Bent County is a rural, agricultural county in southeastern Colorado covering 1,541 square miles of the Great Plains and the fertile Arkansas River valley. It is bordered by Kiowa County to the north, Prowers County to the east, Otero County to the west,…

The Bent County Courthouse, located on Courthouse Square in the county seat of Las Animas, opened in 1889 to serve as the county’s administrative and legal center. The county jail opened next to the courthouse in 1912 and was used for nearly a century to…

Founded in 1866 near the confluence of the Arkansas and Purgatoire Rivers, Boggsville became the first permanent settlement in southeastern Colorado. Its residents pioneered irrigation and large-scale farming and ranching in the Arkansas Valley. The town…

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,…