The Battle of Milk Creek was the major military engagement during the Meeker Incident, a revolt by a Nuche (Ute people) community in northwest Colorado in September 1879. The battle began on September 29, when Utes opened fire from the heights above Milk…

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…

The Meeker Incident (September 29–October 5, 1879) was a Ute uprising at the White River Indian Agency on the Ute Reservation in present-day Rio Blanco County. Tension had been building on the reservation for months as Indian Agent Nathan Meeker…

Nathan Cook Meeker (1817–1879) was an agriculturalist, newspaper editor, and Indian agent. He founded the Union Colony at present-day Greeley as well as the city’s oldest newspaper, the Greeley Tribune. In 1878 he was appointed Indian agent of the…

Rio Blanco County is a remote, mountainous county in northwestern Colorado covering 3,223 square miles. Named for the White River—“Rio Blanco” in Spanish—the county lies on the northern edge of the Colorado Plateau and is bordered to the north by Moffat…

The Texas Creek Overlook Archaeological Site is a picturesque Fremont masonry structure located on a sandstone pinnacle in the rugged canyons south of Rangely. In 1983 the overlook was excavated by Steven D. Creasman of Western Wyoming College in…

The Flat Tops Wilderness covers more than 235,000 acres of remote mountains and forests in Garfield, Rio Blanco, and Eagle Counties on Colorado’s Western Slope. Its most popular natural feature is Trappers Lake, the state’s second-largest natural lake,…

“A Fantasy land,” “a mystique,” “a state of mind”—these are only some of the expressions used to describe the Western Slope of Colorado, commonly defined as the roughly one-third of the state that lies west of the Continental Divide. The serpentine…