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Hunting and Trapping <br />Trapper activity in the region started as early as 1820 when Baptiste Brown (Jean - <br />Baptiste Chalifoux) discovered Brown's Hole on the Green River. There were also trappers <br />in Rio Blanco County before the full development of the fur trade. Among them were half- <br />breed French trappers who worked for whomever paid the best price (Athearn 1977). <br />Thereafter, the William Ashley party was sent out by the Rocky Mountain Fur Company <br />from St. Louis in 1824 to trap the central Rockies -- Wyoming, the Yampa Valley, Steamboat <br />Springs, and Brown's Hole (History of the Routt National Forest 1975:1-4). They reached <br />Brown's Hole on the Green in 1825. This year also marked the incursion of Antoine <br />Robidoux into west -central Colorado and up into Brown's Park, and the boom was on. <br />Exploration <br />Northwestern Colorado was visited by many famous (and some not so famous) <br />explorers as they made their way through the West. They came for a variety of purposes: <br />exploration, science, pleasure, adventure, and profit. The earliest explorers included the <br />Escalante expedition (1776), Captain Benjamen L. E. Bonneville (1826), Dr. Fredrick <br />Wislizenius (1839), E. Willard Smith (1840), who traveled to the Little Snake River area, and <br />Col. John C. Fremont (1844). Later, miners began making forays into the region: George <br />Way (1860), and Joseph Hahn (186 1) worked the placer gold deposits. Captain E. L. <br />Berthoud traveled both the White and Yampa River valleys in 1861, looking for a more direct <br />route from Denver to Salt Lake City (Powell 1961). John Wesley Powell visited <br />northwestern Colorado in 1868-1869 during his exploration of the Colorado River. The <br />influence of this journey on the later location of a railroad into the region is suspected. The <br />Hayden Survey passed through northwestern Colorado in the mid -1870s. <br />Early Settlement <br />Historic Euro -American interest in the potential agricultural lands of the reservation <br />lands in western Colorado (namely the Uncompahgre, Gunnison, Colorado, Dolores, San <br />Miguel, White, and La Plata River valleys) had been growing for some time prior to the Utes' <br />banishment, and by the spring of 1881 frontier towns closest to the Ute lands were "crowded <br />with people, anxious to enter the Reservation and take possession of the most desirable <br />locations" (Haskell 1886:2). Only days after the last of the Utes had been expelled, settlers <br />began rushing onto the reservation lands. Settlement activity spread quickly --during the <br />autumn months of 1881 land claims were staked, townsites were chosen, and railroad routes <br />were surveyed (Borland 1952, Haskell 1886, Rait 1932). However, because the former <br />reservation lands were not officially declared public lands until August 1882, the first year of <br />settlement activity was marked by a degree of uncertainty regarding the legality of land <br />claims. <br />When finally announced, the 1882 declaration did not allow homestead entries on the <br />newly opened lands, but only preemptions, or cash entries, at the rate of $1.25 per acre for <br />11 <br />