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 Chicago-Colorado Colony (1871–73) established the city of Longmont near the confluence of St. Vrain and Left Hand Creeks in 1871. Financed by wealthy Chicagoans and consisting mostly of immigrants from the Midwest, the colony was an agricultural…

Eastern Colorado, bordered by the foothills of the Rocky Mountains on the west, Kansas on the east, and the corners of Nebraska and Oklahoma, constitutes a portion of the Great Plains. It is the agricultural heartland of Colorado. This semiarid region is…

The Front Range is a corridor of the Rocky Mountains and surrounding land stretching 200 miles from the Wyoming border on the north to the Arkansas River on the south. The western border of the Front Range consists of a collection of high mountain ranges…

Oliver Toussaint “O. T.” Jackson (1862–1948) was an entrepreneur and prominent member of black communities in Denver and Boulder during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1910 he founded Dearfield, an-all black agricultural settlement…

Phillips County covers 688 square miles on the Great Plains of northeastern Colorado. It has a population of 4,349, more than half of whom live in the county seat of Holyoke. Other communities include Haxton (pop. 946) and Amherst (58). Frenchman Creek…

Washington County, named for the first US president, is a county of 2,524 square miles on Colorado’s eastern Great Plains. It is bordered to the north by Logan County, to the east by Yuma County, to the south by Kit Carson and Lincoln Counties, and to…

Yuma County covers 2,369 square miles in northeast Colorado. A part of the state’s Great Plains region, the county includes the lowest point in Colorado: 3,315 feet, along the Arikaree River at the Kansas border. Yuma County is bordered to the east by…

Early nineteenth century Army explorers Zebulon Pike and Stephen H. Long conceptualized the Great Plains east of the Rocky Mountains as the “Great American Desert.” Long’s report called it “unfit for cultivation,” while Pike compared it to “the sandy…