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mountains along the route of modern II.B. 36 west from Lyons. In <br />• 1836 A. Pike Vasquez stripped the Vasquez's Clear Creek post of all <br />usable materials, leaving the cottonwood and adobe structure to <br />molder back into the earth. This marked the beginning of the end. <br />Within a few years of the fort's abandonment the fur trade declined <br />as fashion changed, resulting is silk, not beaver, being "the" <br />material for hate coincidental to exhaustion of the beaver supply <br />from over-trapping (Mehls, 1984b). Duriaq and after the halcyon <br />days of the mountain man, the 0.8. Army continued to show an <br />interest is the Bouth Platte region, sending out patrols to <br />maintain peace among the Indians and further explorers, seeking new <br />routes to and from the Far west. Hy the 185os the Army patrols had <br />become more frequent, reflecting increased American presence in the <br />Southwest after the region was ceded to the IInited states at the <br />en8 of the Mexican War in 1848(Mehls 1984a:26,28-9). The era of <br />exploration and the fur trade added much useful information to the <br />body of knowledge about the American Weat and Colorado by the time <br />early federal exploration ended in the late 18509. The other, more <br />• important, contribution for development of the Study Area came with <br />the government explorers and mountain men, who discovered and <br />mapped travel routes, including the South Platte Trail and routes <br />into the mountains, so that when gold was discovered in 1858 <br />Americans already knew how to get to the Cherry Creek gold <br />fields(Meier 1987b). <br />• 16 <br />