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…

Daniels Park (8682 N Daniels Park Rd, Sedalia, CO 80135) is a unit of the Denver Mountain Parks system located in an area of grassy buttes and ravines just west of Castle Pines in Douglas County. First established with a thirty-eight-acre donation from…

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…

The US Army operated Fort Garland in the San Luis Valley for twenty-five years, from 1858 to 1883. The fort was built to protect early settlers from Native American raids in the years before treaties, reservations, and removal made that mission obsolete…

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…

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…

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…