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<br />..records of fur traders and prospectors are meager, for the <br />valley was typical desert country and had little to offer. <br />CHowever7 all Colorado was overrun by adventurous trappers in <br />the 1820s because of the high value of beaver skin (Raft 1932: 6). <br />In 1828, Antoine Robidoux, a French trader from St. Louis, established a <br />trading post named Fort Uncompahgre at the junction of the Gunnison and <br />Uncompahgre Rivers near the present site of Delta (Hafen 1948: 79). But <br />Robidoux's enterprise never prospered and, furthermore, the Utes did not <br />tolerate his presence for long, setting fire to his log buildings not long <br />after they were built (Rockwell 1956: 60). Robidoux also attempted to <br />establish a post on the White River, as attested by a petroglyph of his <br />making dated 1837 in Hay Canyon, approximately 10 miles west of Douglas Pass: <br />ANTOINE ROBIDOUX <br />PASSE ICI LE 13 NOVEMBRE <br />1837 <br />POUR ETABLIRE MAISON <br />TRAITTE A LA <br />RV VERT OU WIYTE <br /> <br />• <br />Other early Anglo-American trappers who roamed western Colorado included <br />James 0. Pattie, William Bicknell, Samuel Juddart, Marcus Whitman, Captain <br />John W. Gunnison, E. F. Beale, and John C. Fremont (Hafen 1927: 308). Per- <br />haps more important than their hunting/trapping activites, these men served <br />as advance scouts into Ute territory, carrying back descriptions of the Rocky <br />Mountain wilderness to westward-bound Americans. <br />Interest in the potential agricultural lands of western Colorado had <br />been growing for some time prior to the Utes' banishment and, by the spring <br />of 1881, frontier towns closest to the Ute lands were "crowded with people <br />anxious to enter the Reservation and take possession of the most desirable <br />locations" (Haskell 1886: 2). The town of Gunnison, having been settled <br />ca. 1874, was located only a short distance east of Ute territory (Goody- <br />koontz 1927: 459) and hosted large numbers of would-be settlers during the <br />period between the signing and implementation of the Treaty of 1880. An <br />editorial in the Gunnison Review, 19 June 1880 (four days after the "Ute <br />19a <br />