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-z- <br /> <br />J <br />~• <br />trail from Santa Fe to Santa Earbara, California. The leaders, <br />Fray Atanasio Velez de Escalante and Eugenio Dominguez were <br />Franciscan priests caho c.~ere looking for a way to the California <br />mission. They traversed Colorado and found their way into <br />Douglas Canyon where they observed the Canon Pintado (pictographs). <br />They then moved north to the Sdhite River and proceeded into <br />Utah where they decided to give up and returned to Santa Fa via <br />Arizona. They left behind a journal which provided the first <br />descriptions of western Colorado as seen by Europeans. The two <br />friars were not overly flattering in their appraisal of the <br />2 <br />land. <br />The next fifty years saw little incursion of Europeans <br />into this land. A few fur trappers may have entered along the <br />river valleys in search of fur such as beaver and other water <br />animals, but little development occured. It was no[ until the <br />early 1820's that the first known fur trappers appeared. As <br />early as 1819, Jean-Baptiste Chalifaux, otherwise known as <br />Baptiste Brown, entered the area in the far northwestern corner <br />3 <br />of Colorado known as Brown's Hole. In 1324, ~dilliam Ashley <br />of St. Louis entered Brown's Hole with a large trapping party <br />to exploit the area. From this point on, Brawn's Hole was the <br />major fur trading center in the northwest corner of Colorado. <br />By 1830, Antoine Robidioux had built Fort Uintah in nearby <br />Utah to serve the growing trade. The first permanent white <br />settlement in the region came in 1838 with the construction <br />of Fort Davy Crockett built by Prewett F. Sinclair, k'illiam <br />Craig and Philip Thompson <br />Their plan was to capture the fur <br />