People

Minnie Reynolds Scalabrino (1865–1936) was a newspaperwoman, candidate for political office, and lifelong suffragette in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. She played an important role in the women’s suffrage movement in Colorado and worked tirelessly in other states to secure the...

The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe is one of three federally recognized tribes of the Ute nation. Their tribal lands comprise 597,288 acres of trust land and 27,354 acres of fee land in southwestern Colorado, northwestern New Mexico, and small, isolated sections of Utah. Approximately 2,200 tribal members...

The women’s suffrage movement was a sociopolitical movement in the late nineteenth century that secured voting rights for Colorado women by state referendum in 1893. The movement’s success made Colorado the first state to enact women’s suffrage by popular referendum. Origins On July 4, 1876,...

Arthur Hawthorne Carhart (1892–1978) was a novelist, US Forest Service (USFS) official, and landscape architect known for developing a commonsense, nonpartisan, and democratic approach to conservation and natural resource management. His legacy lives on today in the Arthur Carhart National...

The Hispano farmer and sheep rancher Don Felipe de Jesus Baca (1829–74) was one of the first settlers of the Purgatoire River valley, one of the most important developers of Trinidad , and a member of the Colorado Territorial legislature. He is the namesake of Baca County in southeast Colorado...

The Paleo-Indian period is the era from the end of the Pleistocene (the last Ice Age) to about 9,000 years ago (7000 BC), during which the first people migrated to North and South America. This period is seen through a glass darkly: Paleo-Indian sites are few and scattered, and the material from...

Chief Left Hand (1820s–64) was a prominent Arapaho leader in the mid-1800s, a tumultuous period in Colorado history that followed the 1858 discovery of gold near present-day Denver , on the traditional lands of the Arapaho and Cheyenne . Diplomat, negotiator, linguist, and fluent English speaker,...

Juan Antonio María de Rivera (1738–?) was a Spaniard and the first Euro-American to intensively explore the territory that eventually became the state of Colorado. In 1765 he made two trips into western Colorado from New Mexico, traveling as far as the Gunnison River in Delta County . Along the way...

Tree-ring dating is formally known as “dendrochronology” (literally, the study of tree time). It is the science of assigning calendar-year dates to the growth rings of trees, and Colorado figures prominently in its development and application in archaeology and other disciplines. Uses...