Topics (click on a topic to jump to that section)
Marker Topic: Army of the West
Marker Topic: Bent's Fort
Santa Fe Trail: Mountain Route
From 1821 to 1846, the Sante Fe Trail was an international road for American and Mexican traders. In 1848, the Mexican-American War ended, adding new Mexico to the United States. The trail became a national road for commercial and military freighting, stagecoach travel, and mail service until the railroad reached Sante Fe in 1880.
Marker Topic: Borderlands
The 1819 Adams-Oñis Treaty fixed the boundary between the U.S. and Spain at the Arkansas River, formalizing a centuries-old convention - the Arkansas had always been a border. Neighboring Indian tribes fronted tensely on this crucial waterway, whose wealth of resources (water, timber, pasture, game) were essential for survival. The colonial powers, too, jostled for control of the river, which came to represent the proverbial line in the sand. Any breach drew the fiercest resistance. Spain was particularly vigilant, ignoring French and American travelers north of the Arkansas but treating all who ventured south of it (including Zebulon Pike) as hostile invaders. With America's 1848 conquest of northern Mexico and the removal of the Arapahos and Cheyennes in 1865, the river finally ceased to divide. For the first time in perhaps 1,000 years, the Arkansas served a single country. Today, it remains a cultural border of the American Southwest.
Crossroads of the Arkansas
Pueblo sits at the intersection of two ancient thoroughfares - the Arkansas River, gateway to the mountains and a key prairie highway, and Fountain Creek, part of the long north-south road along the Front Range of the Rockies. Utes, Plains Apaches, Comanches, Kiowas, Arapahos, and Cheyennes all frequented the area around present-day Pueblo; the Spanish and French sent explorers here; and the site's steady traffic made it a perfect location for nineteenth-century traders from Mexico and the United States. By the 1890s the railroads, built along the two timeless footpaths, were carrying immigrant workers from around the world to Pueblo. Today this welcoming junction of mountain and plain bears the influence of more than thirty nations.
Pueblo's frontier precursor, El Pueblo (1842-1854), counted African Americans, Mexicans, Anglos, and Indians among its ever-changing residents. The city that eventually grew here boasted even greater ethnic diversity. Vast waves of immigrants came to Pueblo in the late nineteenth century, landing in Smelter Hill's shanties, then moving up as their prospects improved. These new Americans - Italians, Irish, Slovenians, Welsh, Germans, Greeks, Russians, Southern and Eastern European Jews, and Japanese - found plentiful work in the smelters and rail yards, and they added immeasurably to the city's cultural life. Pueblo's Italian stonemasons constructed many of Pueblo's buildings; Hispanos contributed to livestock raising practices and labor for the railroad; the first Slovakian Eastern Orthodox church in Colorado was built in Pueblo in 1899; and all groups had thriving businesses, newspapers, and civic organizations. Thousands came to Pueblo in search of the American dream of freedom and opportunity. While for some the search was fruitless, for many more the dream proved a reality. Today many of their descendants are civic and cultural leaders.
Pueblo's leaders put up $50,000 to lure the Denver & Rio Grande to town in 1872. What an investment! The railroad not only transported cattle, but fed ores to local smelters that fashioned these raw materials into rails, spikes, and pistons. D&RG magnate William Jackson Palmer founded Pueblo's first steel plant, which later evolved into mighty Colorado Fuel and Iron - by 1900 among the world's largest steel producers. Four other railroads connected Pueblo to distant markets, fueling commerce and employing thousands of workers. The industry sagged during the Great Depression but bounced back briefly during World War II, when trains delivered munitions to the Pueblo Army Ordnance Depot. Though the railroads' passenger heyday ended after the war, freight cars still rumble through Pueblo, a routine nearly as old as the city itself.
Marker Topic: Charles Autobees/Land Grants
Charles Autobees/Land Grants
Charles Autobees was perfectly suited to help settle this part of the West. Born in St. Louis in 1812, he came west in the 1820s, and for the rest of his life he worked as a trapper, trader, scout, rancher, and public servant. Fluent in English, Spanish, and several Indian languages, Autobees possessed all the skills and friendships necessary to succeed in this borderland, a territory hotly contested by Mexico, the United States, and native peoples from half a dozen tribes. In 1853 he built a ranch known as Autobees' Plaza five miles south of here - one of the first permanent settlements in what would become Colorado and a center for local government. From then on until his death in 1882, the frontiersman acted as a teacher-helping others who, like him, sought to put down roots here. Hundreds of his descendants still live in this area.
Land GrantsCharles Autobees's ranch lay within the four-million-acre Vigil-St. Vrain Grant, the largest of six land grants the Mexican government made in present-day Colorado during the 1840s. A remnant of Spanish colonial rule, the land-grant system transferred public acreage to private owners, who (in theory) would help populate territories under their control. The Colorado grants were meant to encourage settlement along Mexico's northern border (then defined by the Arkansas River) and secure it against threats from Indians and the United States. But the strategy failed: the United States annexed the region in 1848 after winning the Mexican-American War. The U.S. government immediately challenged the grants' legitimacy and dispossessed many landowners-including Charles Autobees, who lost control of his ranch lands despite holding a title deed. Some disputes ended up in court and stayed there for decades. Even today, unresolved land-grant issues occasionally surface.
Marker Topic: Plains Indian Life/Buffalo Country
Plains Indian Life
By the nineteenth century, Colorado's southeastern plains country was home to many native peoples, including Comanches, Kiowas, Plains Apaches, Arapahos, and Cheyennes. Although vastly different in language and culture, they shared certain adaptations and inventions that allowed them to survive and prosper in the challenging prairie environment. The horse, introduced to the Indians by the Spanish, provided the means to hunt the far-ranging herds of buffalo, the Indians' primary food source. The travois, a horse-drawn carrier, made possible the rapid movement of people and things. And the tipi, a portable buffalo hide shelter, provided protection against even the most severe storm.
The Southern CheyennesOriginally an agricultural people of the Great Lakes region, the Cheyennes ventured into the western plains country sometime in the seventeenth century, where they became a classic Plains Indian people. By the early nineteenth century, the Southern Cheyennes occupied present Kiowa County and southeastern Colorado. Here, they lived with other native peoples, sometimes in cooperation, sometimes in conflict. After the great Indian peace council of 1840, a generation of quiet settled over the region. Tragically, this peace was shattered in 1864 at Sand Creek, a few miles east of here, when U.S. troops killed over 150 Cheyenne and Arapaho men, women, and children. In 1867 the Cheyennes - along with their Arapaho, Kiowa, and Comanche allies - were forcibly removed to reservation lands in present Oklahoma.
Don't Fence Me In
Large-scale cattle ranching on these high plains began during the 1870s. By then, the Plains Indians had been forcibly removed to reservations, and the great buffalo herds had been hunted to near extinction. Here, in southeastern Colorado, the vast grasslands attracted eastern and European capitalists who saw a beef bonanza equal to any gold discovery. And so began the day of the cattleman - a time when the range was open and grass was king. To help the great cattle barons, Colorado required would-be sodbusters to fence roaming cattle out of their property. The open range prevailed until the late 1890s, when a network of rails, windmills, and barbed wire opened this region to farmers.
As North America's largest land animal, the buffalo weighs in at 3,000 pounds, stands six feet tall, and spans twelve feet between head and tail. Before the combined pressure of white and Indian hunters brought the animal to near extinction in the late nineteenth century, more than thirty million roamed the western grasslands, with about eight million here on the southern Plains. Although large and ponderous-looking, buffalo gallop at speeds up to thirty-five miles per hour - and can sustain this pace for fifteen miles. Its great weakness is sight. If an object does not move, a buffalo may not see it at all. Today, buffalo thrive in zoos, parks, wildlife refuges, and on ranches.
The Great Buffalo Hunt
In January 1872, twenty-one-year-old Grand Duke Alexis of Russia visited Denver, where he was promised an exciting buffalo hunt. The ducal escort party included some of the West's most legendary names: Gen. Philip H. Sheridan, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody, and James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickok. Detraining at Kit Carson, Colorado, the hunters headed for a valley between Rush Creek and the Big Sandy, a few miles northeast of here. Alexis, armed with a brace of pistols, bowie knife, and rifle, took aim and knocked down a fine bull and two cows. The success of the gala hunt, along with the champagne and whiskey that flowed freely, greatly improved relations between Russia and the United States.
Marker Topic: Rocky Ford
History of Rocky Ford
Rocky Ford got off to a rocky start - its first building sat on land sold fraudulently to town founder George Washington Swink - but a smoother road lay ahead. Established in 1870 at a busy river crossing named by Kit Carson, the town moved a few miles in 1876 to get nearer the Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad, where it benefited from steady trade traffic and an ample water supply. Its main asset, though, was Swink himself. He developed Rocky Ford's two main cash crops, melons and sugar beets; courted the town's largest corporation, the American Beet Sugar Company; and helped build the Rocky Ford Ditch, the spine of an extensive irrigation network. Swink's formula - land, transportation, industry, and water - represented prairie town-building at its best. He died in 1910, but his many gifts to this town still live on.
Marker Topic: Sand Creek Massacre
- George Bent, 1864. Bent was the son of William Bent and his Cheyenne wife, Owl Woman. Educated in St. Louis, and a Confederate Army veteran, Bent was living with the Cheyennes when Black Kettle's village on Sand Creek was attacked by soldiers.
Trail Days/Charles Goodnight Highway
"A good sized steer when it is fit for the butcher market will bring from $45.00 to $60.00. The same animal at its birth was worth but $5.00. He has run on the plains and cropped the grass from the public domain for four or five years, and now, with scarcely any expense to its owner, is worth forty dollars more than when he started....and that is why our cattlemen grow rich."
"Charles Goodnight approaches greatness more nearly than any other cowman of history."
Highway for the Ages
Though less famous than the trails that brought American pioneers westward, the north- south route along the foot of the Rockies covers far greater distances in space and in time. This natural transportation corridor runs the length of the Americas and has carried ten thousand years' worth of traffic. Native peoples traveled it for centuries, Spanish explorers marched it during seventeenth- and eighteenth-century quests for territory and treasure, and U.S. pathfinders covered parts of the route during nineteenth-century expeditions. Colorado's first permanent settlers arrived on this trail from Mexico, filtering into the Arkansas River country beginning in the 1820s. By then the route was already a fixture of the North American landscape - truly a highway for the ages.
El Pueblo never achieved great commercial success, but one could make a living there. Built in 1842 by traders George Simpson, Matthew Kinkead, Robert Fisher, Jim Beckwourth, and several others, El Pueblo stood at a long-established crossroads with well-traveled roads and rich bottomland. Located on the north bank of the Arkansas River - the international boundary between Mexico and the United States - the adobe fort was a cooperative venture which proffered guns, powder, beads, and trade cloth to customers on both sides of the border. With a peak population of about 150 men, women, and children, El Pueblo had the feel of a semi-permanent settlement. But its uneven reputation scared some customers away, and the proprietors, having hoped for better profits, all departed by 1848. After a deadly Ute attack in 1854, El Pueblo was abandoned for good.
"My vision for this place is that it should be made the most attractive place for homes in the West - a place for schools, colleges, literature, science, first-class newspapers, and everything that the above imply."