People

The Pueblo of Santa Ana is one of the seven Keres-speaking Pueblos that currently inhabit the state of New Mexico. The ruins of the homes of the current inhabitants’ ancestors can be found in what is now Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado. Archaeological data and pueblo oral history...

An earth lodge is a distinctive type of timber-frame house built from the early 1400s to the late 1800s by a dozen different Plains Indian tribes. These massive circular structures, often encompassing 1,500 square feet or more, featured four large support posts arranged around a central fireplace...

Dean Reed (1938–86) was a singer-songwriter and actor from Denver who enjoyed a stint of popularity in the 1960s and 1970s before experiencing a slow slide into obscurity by the end of his life. Best known for his time spent living and recording in the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War,...

Saco Rienk DeBoer (1883–1974) was a prolific Denver -based landscape architect and city planner in the early twentieth century. DeBoer played a significant role in the development of Denver’s built environment, particularly the city’s parks and the establishment of its zoning codes. His work...

Robert Roeschlaub (1843–1923) was Colorado’s first officially licensed architect, working in Denver during the early settlement era. Roeschlaub played a central role in defining the city’s building code, which has affected the development of Denver’s built environment through the present. Today,...

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 ruins of this culture date to...

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...