People

Caroline Bancroft (1900–85) was a prominent author, journalist, organizer, and socialite in twentieth-century Denver. Bancroft’s extensive writings on Colorado’s local history established the importance of the genre and served as an example for generations of historians who followed in her...

Formerly labeled Anasazi, the Ancestral Puebloan culture is the most widely known of the ancient cultures of Colorado. The people who built the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde and the great houses of Chaco Canyon were subsistence farmers of corn, beans, and squash. The structures of this culture date...

In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Colorado, women’s labor was often vital to a family’s economic survival. Historian Katherine Harris demonstrated in her study of Logan and Washington Counties that women’s earnings from butter, eggs, and the garden often provided much of a farm family’s...

Photojournalist, radio reporter, and film producer Harry Buckwalter (1867–1930) is considered Colorado’s first photojournalist. He was also one of the great technological innovators of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American West, known for his advances in X-ray photography, early...

Although it is on the eastern fringe of the area occupied by a people known to archaeology as the Fremont, Colorado is nevertheless important in the Fremont story, since clues to their origins and end are found there. Additionally, the presence of Fremont farmers had a profound influence on the...

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, rancher, Indian agent in New Mexico and Colorado...

Sapiah (1840–1936) was the preeminent chief of the Muache band of the Southern Ute Tribe beginning around 1870. He was born to a Muache father and an Apache mother, perhaps in the vicinity of Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico. The origins of his English name, "Buckskin Charley," are obscure, and later in...

The Plains Woodland period covers approximately a thousand years of Colorado prehistory across a large portion of the state. Plains Woodland describes the groups of people occupying much of the western plains from present-day Nebraska and Kansas, west of the Missouri River, to the eastern plains of...

Fluted projectile points represent the earliest North American stone tool technology, although they comprise a small portion of the overall stone technology observed in the New World. These easily recognized spear points represent one form of technology used by the earliest human inhabitants of...