an…

Little Arkansas Treaty

The Little Arkansas Treaty refers to a pair of treaties signed between the US and Indigenous nations in Kansas in mid-October 1865: one with the Southern Arapaho and Southern Cheyenne nations and one with the Comanche and Kiowa. Of the two, the treaty…

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…

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…

Lyons Sandstone

Named for the Boulder County town whose historic quarries made it famous, the Lyons Sandstone formation is a Permian age rock layer in the foothills of the Front Range from the Wyoming border to south of Colorado Springs. It is the primary formation in…

Mantle's Cave

Mantle’s Cave is the most important Fremont period archaeological site excavated in northwestern Colorado. Artifacts recovered from the cave were instrumental in defining the Fremont culture. Because the cave is dry, artifacts that are not usually seen…

Medicine Lodge Treaties

The Medicine Lodge Treaties were a series of three treaties between the US government and the Comanche, Kiowa, Plains Apache, Southern Cheyenne, and Southern Arapaho American Indian nations, signed in October 1867 along Medicine Lodge Creek, south of…

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…

Mesa Verde National Park

Mesa Verde National Park was established on June 29, 1906. It is the largest of the National Park Service parcels protecting cultural resources in Colorado, with nearly 5,000 documented sites, including about 600 cliff dwellings. A majority of the…

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…

Nathan Meeker

Nathan Cook Meeker (1817–1879) was an agriculturalist, newspaper editor, and Indian agent. He founded the Union Colony at present-day Greeley as well as the city’s oldest newspaper, the Greeley Tribune. In 1878 he was appointed Indian agent of the…

Nineteenth-Century Trading Posts

The historic fur trade era in the Colorado region, which began in the early nineteenth century, ushered in a period of direct contact between Native Americans and whites. By this time, the hides and robes provided by Colorado’s furbearing animals had…

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…

Old Spanish National Historic Trail

The Old Spanish Trail was designated a national historic trail by an act of Congress in 2002. From 1829 to 1848, the major trade route extended 2,700 miles between Santa Fé de Nuevo Mexico (Santa Fe, New Mexico), and Alta California (Los Angeles,…

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…

Overland Trail

The Overland Trail, also known as the "Central Overland Emigrant Route," was an important nineteenth-century corridor for explorers, colonists, miners, and traders that ran from Atchison, Kansas, to Fort Bridger, Wyoming. It followed preexisting…

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…

Pike’s Stockade

The Pike Stockade is a reconstruction of a small fortress built by the soldiers of the 1806–7 Zebulon Pike expedition. It is located on the Rio Conejos, a tributary of the Rio Grande, in the San Luis Valley, seventeen miles southeast of Alamosa…

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…

Prehistoric Stone Quarrying in Colorado

From exquisitely flaked Folsom spear points to the spectacular cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde National Park, among the most visible vestiges of Colorado’s Native American history are those crafted from naturally available rock. Archaeologists and others…

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…

Radiocarbon Dating

Radiocarbon dating is the most common technique used in ascertaining the age of archaeological and paleontological sites during the last 45,000 years. Developed by a chemist born in Colorado, there are now commercial and academic laboratories across the…

Richard Wetherill

Richard Wetherill (1858–1910) was a nineteenth-century rancher and explorer who lived in southwest Colorado. Although he is often credited with "discovering" some of the most significant Ancestral Pueblo archaeological sites…

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…

Samuel Gerish Colley

Holding political offices in Wisconsin and Colorado throughout his life, Samuel G. Colley (1807–90) is best known for serving as Indian Agent for the Upper Arkansas Indian Agency from 1860 to 1865. He was responsible for managing the Cheyenne and Arapaho…

Sand Creek Massacre

On November 29, 1864, US volunteer cavalry killed at least 230 Cheyenne and Arapaho people—mostly women, children, and the elderly—who were camped peacefully along Sand Creek in what was then Colorado Territory. Learning about the Sand…

Sand Wash Basin Tool Stone Sites

Located northwest of Craig in Moffat County, the Sand Wash Basin is an area of Bridger Formation rock outcrops that prehistoric peoples mined extensively as a source for stones to make tools with. Bridger Formation chert is typically light to dark brown,…

Santa Fé Trail

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…

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, …

Shield Cave Archaeological Site

Shield Cave is a large limestone cavern in Eagle County that contains painted rock art dating to the Historic period and deposits of the iron mineral pigment material used to make ochre-color paint. This site is one of hundreds of caverns that have…

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…

Spanish Exploration in Southeastern Colorado, 1590–1790

The Spanish effort to conquer and control the lands that would eventually become southeastern Colorado tended to be slow and methodical. The lands claimed by New Spain extended from Panama to the Arctic, although the capital was located in Mexico City…

Spanish Exploration in Western Colorado

The Spanish colony of New Mexico was founded in 1598. Until 1821, Colorado was part of the extensive Spanish territories governed by the colony. These territories extended far to the north of the New Mexico capital in Santa Fé. In the sixteenth century…

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 Civil War in Colorado

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…

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 Fur Trade in Colorado

The trading of animal skins has been a prominent activity throughout the known human occupation of Colorado. These skins—as hides, furs, or robes—provided protection from the elements as well as a valuable commodity traded for economic gain; their trade…

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 Abiquiú

Considered to be the first official treaty between the United States and the Ute people of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, the Treaty of Abiquiú was made in 1849 with the intention of establishing peaceful relations between the two groups…

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…

Treaty of Fort Wise

The Treaty of Fort Wise was an agreement between the US government and the Cheyenne and Arapaho people who lived on the western Great Plains in present-day Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, and Wyoming. The treaty was signed in 1861 and reduced the territorial…

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

Signed on February 2, 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American War (1846–48). In the treaty, the Republic of Mexico agreed to cede 55 percent of its territory, some 525,000 square miles, to the United States. This land eventually…

Tree-Ring Dating

Tree-ring dating is formally known as “dendrochronology” (literally, the study of tree time). It is the science of assigning calendar-year dates to the growth rings of trees, and Colorado figures prominently in its development and application in…

Trout Creek Archaeological Site

Trout Creek in east Chaffee County is an extensive archaeological site exhibiting natural outcrops of colorful jaspers that were used for thousands of years as raw material for toolmaking by many different groups of Native Americans. It is one of the…

Upper Arkansas Indian Agency

The Upper Arkansas Indian Agency was established in 1855 at Bent’s New Fort to service tribes along the upper part of the Arkansas River in eastern Colorado and western Kansas. It was also known as the Big Timbers Agency for the extensive stands of…

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…

Wickiups and Other Wooden Features

Wickiups were temporary conical and domed shelters constructed by the Native American inhabitants of Colorado for millennia. Because of the perishable nature of their construction materials, a vast majority of wickiups and other prehistoric wooden…

Willard Frank Libby

Willard Frank “Bill” Libby (1908–80) was a native Coloradan who won the Nobel Prize for inventing the radiocarbon dating method. Radiocarbon dating is one of the most commonly used dating techniques by archaeologists and other scientists across the world…

William Bent

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…

William Larimer, Jr.

General William Larimer, Jr. (1809–75), was a prominent nineteenth-century town promoter, prospector, and legislator in the Kansas and Colorado Territories. He is known for establishing the city of Denver. Larimer’s life serves as an example of the…

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,…

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…

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…