Alferd Packer
Ancestral Puebloans of the Four Corners Region
Antiquities Act
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
Bent's Forts
Bison
Brunot Agreement
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
Chimney Rock
Cliff Dwelling
Clovis
Colorado Territory
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
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
Far View Sites
Fluted Points
Folsom People
Fort Davy Crockett
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 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
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
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
Gustaf Nordenskiöld and the Mesa Verde Region
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
Homestead
Hovenweep National Monument
Impact of Disease on Native Americans
Indian Agencies and Agents
Indian Annuities
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)
Indigenous Treaties in Colorado
John C. Frémont
Juan Antonio María de Rivera
Kit Carson
Kivas
Lafayette Head
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
Los Piños Indian Agency
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
Mantle's Cave
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
Mesa Verde National Park
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
Nineteenth-Century Trading Posts
Niwot (Left Hand)
Northern Ute People (Uintah and Ouray Reservation)
Old Spanish National Historic Trail
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
Overland Trail
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
Plains Woodland
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
Richard Wetherill
Rock Art of Colorado
Samuel Gerish Colley
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
Sapiah
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
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 Civil War in 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 Gateway Tradition
Tipi
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
Treaty of Fort Wise
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Tree-Ring Dating
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
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
White River Ute Indian Agency
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 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…