Mountain man Jedediah Smith reached the lower Colorado by way of the Virgin River canyon in 1826. Smith called the Colorado the "Seedskeedee", as the Green River in Wyoming was known to fur trappers, correctly believing it to be a continuation of the Green and not a separate river as others believed under the Buenaventura myth. John C. Frémont's 1843 Great Basin expedition proved that no river traversed the Great Basin and Sierra Nevada, officially debunking the Buenaventura myth.
Early explorers
Colorado River
Colorado River | Early explorers
The Spanish began to explore and colonize western North America. Spanish The Spanish. Spanish
are the oldest rocks in the world in the grand canyon
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Yes, the rock layers exposed in the Grand Canyon and in the Grand Canyon National Park area range in age from about 200 million to nearly 2 billion years old.
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is there any river flowing through or alongside it?
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Yes, Colorado River
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what exactly is that canyon mentioned above?
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It is a steep-sided canyon carved by the Colorado River in Arizona, United States.
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what are some of the tributaries of the water body mentioned above?
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The Colorado is joined by over 25 significant tributaries: Green River,  Gila River ,
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what are some of the flora found near this larger river?
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Creosote bush, saguaro cactus, and Joshua trees
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who were the first to explore this area?
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Mountain man Jedediah Smith reached the lower Colorado by way of the Virgin River canyon in 1826. Smith called the Colorado the "Seedskeedee", as the Green River in Wyoming was known to fur trappers, correctly believing it to be a continuation of the Green and not a separate river as others believed under the Buenaventura myth. John C. Frémont's 1843 Great Basin expedition proved that no river traversed the Great Basin and Sierra Nevada, officially debunking the Buenaventura myth.
Colorado River | Early explorers
With the guidance of Hopi Indians, Cárdenas and his men became the first outsiders to see the Grand Canyon. Cárdenas was reportedly unimpressed with the canyon, assuming the width of the Colorado River at and estimating -tall rock formations to be the size of a man. After failing at an attempt to descend to the river, they left the area, defeated by the difficult terrain and torrid weather. In 1540, Hernando de Alarcón and his fleet reached the mouth of the river, intending to provide additional supplies to Coronado's expedition. Alarcón may have sailed the Colorado as far upstream as the present-day California–Arizona border.
Colorado River | Early explorers
During the 16th century, the Spanish began to explore and colonize western North America. An early motive was the search for the Seven Cities of Gold, or "Cibola", rumored to have been built by Native Americans somewhere in the desert Southwest. According to a United States Geological Survey publication, it is likely that Francisco de Ulloa was the first European to see the Colorado River when in 1536 he sailed to the head of the Gulf of California. Francisco Vásquez de Coronado's 1540–1542 expedition began as a search for the fabled Cities of Gold, but after learning from natives in New Mexico of a large river to the west, he sent García López de Cárdenas to lead a small contingent to find it.
Colorado River | Early explorers
Early explorers reported jaguars, beavers, deer, and coyotes in the delta, in addition to the abundance of waterfowl, fish, and other marine and estuary organisms (Spamer, 1990; {Aldo Leopold, 1948}). Early explorers also encountered local people known as the Cucapá, or the people of the river. The Cucapá are descendants of the Yuman-speaking Native Indigenous peoples of the Americas and have inhabited the delta for nearly a thousand years. Spanish explorer Hernando de Alarcón made the first recorded contact with the Cucapá in 1540 and reported seeing many thousands. The Cucapá used the delta floodplain extensively for harvesting Palmer's saltgrass ("Distichlis palmeri"), a wild grain that grows in salty soil, and for cultivating maize (corn), beans, and squash.
Colorado River Delta | Early history
Vulnerable species and plant communities include saltbush/wolfberry flats, saguaro, nightblooming cereus cacti, tamarisks, barrel cactus, Sonoran panicgrass, and Acuna cactus.
Lower Colorado River Valley | Flora
Human activity in the Little Colorado River watershed dates back to the early Holocene epoch, in the last glacial period. Nomadic hunter-gatherers inhabited the relatively water-rich and diverse upper basin of the Little Colorado for almost 8,000 years before the Navajo, Apache and Hopi tribes populated the area. Many of these people practiced small-scale irrigation in riverside villages, located in sheltered canyons and cliffs that provided defense. Early Spanish explorers exploring the Grand Canyon area were most likely the first Europeans to see the Little Colorado River. They called it "Colorado Chiquito", the Little Colorado. Other than fur trappers and mountain men, one of the first organized expeditions into the area of the Little Colorado River was led by Amiel Weeks Whipple in 1853–54 during one of the expeditions to map out a route for a transcontinental railroad.
Little Colorado River | History
Leaving the canyon they proceeded overland and someplace in the vicinity of the Grand Falls (also known as the Chocolate Falls) on the Little Colorado, picked up the Whipple trail from four years prior. The Powell Geographic Expedition, on August 10, 1869, was one of the first American parties to sight the Little Colorado River. Powell and some of his crew explored a segment of the Little Colorado River canyon, although they mainly found it impassable. In diary entries, they recorded its name as "Flax River", for the flax that makes up much of the river's riparian zone—and "Colorado Chiquito"—so, presumably they already knew about the river before they had come on the expedition.
Little Colorado River | History
The first humans of the Colorado River basin were likely Paleo-Indians of the Clovis and Folsom cultures, who first arrived on the Colorado Plateau about 12,000 years ago. Very little human activity occurred in the watershed until the rise of the Desert Archaic Culture, which from 8,000 to 2,000 years ago constituted most of the region's human population. These prehistoric inhabitants led a generally nomadic lifestyle, gathering plants and hunting small animals (though some of the earliest peoples hunted larger mammals that became extinct in North America after the end of the Pleistocene epoch). Another notable early group was the Fremont culture, whose peoples inhabited the Colorado Plateau from 2,000 to 700 years ago.
Colorado River | Indigenous peoples
Kino's 1701 map, "Paso por Tierra a la California," is the first known map to label the river as the Colorado. During the 18th and early 19th centuries, many Americans and Spanish believed in the existence of the Buenaventura River, purported to run from the Rocky Mountains in Utah or Colorado to the Pacific Ocean. The name "Buenaventura" was given to the Green River by Silvestre Vélez de Escalante as early as 1776, but Escalante did not know that the Green drained to the Colorado. Many later maps showed the headwaters of the Green and Colorado rivers connecting with the Sevier River (Rio San Ysabel) and Utah Lake (Lake Timpanogos) before flowing west through the Sierra Nevada into California.
Colorado River | Early explorers
The expedition to the lower Colorado River was important as the only recorded European incursion into that region between the expeditions of Hernando de Alarcón and Melchior Díaz in 1540, and the visits of Eusebio Francisco Kino beginning in 1701. The explorers did not see evidence of prehistoric Lake Cahuilla, which must have arisen shortly afterwards in the Salton Sink. They mistakenly thought that the Gulf of California continued indefinitely to the northwest, giving rise to a belief that was common in the 17th century that the western coasts of an Island of California were what was seen by sailing expeditions in the Pacific.
Juan de Oñate | Colorado River expedition
Coronado never reached the Gulf of California, and Alarcón eventually gave up and left. Melchior Díaz reached the delta in the same year, intending to establish contact with Alarcón, but the latter was already gone by the time of Díaz's arrival. Díaz named the Colorado River "Rio del Tizon" ("Firebrand River") after seeing a practice used by the local natives for warming themselves. The name "Tizon" lasted for the next 200 years. The name "Rio Colorado" ("Red River") was first applied to the Colorado by Father Eusebio Francisco Kino in his maps and written reports resulting from his explorations to the Colorado River Delta and his discovery that California was not an island but a peninsula (1700–1702).
Colorado River | Early explorers
Edgar Alexander Mearns wrote in his 1907 naturalist survey "Mammals of the Mexican Boundary of the United States" that beaver were present on nearly all streams of the Colorado Basin. Re-introductions of beaver in recent times have transformed even small desert streams into robust riparian habitat, increasing species abundance and diversity.
Verde River | Flora and fauna
Reduction of the delta's size has also threatened animals such as jaguars and the vaquita porpoise, which is endemic to the gulf. Human development of the Colorado River has also helped to create new riparian zones by smoothing the river's seasonal flow, notably through the Grand Canyon. More than 1,600 species of plants grow in the Colorado River watershed, ranging from the creosote bush, saguaro cactus, and Joshua trees of the Sonoran and Mojave Deserts to the forests of the Rocky Mountains and other uplands, composed mainly of ponderosa pine, subalpine fir, Douglas-fir and Engelmann spruce. Before logging in the 19th century, forests were abundant in high elevations as far south as the Mexico–U.S.
Colorado River | Wildlife and plants
Ellen Thompson joined John Wesley Powell's second Colorado River expedition during their 1872 winter camp near Kanab, Utah, serving as botanist. Her husband Almon Harris Thompson was second in command. She collected plants primarily in the Kanab area, although collecting excursions were also made through southern Utah and northern Arizona. She collected 385 specimens, 15 of which would become type specimens for new taxa. Every three months, she sent her collections (dried pressed plants) to Dr Asa Gray at Harvard. Many of her specimens reside at the Gray Herbarium, part of Harvard University Herbaria. Some were deposited in the United States National Herbarium in Washington D.C., and others in scattered herbaria across the country.
Ellen Powell Thompson | Botany
It was revised and published in 1895 as "The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons". It includes hundreds of wood engravings based on photographs by E.O. Beaman, James Fennemore and John Karl Hillers, and drawings by Thomas Moran.
The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons | Introduction
border, and runoff from these areas nourished abundant grassland communities in river valleys. Some arid regions of the watershed, such as the upper Green River valley in Wyoming, Canyonlands National Park in Utah and the San Pedro River valley in Arizona and Sonora, supported extensive reaches of grassland roamed by large mammals such as buffalo and antelope as late as the 1860s. Near Tucson, Arizona, "where now there is only powder-dry desert, the grass once reached as high as the head of a man on horse back". Rivers and streams in the Colorado basin were once home to 49 species of native fish, of which 42 were endemic.
Colorado River | Wildlife and plants
When Jedediah Smith reached the lower Colorado in 1826 he at first called it the Seedskeedee, as the Green/Colorado River was commonly known among the trappers. By the time of Bonneville's expedition in 1832, the names "Seeds-kee-dee", "Spanish River", "Green River", and even "Colorado River" were used interchangeably by the trappers and American explorers.
Green River (Colorado River tributary) | History
After trying and failing to climb down into the canyon to reach the river, the expedition reported that they would not be able to use the Colorado River to link up with Hernando de Alarcón's fleet. After this, the main body of the expedition began its journey to the next populated center of pueblos, along another large river to the east, the Rio Grande in New Mexico.
Francisco Vázquez de Coronado | Exploration of the Colorado River
Early contact between Europeans and Native Americans was generally limited to the fur trade in the headwaters and sporadic trade interactions along the lower river. After most of the Colorado River basin became part of the U.S. in 1846, much of the river's course was still the subject of myths and speculation. Several expeditions charted the Colorado in the mid-19th century—one of which, led by John Wesley Powell, was the first to run the rapids of the Grand Canyon. American explorers collected valuable information that was later used to develop the river for navigation and water supply. Large-scale settlement of the lower basin began in the mid- to late-19th century, with steamboats providing transportation from the Gulf of California to landings along the river that linked to wagon roads to the interior.
Colorado River | Introduction
In 1853-1854 Roetter accompanied a government expedition that explored the region from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, making detailed drawings of natural history specimens. The aim of the expedition was to find a workable railroad passage from the Mississippi to the West Coast. In the field Roetter created sketches showing botanical details for Engelmann's descriptions of cacti and pines. Engelmann's "The Cactaceae of the Boundary" appeared in 1858, illustrated by 61 of Roetter's drawings. In recognition of Roetter's artistic contributions, Engelmann named a natural hybrid cactus "" in his honour, noting, ""I take great pleasure to acknowledge my indebtedness to the modest and faithful artist, Mr.
Paulus Roetter | Expedition artist
The period immediately preceding the first humans coming into Colorado was the Ice Age Summer starting about 16,000 years ago. For the next five thousand years the landscape would change dramatically and most of the large animals would become extinct. Receding and melting glaciers created the Plum and Monument Creeks, the Castle Rock mesas and unburied the Rocky Mountains. Large mammals, such as the mastodon, mammoth, camels, giant sloths, cheetah, bison antiquus and horses roamed the land. There were a few Paleo-Indian cultures, distinctive by the size of the tools they used and the animals they hunted. People in the first, Clovis complex period, had large tools to hunt the megafauna animals of the early Paleo-Indian period.
Lindenmeier Site | Paleo-Indian period
He was the first European to ascend the river for a distance considerable enough to make important observations. On a second voyage, he probably proceeded past the present-day site of Yuma, Arizona. A map drawn by one of Alarcón's pilots is the earliest accurately detailed representation of the Gulf of California and the lower course of the Colorado River.
Hernando de Alarcón | 1540 expedition
The period immediately preceding the first humans coming into Colorado was the Ice Age Summer starting about 16,000 years ago. For the next five thousand years the landscape would change dramatically and most of the large animals would become extinct. Receding and melting glaciers created the Plum and Monument Creeks, the Castle Rock mesas and unburied the Rocky Mountains. Large mammals, such as the mastodon, mammoth, camels, giant sloths, cheetah, bison antiquus and horses roamed the land. Sites for the early Paleo-Indian period are found on the plains (eastern half of the state), but later in the period, there are sites found in both the mountains and plains of Colorado.
Prehistory of Colorado | Paleo-Indian period
The Fremont were likely the first peoples of the Colorado River basin to domesticate crops and construct masonry dwellings; they also left behind a large amount of rock art and petroglyphs, many of which have survived to the present day. Beginning in the early centuries A.D., Colorado River basin peoples began to form large agriculture-based societies, some of which lasted hundreds of years and grew into well-organized civilizations encompassing tens of thousands of inhabitants. The Ancient Puebloan (also known as Anasazi or Hisatsinom) people of the Four Corners region were descended from the Desert Archaic culture. The Puebloan people developed a complex distribution system to supply drinking and irrigation water in Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico.
Colorado River | Indigenous peoples
The period immediately preceding the first humans coming into Colorado was the Ice Age Summer starting about 16,000 years ago. For the next five thousand years the landscape would change dramatically and most of the large animals would become extinct. Receding and melting glaciers created the Plum and Monument Creeks, the Castle Rock mesas and unburied the Rocky Mountains. Large mammals, such as the mastodon, mammoth, camels, giant sloths, cheetah, bison antiquus and horses roamed the land. There were a few Paleo-Indian cultures, distinctive by the size of the tools they used and the animals they hunted. People in the first, Clovis complex period, had large tools to hunt the megafauna animals of the early Paleo-Indian period.
LoDaisKa Site | Paleo-Indians
Díaz named the river the "Firebrand (Tizón) River" because the natives in the area used firebrands to keep their bodies warm in the winter. Díaz died on the trip back to the camp in the valley of the Corazones. While at Hawikuh, Vázquez de Coronado sent another scouting expedition overland to find the Colorado River, led by Don Garcia López de Cárdenas. The expedition returned to Hopi territory to acquire scouts and supplies. Members of Cárdenas's party eventually reached the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, where they could see the Colorado River thousands of feet below, becoming the first Europeans to do so.
Francisco Vázquez de Coronado | Exploration of the Colorado River
Soon after arriving at the camp he set out from the valley of Corazones in Sonora and traveled overland in a north/northwesterly direction until he arrived at the junction of the Colorado River and Gila River. There the local natives, probably the CocoMaricopa (see Seymour 2007b), told him that Alarcón's sailors had buried supplies and left a note in a bottle. The supplies were retrieved, and the note stated that Alarcón's men had rowed up the river as far as they could, searching in vain for the Vázquez de Coronado expedition. They had given up and decided to return to their departure point because worms were eating holes in their boats.
Francisco Vázquez de Coronado | Exploration of the Colorado River
Called The Great Railroad Expeditions, or Pacific Railroad Surveys, Whipple's expedition consisted of several teams going roughly along the 35th parallel from Albuquerque to the Pacific, following the Santa Fe Trail route. The Little Colorado River, also known as the Flax River, and the first Rio Chiquito, is depicted and labelled as such on a map compiled by Lt. Joseph C. Ives and published in the official volumes of those expeditions. Ives would again return to the area in 1858 after navigating a steamboat named the "Explorer" up the Colorado from south of Yuma northwards to Black Canyon, at which point his party went ashore and attempted to go up into the Grand Canyon until the sheer cliffs prevented them from doing so.
Little Colorado River | History
True cinnamon ("Cinnamomum Verum") is not native to South America. Other related cinnamon-containing plants (of the family "Lauraceae") are fairly common in that part of the Amazon and Pizarro probably saw some of these. The expedition reached the mouth of the Amazon on 24 August 1542, demonstrating the practical navigability of the Great River.
Amazon River | Exploration
The Colorado River, which means 'red' or 'reddish' river in Spanish, was frequently confused by Spanish explorers with the Brazos River to the north. The European discoverer of these two neighboring rivers called the present Colorado River the , and called the present Brazos the Colorado River. The two names would later be reversed. The upper Colorado River was controlled by Comanches from the early 18th century to the late 19th century. In 1757, Spanish Texas attempted to establish an outlying Catholic mission (Mission Santa Cruz de San Sabá) on the San Saba River, near its confluence with the Colorado River.
Colorado River (Texas) | History
In pre-Columbian times, the Lees Ferry area was inhabited first by Paleo-Indians, who populated the region beginning about 11,500 years ago, followed by the Archaic culture, which appeared on the Colorado Plateau about 8,000 years ago. The Anasazi, Paiute and Navajo peoples, who left more evidence of habitation in the valley, arrived only in the last 1,000 years or so. Evidence, including the discovery of two ruins nearby on the Paria River, suggests that the Anasazi utilized the area sometime in the 12th century A.D. Nonetheless, indigenous peoples generally did not make extensive use of the Lees Ferry area and other canyon stretches of the Colorado River, preferring the open plains above for hunting.
Lee's Ferry | Early inhabitants and explorers
Leaving the river behind in a sandy area where his ox carts could not pass, he went across country, and the land became greener, with more water and groves of Black walnut ("Juglans nigra") and bur oak ("Quercus macrocarpa") trees.
Juan de Oñate | Great Plains expedition
Foxtail cactus ("Escobaria vivipara" subsp.) and California barrel cactus ("Ferocactus cylindraceus") dot the landscape, and a Burro mule deer ("Odocoileus hemionus" var. "eremicus") herd relies on the Colorado River for survival.
Big Maria Mountains | Ecology
The first Europeans to see the Cimarron River were apparently Spanish conquistadores led by Francisco Vásquez de Coronado in 1541. The Spanish seem to have done little to exploit the area. The Osage tribe claimed most of the territory west of the confluence of the Cimarron and the Arkansas. In 1819 Thomas Nuttall explored the lower Cimarron and wrote a report describing the flora and fauna that he found there. In 1821 Mexico threw off Spanish rule and William Becknell opened the Santa Fe Trail.
Cimarron River (Arkansas River tributary) | Early explorers
Thomas. Powell led a second expedition in 1871, this time with financial backing from the U.S. government. The explorers named many features along the Colorado and Green rivers, including Glen Canyon, the Dirty Devil River, Flaming Gorge, and the Gates of Lodore. In what is perhaps a twist of irony, modern-day Lake Powell, which floods Glen Canyon, is also named for their leader.
Colorado River | Powell's expeditions, 1869–1871
The earliest explorers of European extraction to visit the area were Spanish explorers such as Coronado, although the Coronado expedition of 1540–42 only skirted the future border of the Colorado Territory to the south and southeast. In 1776, Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante explored southern Colorado in the Dominguez-Escalante Expedition. Other notable explorations included the Pike Expedition of 1806–07 by Zebulon Pike, the journey along the north bank of the Platte River in 1820 by Stephen H. Long to what came to be called Longs Peak, the John C. Frémont expedition in 1845–46, and the Powell Geographic Expedition of 1869 by John Wesley Powell.
Colorado Territory | Exploration by non-native peoples
The remaining eight members of the expedition constructed makeshift canoes and floated down the Colorado River until they reached the Gulf of California, where the powerful surf forced the Patties to leave their boats a few miles upriver. They had amassed hundreds of furs, worth between $25,000-$30,000, which they cached near the river in February 1827.
James Ohio Pattie | 1827–28: Pecos, Gila and Colorado Rivers
Some 13,000 years ago Paleo-Indians inhabited this region, leaving behind some 79 registered archeological sites. These early Americans continued to occupy this region into historic times. Trappers as well as explorers, including John C. Fremont, followed the South Platte and Cache la Poudre rivers seeking furs and a route through the mountains. The Trapper's Trail was established in 1824-25. The Overland Stage Line to California came through in 1862 paralleling the Cherokee Trail and the Trapper's Trail. In 1863, a native of Wisconsin, Adolphus Livernash (aged 16) and Stephen Moore built a cabin on the bank of the North Fork of the Cache la Poudre River and engaged in prospecting for coal and precious metals.
Livermore, Colorado | History
The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons by John Wesley Powell is a classic of American exploration literature. It is about the Powell Geographic Expedition of 1869 which was the first trip down the Colorado River by boat, including the first trip through the Grand Canyon. Powell's first written accounts of his exploration appeared in the January, February and March 1875 editions of "Scribner’s Monthly" as "The Canons of the Colorado". The Smithsonian published it in book form in 1875 under title "Report of the Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries. Explored in 1869, 1870, 1871, and 1872, under the direction of the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution".
The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons | Introduction
The ore samples he brought back to Santa Fe were among the first recorded discoveries of gold in present-day Colorado, although they created no particular interest at the time.
Juan Rivera (explorer) | Introduction
Elzada Clover (1897–1980) was an American botanist who was the first to catalog plant life in the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River. She and Lois Jotter became the first two women to raft the entire length of the Grand Canyon.
Elzada Clover | Introduction
Jotter's mentor at the University of Michigan, Elzada Clover, invited her to join a boating expedition along the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in the summer of 1938, during her graduate studies. The women planned to document and gather native plant species during the trip. At the time, only a few men had successfully boated down the Colorado and the only woman to do so, Bessie Hyde, disappeared and was presumed dead. Many of the women's colleagues and family members discouraged their participation in the trip due to the associated danger. The novelty of the women's involvement generated significant press coverage at the time, but articles tended to focus on the botanists' gender, appearance, and age rather than their scientific goals.
Lois Jotter | Grand Canyon Expedition
Also found here and named after the town is the Mesozoic mammal "Fruitafossor" ("Fruita digger"), discovered 2005. It was a small animal at less than 10 grams body mass, and had a lifestyle similar to modern-day armadillos but was not related to them, but rather close to the ancestor of all therian mammals. Thus, this important find proves that the first "modern" mammals lived in the Jurassic already.
Fruita, Colorado | Paleontology
The flora consists of deciduous forest and mesquite. There are hounds tooth, grass pastures, zacatón, Colorado grass, blue glandular grama filiform, bilberry cactus, buffalo grass, false grass, foxtail, woolly and wolfhounds, along with forage species and huaraches, several species of cactus and cacahuetes, etc.
Apaseo el Grande | Vegetation
Juan Maria Antonio Rivera (also spelled Ribera) was an 18th-century Spanish explorer who explored southwestern North America, including parts of Southern Rocky Mountains. In 1765, at the request of Governor Tomás Vélez Cachupin of New Mexico, he led an expedition from Santa Fe northward through present-day Utah and Colorado, partly in search of silver but also to help thwart the expansion of European powers in the region. His expedition passed through regions inhabited by the Ute and Southern Paiute tribes. His expedition cross the Los Animas River near present day Durango, Colorado (a tributary of the Colorado River), which he may have named.
Juan Rivera (explorer) | Introduction
The first non-native to see and record information of the Gunnison River was Juan Maria de Rivera, who came to the banks of the river just below its confluence with the Uncompahgre River in 1761 and 1765. It was again seen in 1776 by Silvestre Vélez de Escalante. At the time the Spanish name for the river was "Rio de San Javier (Xavier)", and the Native American name was "Tomichi". Escalante noted that Rivera thought it was "the great Rio del Tizon", the long used Spanish name for the lower Colorado River. Through the mid-1800s, the river was variously named the Eagle, Eagle Tail, South Fork of the Grand, Grande, and Grand River.
Gunnison River | History
Beginning with small bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers, Native Americans have inhabited the Colorado River basin for at least 8,000 years. Between 2,000 and 1,000 years ago, the watershed was home to large agricultural civilizations—considered some of the most sophisticated indigenous North American cultures—which eventually declined due to a combination of severe drought and poor land use practices. Most native peoples that inhabit the region today are descended from other groups that settled there beginning about 1,000 years ago. Europeans first entered the Colorado Basin in the 16th century, when explorers from Spain began mapping and claiming the area, which became part of Mexico upon its independence in 1821.
Colorado River | Introduction
Later, another rich flora and fauna would come to be preserved in the Florissant beds, where both rhinoceroses and uintatheres lived. More recently the state's modern prairies began to form and the state was home to creatures like bison, camels, horses, and mammoths. Local Native Americans have devised myths to explain local fossil bones and dinosaur footprints. By the late 19th century, local fossils had attracted the attention of formally trainer scientists. Major finds include the Late Jurassic dinosaurs of the Morrison Formation and the Cenozoic plants and mammals of the Florissant beds. The Jurassic plated dinosaur "Stegosaurus armatus" is the Colorado state fossil.
Paleontology in Colorado | Introduction
The Puebloans dominated the basin of the San Juan River, and the center of their civilization was in Chaco Canyon. In Chaco Canyon and the surrounding lands, they built more than 150 multi-story pueblos or "great houses", the largest of which, Pueblo Bonito, is composed of more than 600 rooms. The Hohokam culture was present along the middle Gila River beginning around 1 A.D. Between 600 and 700 A.D. they began to employ irrigation on a large scale, and did so more prolifically than any other native group in the Colorado River basin. An extensive system of irrigation canals was constructed on the Gila and Salt rivers, with various estimates of a total length ranging from and capable of irrigating .
Colorado River | Indigenous peoples
His name for the Colorado River was the accepted name for almost two centuries. He reported details of Native American culture. He discovered and reported geothermal hot springs, probably the ones near Calexico.
Melchor Díaz | Death and legacy
The Shoshone called the river the "Seeds-kee-dee-Agie", meaning "Prairie Hen River." In 1776, the Spanish friars Silvestre Vélez de Escalante and Francisco Atanasio Domínguez crossed the river near present-day Jensen, naming it the Rio de San Buenaventura. The map-maker of the expedition, Captain Bernardo Miera y Pacheco, erroneously indicated that the river flowed southwest to what is now known as Sevier Lake. Later cartographers extended the error, representing the Buenaventura River as flowing into the Pacific Ocean. At least one charted the Buenaventura as draining the Great Salt Lake. Later Spanish and Mexican explorers adopted the name Rio Verde, meaning "Green River" in Spanish.
Green River (Colorado River tributary) | History
The arrowheads, mortars and paintings found at the site indicate the following human occupation periods: Paleo-Indian (15,000–6,500 BC), Archaic (6500 BC – 900 AD), early Postclassic (900–1500 AD), and late Postclassic (1300–1680). These populations were dispersed with seasonal movements, allowing the use of resources. They engaged in fishing, the collection, hunting, and agriculture. Among the groups transiting this area were the Conchos, the Jumano, the Chisos and Apaches, the Chiricahua, the Mescaleros and Lipanes. The Spanish and Comanche arrived at the same time, and ended with the Mescalero and Lipan. The colonial government established the Rio Grande as a line of defense, where he built small fortifications, which were guarded by a garrison of soldiers.
Cañón de Santa Elena Flora and Fauna Protection Area | History
Starting around 1300 AD, a warming climate brought long droughts to the area, forcing the Puebloans to abandon their settlements north of the San Juan River, and eventually causing them to migrate out of the San Juan River basin to the Rio Grande Valley, where their descendants live today. The Navajo, who continue to live along the San Juan River today, are believed to have migrated into the Four Corners region by the 1500s, and may have come into contact with the last departing Anasazi. The Navajo name for the river was , "Old Age River" or "Old Man's River".
San Juan River (Colorado River tributary) | Indigenous peoples
The Great Salt Lake (GSL) was first seen and reported as very saline by white North Americans in 1824, apparently independently by Jim Bridger and Etienne Provost. Upon learning of the GSL, explorers began equating Lake Timpanogos on the maps with it, and apparently unaware of the fact that saline lakes such as the Great Salt and Sevier Lakes have no outlets; began efforts to find the rivers flowing from them west to the Pacific as promised by maps such as Tanner's. In 1825, William H. Ashley attempted to float the Green (Buenaventura) River to either what was called "Salt Lake" (actually Sevier Lake) on Tanner's map, or the Colorado River, to which the fur traders suspected it flowed.
Buenaventura River (legend) | Explorations to find the Buenaventura
In 1810 he travelled to the Great Lakes and in 1811 travelled on the Astor Expedition led by William Price Hunt on behalf of John Jacob Astor up the Missouri River. Nuttall was accompanied by the English botanist John Bradbury, who was collecting plants on behalf of Liverpool botanical gardens. Nuttall and Bradbury left the party at the trading post with the Arikara Indians in South Dakota, and continued farther upriver with Ramsay Crooks. In August they returned to the Arikara post and joined Manuel Lisa's group on a return to St. Louis. Although Lewis and Clark had travelled this way previously, many of their specimens had been lost.
Thomas Nuttall | Early explorations in the United States
The river was named the Santa Clara by the early travelers of the Old Spanish Trail that followed the river. It was also known as the Tonaquint River, for the Tonaquint Band of Indians who lived near the river's mouth. Archaeological evidence shows that Ancestral Puebloans (also known as the Virgin Anasazi) lived in the area from 700 B.C. to A.D. 1200 and that they had developed irrigation for their farmed crops. Their population increased until about A.D. 1200, when all Anasazi populations collapsed. They were replaced by the Southern Paiute, who also farmed along the watercourse. The first Europeans to see the river were Fathers Escalante and Dominguez on the Domínguez–Escalante expedition.
Santa Clara River (Utah) | History
Conglomeritic sands and silts beneath the Mesa Arenosa were examined by Colletta and Ortlieb and dated at between 700,000 and 120,000 years before present. Vertebrate fossils found by Merriam within the deltaic deposits include "Equus", "Gomphotherium", and "Bison" and were assigned to Irvingtonian age (0.5 to 1.8 million years before present), dates consistent with the aforementioned capture of the lower Colorado River. Evidence of a giant anteater, "Myrmecophaga tridactyla", was found in the deltaic deposits in the southern Gran Desierto. Van Devender notes that the specimen was found in association with fossils of mammoths, sloths, and boa constrictors, a tropical faunal assemblage which supports a contention that the Colorado River delta of a previous interglacial period (>120,000 years ago) was much warmer and wetter than in the present interglacial.
Gran Desierto de Altar | Geology
It was not until the late 18th and the early 19th century that the first European Americans explored the remote and hard-to-reach area. Mormon scouts visited the area in the 1850s to gauge its potential for agricultural development, use for grazing, and settlement. The first major scientific expedition to the area was led by U.S. Army Major John Wesley Powell in 1872. Powell, along with a team of mapmakers and geologists, surveyed the Sevier and Virgin River area as part of a larger survey of the Colorado Plateaus. His mapmakers kept many of the Paiute place names. Small groups of Mormon pioneers followed and attempted to settle east of Bryce Canyon along the Paria River.
Bryce Canyon National Park | European American exploration and settlement
Humans have occupied the region since the last ice age 10,000 years ago. Fremont people and ancestral Puebloans lived in the area until about 700 years ago. Spanish missionaries encountered Ute and Paiute tribes in the area when they first came through in 1775, but the first European-Americans to attempt settlement in the area were the Mormon Elk Mountain Mission in 1855, who soon abandoned the area. Ranchers, farmers, and prospectors later settled Moab in the neighboring Riverine Valley in the 1880s. Word of the beauty of the surrounding rock formations spread beyond the settlement as a possible tourist destination.
Arches National Park | History
The first recorded expedition of Western Colorado wilderness was led by Don Juan Rivera in 1765. In 1776, two Spanish priests, Fathers Escalante and Domínguez, led a party into the area around Montrose and Paonia. The 1830s brought the mountainmen into the area to trap beaver. An old cabin located on Cochetopa Creek discovered by Sidney Jocknick was most likely built between 1830 and 1840 and a rude fort was discovered on a tributary of Tomichi Creek bore signs of a conflict.
Gunnison County, Colorado | History
He reported on the "Botany of the Mexican Boundary Survey" (1859), that of the expedition upon the Colorado River under Lieutenant Joseph C. Ives (1861), and, in association with Asa Gray, the botanical collections of the Wilkes exploring expedition. The last was in his hands at the time of his death, its publication having been delayed by the Civil War.
John Torrey | Publications
One newly described species, "Coloradoa mesa verdae", has since been reclassified as "Sclerocactus mesae-verde". Boissevain's coauthor, Carol Davidson, took all of the photographs except two, one of which was by Laura Gilpin and the other by Elzada Clover.
Charles H. Boissevain | Research
After 1867, Powell led a series of expeditions into the Rocky Mountains and around the Green and Colorado rivers. One of these expeditions was with his students and his wife, to collect specimens all over Colorado. Powell, William Byers, and five other men were the first white men to climb Longs Peak in Colorado in 1868. In 1869, he set out to explore the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon. Gathering nine men, four boats and food for 10 months, he set out from Green River, Wyoming, on May 24. Passing through dangerous rapids, the group passed down the Green River to its confluence with the Colorado River (then also known as the Grand River upriver from the junction), near present-day Moab, Utah, and completed the journey on August 30, 1869.
John Wesley Powell | Expeditions
He started in present-day Wyoming, and after passing through the treacherous Gates of Lodore, aborted the trip prior to entering Desolation Canyon. Despite not having gotten close to the Colorado River, he concluded that the Green did empty into it, and continued his exploration by engaging Provost to lead him on an overland excursion to observe the GSL. The next spring his partner, Jedediah Smith, explored areas the north and west of the GSL, but found no rivers flowing from it. He sent more men to float around the shoreline to the west and south, and they were also unsuccessful in finding the "Los Mongos R." and "R.
Buenaventura River (legend) | Explorations to find the Buenaventura
Boissevain was a mathematically trained biochemist who worked as a professor of biology at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. In 1924, he was appointed the first chief of research and laboratory director of the newly founded Colorado Foundation for Research in Tuberculosis, later renamed the Webb-Waring Institute. He had a reputation as a brilliant researcher and a man of many ideas. Boissevain had been interested in cacti for many years and eventually became a leading specialist in western cacti. He coauthored the first comprehensive survey of native Colorado cacti. It covers species in the genera Opuntia, Echinocereus, Sclerocactus, Coloradoa, Pediocactus, Coryphantha, and Neobesseya and includes numerous black-and-white photographs.
Charles H. Boissevain | Research
During the same period, John Wesley Powell conducted a more extensive survey. When asked about Adams' report, Powell found many of the statements to be inaccurate, including a claim that Adams first surveyed an area that was surveyed in 1857 by Joseph C. Ives. Adams struggled for over ten years to impose his view of the Colorado River - that it was a mineral paradise shot through with veins of gold and silver - but ultimately failed. In 1878, Senator Francis Cockrell rejected a resolution that would have compensated Adams for his spontaneous work. Adams' survey, while wildly off the mark and generally recognized as unscientific, was a notable moment in the exploration of the West.
Sam Adams (explorer) | Colorado River survey
At one time, the banks of the Colorado River were lined with cottonwood and willow forests, sustained by the river’s natural periodic flooding. Animals depended on this green forest oasis for breeding, resting, feeding, and shade. Woodcutting during the steamboat era, clearing for agriculture, wild fire, exotic plants like salt cedar, and use of dams for flood prevention have devastated cottonwood and willow stands along the lower Colorado River. Some animals that depended the riparian forests, such as the southwestern willow flycatcher ("Empidonax traillii extimus"), have become endangered.
Imperial National Wildlife Refuge | Forest in the Desert
The earliest known residents of the land in and around what later became Joshua Tree National Park were the people of the Pinto Culture, who lived and hunted here between 8000 and 4000 BCE. Their stone tools and spear points, discovered in the Pinto Basin in the 1930s, suggest that they hunted game and gathered seasonal plants, but little else is known about them. Later residents included the Serrano, the Cahuilla, and the Chemehuevi peoples. All three lived at times in small villages in or near water, particularly the Oasis of Mara in what non-aboriginals later called Twentynine Palms. They were hunter-gatherers who subsisted largely on plant foods supplemented by small game, amphibians, and reptiles while using other plants for making medicines, bows and arrows, baskets, and other articles of daily life.
Joshua Tree National Park | Early
It dominates the river bank and does not provide the necessary shading for river edge habitats, resulting in warmer water and a lower diversity of aquatic animals. The giant reed along with the salt cedar, have greatly devastated and degraded the lower Colorado River riparian.
West Wetlands Park | Invasive plants
Petroglyphs (rock art) found throughout the Forest suggest that the land had been hunted for centuries by Indians before the arrival of Europeans. The first white men believed to have set foot in Ashley National Forest were the Spanish explorers Dominques and Escalante, in 1776. The Forest, however, was not thoroughly explored until the early 19th century when General William Henry Ashley, an organizer of a fur company, began looking for an outlet to the Gulf of Mexico for his business. General Ashley and his team began making their way up the Green River (one of the many bodies of water located in the Forest) in the spring of 1825.
Ashley National Forest | History
Indigenous peoples, most likely of the Fremont culture, inhabited the Canyonlands area long before European settlers arrived. Rock art and ruins have been found in Cataract Canyon that are at least 800 years old. Because of the remote location, it was some time before European explorers and settlers reached the area. The Colorado River and its canyons were more of an obstacle to travel than a destination to be explored. The first recorded European to reach Cataract Canyon was a fur trapper named Denis Julien in 1836. Julien carved his name into a rock wall in the lower section of Cataract Canyon, though this inscription is now covered by Lake Powell.
Cataract Canyon | History
Edible plants such as wild asparagus and prickly pear are occasionally found. Virginia creeper and imported plants such as the Russian olive, dandelion are present. Despite the limited area this corridor offers, raccoons, beaver, foxes, coyotes, and even deer are not uncommon sights along the creek. The beaver typically have lodges upstream (east) of Denver, but swim downstream to forage.
Cherry Creek (Colorado) | Ecology
He traveled alongside this stream for some distance, then crossed to the Rio Sonora, which he followed nearly to its source before a pass (now known as Montezuma Pass) was discovered. On the southern side of the Huachuca Mountains he found a stream he called the "Nexpa", which may have been either the Santa Cruz or the San Pedro in modern Arizona of modern maps, most likely the northward-flowing San Pedro River. The party followed this river valley until they reached the edge of the wilderness, where, as Friar Marcos had described it to them, they found Chichilticalli. Chichilticalli is in southern Arizona in the Sulphur Springs Valley, within the bend of the Dos Cabezas and Chiricahua Mountains.
Francisco Vázquez de Coronado | Expedition
The mission was built in a place that is now called ""LLano Colorado"" or "Red Plain" because of the color of the volcanic rocks there. Today this land is cultivated during certain seasons and grows wheat and barley. Among the flora the missionaries found near the site would have been chamomile, ceanothus, yucca, mesquite, brushwood, oak, and juniper. The animals and birds that lived in the region were squirrel, mole, beaver, shrew-mouse, coyote, puma, deer, woodpeckers, white-winged doves, owl, and wild ducks, among others. The agricultural production consisted of corn, bean, wheat, and barley crops, as well as different fruits and vegetables.
Misión San Vicente Ferrer | Location and natural habitat
On all these river trips, Cutler collected plant specimens. He retired from the Missouri Botanical Garden in 1977.
Hugh Carson Cutler | Biography
The Lone Mesa snakeweed was the sixth new plant discovered in Colorado in roughly 15 years.
Gutierrezia elegans | Discovery
The dunes were likely a visible landmark for travelers along the trail. The first known writings about Great Sand Dunes appear in Zebulon Pike's journals of 1807. As Lewis and Clark's expedition was returning east, U.S. Army Lt. Pike was commissioned to explore as far west as the Arkansas and Red Rivers. By the end of November 1806, Pike and his men had reached the site of today's Pueblo, Colorado. Still pushing southwest, and confused about the location of the Arkansas River, Pike crossed the Sangre de Cristos just above the Great Sand Dunes. In 1848, John C. Frémont was hired to find a railroad route from St.
Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve | Settler exploration
A population of Rio Grande cutthroat trout survives in Holden Prong of Las Animas Creek on the east side of the Black Range. The Mimbres River has its headwaters in the Wilderness.
Aldo Leopold Wilderness | Topography, flora, and fauna
Between 2500 and 2000 BCE there was significant soil build up. When the climate became too arid to produce sufficient food, people relocated until the rate of precipitation increased. Over time there was an increase in drought-resistant plants and the plants that required regular watering did not survive. Woodlands of spruce and fir were replaced by juniper and pinyon trees in the northern Rio Grande valley. Further south, there were fewer juniper and pinyon trees. Both climatic changes resulted in human movement pattern changes to obtain food. The Paleo-Indian had a straightforward movement pattern: follow and hunt the big animals.
Archaic–Early Basketmaker Era | Hunter gatherer culture
In mid-summer Arapahos traveled into the Parks region of Colorado to hunt mountain herds, returning onto the Plains in late summer to autumn for ceremonies and for collective hunts of herds gathering for the rutting season.
Prehistory of Colorado | Late prehistoric Native Americans
Paleo-Indian period – the first people who entered, and subsequently inhabited, the Americas during the final glacial episodes of the late Pleistocene period. Evidence suggests big-game hunters crossed the Bering Strait from Asia into North America over a land and ice bridge (Beringia), that existed between 45,000 BCE – 12,000 BCE, following herds of large herbivores far into Alaska.
Outline of Colorado prehistory | Paleo-Indian
In September, 1540, he began his third expedition, traveling overland to the head of the Gulf of California. Near the confluence of what is now the Colorado and Gila River]]s he learned from the natives that Alarcon had departed, but had left a cache of supplies and correspondence, which he located. The message basically stated that Diaz crossed the Colorado River, becoming the first person of European background to do so, and named it Rio del Tizon ("River of Embers" or "Firebrand River") from the practice of the natives for keeping themselves warm. He was impressed with the physical strength of the natives of the area.
Melchor Díaz | Coronado 1540 expedition
Oñate's last major expedition went to the west, from New Mexico to the lower valley of the Colorado River. The party of about three dozen men set out from the Rio Grande valley in October 1604. They traveled by way of Zuñi, the Hopi pueblos, and the Bill Williams River to the Colorado River, and descended that river to its mouth in the Gulf of California in January 1605, before returning along the same route to New Mexico. The evident purpose of the expedition was to locate a port by which New Mexico could be supplied, as an alternative to the laborious overland route from New Spain.
Juan de Oñate | Colorado River expedition
The San Juan River and its tributaries were an important water source for Native Americans as early as 10,000 BC, when Paleo-Indians inhabited the Four Corners region. By 500 BC–450 AD, the Basketmaker culture was succeeded by the Ancestral Puebloans or Anasazi who developed distinctive irrigation methods and masonry architecture ("pueblos"); many ruins and sites are preserved in the San Juan watershed in places such as Mesa Verde National Park. Most settlements were concentrated along the upper San Juan River in New Mexico, where the terrain is gentler and water more abundant. The lower San Juan River in Utah flows through inaccessible canyons that largely precluded habitation.
San Juan River (Colorado River tributary) | Indigenous peoples
Joseph Christmas Ives rejected his offer of one of his steamboats. Before Ives could finish reassembling his steamer in the delta, George A. Johnson set off from Fort Yuma on December 31, 1857, conducting his own exploration of the river above the fort in his steamboat "General Jesup". He ascended the river in twenty one days as far as the first rapids in Pyramid Canyon, over above Fort Yuma and above the modern site of Davis Dam. Running low on food he turned back. As he returned he encountered Lieutenant Ives, Whipple's assistant, who was leading an expedition to explore the feasibility of using the Colorado River as a navigation route in the Southwest.
Colorado River | Exploration and navigation above Fort Yuma, 1851–1887
The tree was noted by the English naturalist Henry Walter Bates in his 1863 book "The Naturalist on the River Amazons", where he wrote that
Acrocomia aculeata | Ecology
There are 33 crustacean species found in the Colorado River and its tributaries within Grand Canyon National Park. Of these 33, 16 are considered true zooplankton organisms. Only 48 bird species regularly nest along the river, while others use the river as a migration corridor or as overwintering habitat. The bald eagle is one species that uses the river corridor as winter habitat.
Grand Canyon | Lower Sonoran
This is a list of fauna of the Lower Colorado River Valley. The list also includes: Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) and wildflowers.
List of fauna of the Lower Colorado River Valley | Introduction
The Red River Expedition, also known as the Freeman-Custis Expedition, Freeman Red River Expedition, Sparks Expedition, or officially as the Exploring Expedition of Red River in 1806, was one of the first civilian scientific expeditions to explore the Southwestern United States. It was ordered to find the headwaters of the Red River (Red River of the South) from the Mississippi River as a possible trading route to Santa Fe, then under Spanish colonial control in New Mexico; to contact Native American peoples for trading purposes; to collect data on flora, fauna, and topography, and map the country and river; and to assess the land for settlement.
Red River Expedition (1806) | Introduction
This vicinity of the Pecos River valley was a long time meeting place for trade between the Plains and Pueblo tribes, a passage through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains for the Pueblo Indians of the Rio Grande valley to access the plains for buffalo hunting, as well as passage for the later Spanish explorers, frontier traders, buffalo hunters, Indian fighters, the Santa Fe Trail, Civil War armies, and later still for the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway portion of a southern route of a transcontinental railroad system. The traditional Mexican buffalo hunters of the area were known as "ciboleros".
José Guadalupe Gallegos | Early years
Archaeological studies conducted in the Dinosaur National Monument have revealed evidence of human habitation up to 7000 BC. The Fremont culture or Desert Archaic people inhabited the Yampa River basin starting about 800 AD, but disappeared for reasons uncertain during the 1400s. The Fremont created petroglyphs along the Yampa River Canyon, of which more than 300 are still visible today. After the collapse of the Fremont culture, a branch of the Utes moved into the Yampa River basin. The White River Utes inhabited the valleys of the Yampa and White Rivers and the Rockies of northwestern Colorado. The band living in the Yampa River valley was known as the Yamparika or Yapudttka Utes.
Yampa River | Native Americans
The first known specimen was collected in 1831 or 1832 by either botanists Thomas Coulter or David Douglas. They likely collected specimens from Cone Peak to the west of Mission San Antonio. Both sent specimens to England, but Coulter's specimen was first identified as "bracteata" and the name given his species has become the common use.
Abies bracteata | First identified
From the first years of the 20th century Brèthes had established a strong friendship with Carlos Porter , classifying the new species that he sent from the Blanco River (on the western slope of Aconcagua ). With the years Bréthes made more than fifty publications in the Chilean Magazine of Natural History that founded and directed Porte.
Juan Brèthes | Links with Chile
An early Permian age again fell into favor, based on faunal similarities with the Arroyo del Agua beds of the Cutler Formation. However, later studies again confirmed a Late Pennsylvanian age based on biostratigraphy using several new marker fossils, with "Limnoscelis paludis" belonging to this Late Pennsylvanian assemblage. The El Cobre Canyon formation is thought to represent an alluvial plane, with a single-channel meandering river in a semi-arid environment, being one of the earliest representations of a terrestrial fauna. Being semiaquatic, "Limnoscelis" "paludis" would have probably inhabited this river. The river is thought to have flooded seasonally with the rains, possibly drying up completely between the rainy seasons, and forming new channels on an annual to semi-annual basis.
Limnoscelis | "Limnoscelis paludis"
Starting in the 1860s, gold and silver strikes drew prospectors to parts of the upper Colorado River basin.
Colorado River | Introduction
Cutler graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison with B.A. in 1935 and M.A. in 1936 and from Washington University in St. Louis with Ph.D. in 1939. His doctoral dissertation was "Monograph of the North American species of the genus "Ephedra"" . After completing his Ph.D. in 1939 he floated the San Juan River (Colorado River tributary) by himself from Bluff, Utah, to Mexican Hat, Utah. In 1940, Cutler and Martin Withers boated the San Juan from Shiprock, New Mexico, to Aneth, Utah. Cutler met Norman Nevills who hired Cutler to row a boat on one of the early commercial river-running trips down the Colorado River from Green River, Wyoming to Lake Mead through the Grand Canyon.
Hugh Carson Cutler | Biography
Little by little, the ancestral Colorado River built a massive river delta across the sea way. Fossil hardwoods from the deltaic sands and associated coastal plain deposits suggest the region received three times as much rainfall as now.
Anza-Borrego Desert State Park | Geology
The present-day Salton Sea can be considered the most recent incarnation of Lake Cahuilla, though on a much smaller scale. Between 1.8 million and 10,000 years ago, massive flows of basalt from the Uinkaret volcanic field in northern Arizona dammed the Colorado River within the Grand Canyon. At least 13 lava dams were formed, the largest of which was more than high, backing the river up for nearly to present-day Moab, Utah. The lack of associated sediment deposits along this stretch of the Colorado River, which would have accumulated in the impounded lakes over time, suggests that most of these dams did not survive for more than a few decades before collapsing or being washed away.
Colorado River | Geology
Near La Junta, the junction of the Conchos River and the Rio Grande, Chamuscado and Rodríguez found several groups of Indians. At the junction and south were the Abraidres; northward were the Patarabueyes and Otomoacos or Amotomancos. They were friendly, the men described as "handsome" and the women "beautiful". They lived in wattled houses and grew squash and beans, but the Spanish considered them "naked and barbarous people." (See La Junta Indians) Northwards, near present-day El Paso lived the Caguates. They lived in mud brick houses and, while growing corn and beans, they also journeyed to the Great Plains to hunt buffalo and ate fish caught in the river.
Chamuscado and Rodríguez Expedition | The route and the Indians
In June 1826, Pattie claims he took part in an expedition down the Gila River to the San Pedro fork in order to retrieve the cached furs. While this expedition did occur, Pattie was most likely not present, since he served as a witness to a promissory note signed at the mine on June 14. The expedition returned in early July without a single pelt after discovering that Indians had taken the cached furs, which were likely worth thousands of dollars. With the fall trapping season still months away, Pattie spent the summer of 1826 employed at the mine, earning one dollar a day in exchange for protecting the mine from Apache raids.
James Ohio Pattie | 1826–27: Colorado River