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1 1 1 1 1 1 1• 32 Limited numbers of Americans initially came to present-day Colorado in the early 1800s primarily for purposes of exploration, trapping beaver, and later for hunting. Many of the trappers and hunters adapted to Native American and New Mexican customs. Extensive settlements began in the late 1850s and eazly 1860s throughout the region due to the gold strikes in the Colorado mountains. The newly emerging mining towns needed agricultural commodities, which the southern part of the state could supply. The AngloAmericans introduced a rapidly changing materialist way of life. American frontier ranching, farming, and mining, during the nineteenth century, relied on acash-oriented economy (Mehls and Carter 1984; Carrillo 1990, 1995). Therefore, it is only through an awareness of the historical processes responsible for producing the archaeological record in southern Colorado, including the Purgatoire Valley, that the complex nature of the historical archaeology begins to become perceptible and understandable (Weber 1982:284-285). Manifest Destiny and Multiculturalism: Difficult Realities The area that encompasses the present-day states of Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, and California has undergone three major periods of cultural change over four centuries (Table 10). The initial period began with Spain's first appearance in the Southwest and ended with the beginning of Mexican Independence ca. 1821. The second period included that of Mexican political control from 1821 through 1848. The third period began with the arrival of the AngloAmericans and the eventual takeover of the region by the United States in 1848 (Camps 1979). The occupation of SLA7186 falls entirely within the third period. In the recent past, AngloAmerican historians have tended to reflect a research bias when dealing with events that occurred on the western frontier in general, and in the Southwest in particular. The primary reason was that historic events, representing Spanish and Mexican views of the frontier region, were presented from an American perspective. The roots of this skewed perspective can be traced to a speech given in 1893 by Frederick Jackson Turner entitled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" (Lamar 1977:725-729, 1199-] 200). Following the publication in 1921 of Herbert Eugene Bolton's classic The Spanish Borderlands (1964), historical studies have been quite detailed in terms of cultural conflicts and adaptations that occurred when "westward-thrusting AngloAmerican pioneers and northern-advancing Spanish frontiersmen ~pobiadores] met and clashed there" (Weber 1982:xi). This academic bias has only recently begun to change as certain revisionist historians (e.g., Weber 1976, 1982, 1988, 1991, 1992, 1994; Lamaz 1977; White 1991; Worster 1992; Cronon et al. 1992; Hall 1989; Lecompte 1978); historical azchaeologists (Farnsworth and Williams 1992; Thomas 1989, 1990, 1991; South 1994; Deagan 1982, 1987); geographers (Meinig 1971) and others are examining past historical events that occurred in the Spanish and Mexican borderlands using Spanish and Mexican archival data. New and different ideas and perspectives derived from actual documented records and events in New Mexico, and other Mexican-claimed territories, as well as other former Spanish-controlled territory in California and in the Southeast, have recently been formulated.