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and American possessions to the north. The Pike expedition was not particularly successful in this <br />regard, and the boundary between Spain and the United States remained in dispute until 1819, when <br />the Adams-Onis Treaty established the boundary at the Arkansas River. In 1821, Spain ceded their <br />territory to the newly established Republic of Mexico. Almost immediately, American traders from <br />the east pushed into eastern Colorado, using the Arkansas River as a travel corridor. This corridor had <br />been established earlier by the Spanish and was known as the mountain branch of the Sante Fe Trail. <br />Fur trappers and traders were the first Americans to spend any time along the Arkansas. In 1834, <br />William Bent and his brother built Bent's Fort on the Arkansas River 12 mi above the mouth of the <br />Purgatoire River. The Bent brothers traded with the Arapaho and Cheyenne and established a <br />commercial presence in the area. Settlement in the area was sporadic, but El Pueblo, Hardscrabble, <br />Greenhorn, and Huerfano were settled between 1842 and 1853 (Lecompte 1978). All settlements <br />except Huerfano were abandoned by the mid -1850s. The City of Pueblo was established in 1859. <br />Four conditions led to the eventual permanent settlement of the Arkansas Valley and the Pueblo <br />area (Anderson 1989). These conditions included removal of the Native American populations to <br />reservations, the Pikes Peak gold rush, the Homestead Act of 1862 and Desert Land Act of 1877, and <br />improved transportation, including stage and railroad routes. Initially, two groups of people settled <br />southeastern Colorado (Friedman 1988). The first group consisted mainly of Hispanics from New <br />Mexico who needed land to graze small herds of sheep and cattle and to practice subsistence farming. <br />The Hispanics formed small villages, known as plazas, which consisted of extended families headed <br />by a patron who was the landowner. The second group consisted of Anglo-American homesteaders <br />and cattle ranchers. This group tended to live in single-family households in locations where they <br />could control water resources and raise cattle. These ranching endeavors grew and eventually merged <br />into larger cattle companies. Research by Carrillo (1999, 2007) and others (Church 2002; Clark 2003) <br />has determined that domestic sites settled by these two groups differ archaeologically in architecture, <br />site layout, and artifact types. <br />Military installations in the Arkansas Valley included Bent's Fort, which was purchased by the <br />Army in 1860. This fort was later renamed Fort Wise and then Fort Lyon. Fort Lyon was moved to its <br />present location east of Las Animas in 1886. Camp Fillmore (1864-1865) was located on the <br />Arkansas near present-day Boone, Colorado. Fort Reynolds (1868-1872) was located near present- <br />day Avondale, immediately to the southeast of the area that later became the Pueblo Chemical Depot <br />(Mehls and Carter 1984). <br />By the late 1860s, many of the Native Americans had left the area, and the Pikes Peak gold rush <br />began, which brought more settlers to southeastern Colorado (West 1998). Between the 1870s and the <br />1890s, most of the towns in southeastern Colorado were founded, and Pueblo became a major <br />regional commercial center. In 1892, Pueblo became a steel -manufacturing center when the Colorado <br />Coal and Iron Company built the Philadelphia Smelter, which later became the Colorado Fuel and <br />Iron Company (CF&I) (Scamehorn 1976). The city of Colorado Springs was laid out in 1871 by a <br />subsidiary of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad Company. It was originally developed as a <br />vacation destination because of its pristine natural setting (Ubbelohde et al. 2001:118). By the late <br />1890s, Colorado Springs was a booming tourist destination that rivaled Denver. The development of <br />the nearby Cripple Creek gold fields added to this and made Colorado Springs one of Colorado's <br />major cities (Ubbelohde et al. 2001:201). After World War II, Fort Carson and what is now Peterson <br />Air Force Base were opened and quickly followed by the Air Force Academy in 1954 and the North <br />American Air Defense Command in 1957. Schreiver Air Force base was added in 1987. These <br />installations made Colorado Springs into a major military town, which it continues to be today. In the <br />rural areas surrounding Colorado Springs, ranching remains an important part of life. The project area <br />is located on the Hitch Rack Ranch to the north of the constructed ranch features. The Hitch Rack <br />Ranch was started in the early twentieth century by Roy Best, warden of the Colorado State <br />8 <br />