ABSTRACT
For the greater part of the second half of the nineteenth century, Colorado reigned as the pre-eminent mining area in the Rocky Mountain region of the American West. Spaniards were the first Europeans to cross into this area north of the Rio Grande, and Coronado searching for the fabled “Seven Cities of Cibola” was the first, but not the last, to seek gold. Some Spaniards mined there in the eighteenth century. In the early nineteenth-century history of the United States the region was associated with the names of several explorers, including Zebulon Pike, who, assigned to map sections of the Louisiana Purchase, traced the Arkansas River into Colorado (1806), and reported gold being found. Major Stephen Long explored the valleys of the South Platte and the Arkansas rivers and branded this as part of the “Great American Desert,” unsuited for European settlement. During the late 1820s and 1830s several forts and trading posts, used by “mountain men” in the fur trade with the Indians, were built along the Arkansas and Platte Rivers. And in the early 1840s the first covered wagons carrying settlers overland via South Pass to the Pacific Coast began to pass near the region.1
