PERMFILE56926

• Permit No: C1981038
• IBM Index Class Name: Permit File
• Doc Date: 12/11/2001
• Section_Exhibit Name: Volume 9B ARCHAEOLOGY APPENDIX PART 4
• Media Type: D
• Archive: No

Euroamerican Tradition
Primary settlement with extensive land exploitation: The Utes were
removed from the Gunnison Country in 1881 as part of the complete
Ute exodus from both the White River and Uncompahgre Ute Reservations.
The Ute departure had been long anticipated by the white settlers
crowding against the Reservation boundaries from population centers
focused about Gunnison and Ouray. Squatters were settled on the best
ranch sites in the Gunnison Country even before the Reservation was
legally opened to homesteading. The year 1881 closed with most of
the prime lands of the North Fork already in the hands of such
squatters. In this capacity, Indian Agent Otto Mears remarked in
January of 1882 that "I doubt if there is a decent site fora ranch
in either the valleys of the Uncompahgre, Gunnison or Grand Rivers that
has not already been taken up (Goodykoontz 1927:460). By 1882 Montrose,
Delta, and Grand Junction had been established on the old reservation,
and the seeds for towns in the North Fork Valley had been planted by
the arrival of individuals such as Enos Hotchkiss and Samuel Wade,
who respectively ;settled in the Hotchkiss and Paonia areas in 1881
(Borland 1952; Goodykoontz 1927:460; Rockwell 1975:93-94, and
Ferguson 1928).
The first settlers in the North fork Valley were stockmen (Baker 1977:16-26
and Rockwell 1937), and by the middle 1880's more and more individuals
were preempting land and running cattle in the Paonia area. For
most of the 19th Century, cattle remained the mainstay of the local
economy with the basic cultural character of the region being cast
• in stockraising until fruit production eclipsed the industry in
economic importance about the turn of the century (Baker 1977 and
Rockwell 1975 and 1938). In 1885 Paonia was described as a "small
post office town on the North Fork of the Gunnison River, a+ith a
population of about 60, occupied in raising cattle and sheep" (Crofutt
1885:129). Hotchkiss was described as a "post office on the North
Fork of the Gunnison near Lerox Creek. Agriculture and stock-raising,"
while Delta, as the county seat of Delta County, was described as set
amidst a rich farming region of reat future romise." By 1885 it
boasted a bank, newspaper and a number of stores Crofutt 1885:105, 87).
Other towns in the project vicinity, such as Cedaredge and Eckert,
were not founded until much later when the promise of growth of the
fruit industry led to intensive development of the North Fork area.
The intensification of land use involved in the "fruit boom" was made
possible by an ever-increasing irrigation system which made many of
the dry mesas and benches on the south side of the Grand Mesa arable.
The period of Primary Settlement following the Ute removal and earlier
phase of intermittent white contact (Table 2) witnessed the first
stages of the Homesteading Tradition in the North Fork area (Baker 1977).
Good lands on the valley floors seem to have been pretty well "taken
up" by the early 1890's, and by the turn of the century the extensive
form of land exploitation which characterized cattle ranching, that
accompanied the early stages of the Homesteading Tradition, was being
replaced by the intensive agricultural efforts attending growth of
• the fruit industry. The intensive land use (Table 2) attenuiny the