When it opened in 1887, the Beaumont Hotel in Ouray was one of the finest hotels in the Rocky Mountains. After several successful decades, its fortunes declined along with Ouray’s mining economy, and it eventually closed in the 1960s. In 2005 the hotel…


 
 Kierstin Bridger is a Colorado writer who divides her time between Ridgway and Telluride. She is author of two books: Women Writing the West's 2017 WILLA Award-winning Demimonde (Lithic Press) and All Ember (Urban Farmhouse Press). She is a…

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…

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…

Ouray County, named after nineteenth-century Ute leader Ouray, is a small county of 524 square miles in southwestern Colorado. It is bisected by the Uncompahgre River, which flows from Lake Como northeast of Silverton, through the county seat of Ouray,…

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…