Tag: Colorado

Endangered Species and the Sovereignty of the West

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

Hollow Horn of the Sioux Tribe

There was a time when the West was truly wild. I don’t mean the gun fights in saloons, the stampede of a thousand cattle, or stagecoach robberies on the high plains. But it wasn’t that long ago when every river from what is now Kansas to the Pacific Ocean ran its course without a dam or diversion, tens of millions of buffalo grazed on the rich grasslands, and beavers built thousands and thousands of ponds across the Rockies. It was but a blink of the eye since apex predators like Grizzly bears and Wolves ruled the land from north to south.

One man who witnessed a nearly virgin West was John K Townsend, the first trained naturalist to travel from St. Louis to what is today Oregon. In a book called Journey Across the Rocky Mountains to the Columbia River, Townsend shares images of a trip that began in 1834, not long after Louis and Clark first made their expedition. Even in bustling St. Louis, where Townsend was provisioning, there were foretokens of what was ahead in the untrammeled country he was to cross. He describes the sight of a hundred Saque Indians with shaved heads and painted in stripes of “fiery red and deep black, leaving only the scalping tuft, in which was interwoven a quantity of elk hair and eagle’s feathers.”

Just a month into the trip, Townsend encounters a trapper who tells the story of having his horse and rifle stolen by Otto Indians in the middle of winter while still far from any settlement. When Townsend asks the trapper how he survived without food on his journey home, the trapper says, “Why, set to trappin’ prairie squirrels with little nooses made out of the hairs of my head.”

About six weeks into the crossing, Townsend describes the various wolves slinking about the camp looking for scraps of food. By his narrative, he does not seem a bit afraid of them but describes the encounters as “amusing to see the wolves lurking like guilty things around these camps seeking for the fragments that may be left.” The contrast of this naturalist’s comfort around wild animals camped out in the true wilds with just a horse, compared to some of today’s self-styled “mountain men,” is stark. For if you turn on most any AM radio station in Montana, Wyoming, or Colorado today, you’ll hear angry men sealed in 6,000-pound pickup trucks on major highways, calling in to talk shows to express their fear and loathing of wolves. My how soft we’ve become. Read more »

Monday, July 28, 2025

Where Once the Waters Were: Western Colorado’s Big Dry

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

Turner Gulch Fire, Adams County Fire and Rescue

Walking across a piece of my land the other day, I noticed that various grasses had become entirely brown from lack of water. Bromes and Poaceae, normally still green this time of year, looked brittle and were the color of tea. Cheat grass, that invasive species from Eurasia, looked even yellower and drier than it normally does. I picked some of the cheat grass, also known as downy brome, and it practically crumbled in my hands. This has been the driest year I can remember in my part of western Colorado. I don’t just mean statistics based on snowpack and rainfall, because that is only part of the story. Other factors include evaporation rates, timing of the snowmelt and residual lack of moisture in the soil from last year. The first clue that this is an exceptionally dry year came when a spring-fed lake on our ranch never filled with water. Normally by the time the snow melts off, the lake fills to the brim and holds water through the entire summer. This year, even in June it was empty.

Another spring-fed pond that normally stays full all summer is already half empty.

The land has a feeling of wanting to ignite and explode with the slightest spark. It’s the cheat grass that scares me the most for it’s incredibly flammable and covers tens of millions of acres in the intermountain west. Cheat grass has a biological advantage over other native grasses because it germinates earlier than most others, which gives it a head start in the competition for water and soil nutrients. It also dries out sooner than other grasses as the summer wears on and serves as what’s called a “ladder fuel” when it comes to wildfires. The term ladder refers to a ground plant’s ability to help fires climb up onto trees.

According to Glenn Lewis, a fire behavior analyst, the moisture content in western Colorado’s plant communities is at near historic lows—in the 97% percentile since records have been kept. Read more »

Water on the Brain: Irrigation Then and Now

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

Scarcity of water brings out the evil propensities in men quicker than anything else.  —Greeley Tribune, July 1, 1874

Center-pivot irrigation in Kansas

The summer of 1874 was a particularly dry year in Colorado, and the drought led to a water war between the fledgling towns of Fort Collins and Greeley. In the previous years, Greeley farmers had built extensive irrigation canals off the Poudre River to irrigate crops and had enjoyed abundant water from spring snowmelt.

Fort Collins, still just a small colony, saw the success of its downstream neighbors and decided to build their own irrigation canals off the Poudre as well. So in the summer of 1874, when the farmers near Fort Collins began heavy draws on the Poudre, the downstream Greeley farmers watched their crops begin to wither and die. They wouldn’t take it lying down.

As the summer advanced and the streams were reduced, the Greeley farmers became desperate for water. They sent men upstream to explore the Fort Collins ditches and concluded that their neighbors were wasting precious water and outright stealing what belonged to them.  After some legal threats, the parties agreed to meet at a schoolhouse in the town of Eaton, halfway between Greeley and Fort Collins. They hoped to find a way forward in a situation where there just wasn’t enough water for the ambitions of the two towns.

Despite lengthy discussions, legal arguments about prior appropriation, and threats, in the words of water historian George Sibley, “the only successful outcome was that no one was shot.”

Meanwhile, in the same summer of 1874, further south in the Arkansas River Valley near what is today the town of Salida, a war broke out between two ranchers fighting over an irrigation ditch. George Harrington and Elijah Gibbs, both ranchers, had been arguing over ditch rights near Gas Creek for several weeks when their arguments turned to violence. On the morning of June 17, 1874, Harrington noticed that one of his outbuildings was set ablaze. He and his wife hurried to put the fire out, and when he left his house, he was shot in the back and killed immediately. Read more »

Monday, July 11, 2022

After the Gold Rush

Posted on by Ethan Seavey

by Ethan Seavey

Agnes Miner Collection; Gift, Colorado Springs Ghost Town Club. Breckenridge History, Colorado.

Breckenridge, Colorado: a village in the Rocky Mountains which is now known for its popular ski resort. Before 1859, it was a valley with a lush Blue River running through the crease by the foothills of the Ten Mile Range. In 1859, gold was first mined in Breckenridge. After 1859, over 5,000 white men (some estimate closer to 8,000) flocked to the valley, and the village sprung up quickly after.

Many of those men (for they were nearly all men) had stopped on their way home from the gold rush on the west coast, and others had come from out east. They had experience in mining, which not only meant knowledge of how to effectively collect the gold from the mountains, but that they knew how to survive in the isolated wilderness. In the 1860s, a gold miner from Breckenridge would earn about three dollars a day. Let’s make this clear: three dollars a day was a good amount of money. Many people across America were only earning a dollar, and others had no job. If being a miner didn’t pay well, no one would have come so far to work such a dangerous job. Every day, he would spend one dollar on his boarding, another on food and booze and an hour in a brothel, and send the third home to his family out east.

Mining meant stability at home (usually, back East) when work was hard to find. Still, they weren’t educated enough to learn that they were being cheated. The owner of the claim would take an average of ten dollars of gold from each of his men, every day. The owners lived in nice homes, and some of them never even laid their eyes on the mines. If you could afford it, you wouldn’t be living in Breckenridge. Read more »

Monday, November 19, 2018

Colorado’s Blue Tsunami: Taking it Nationwide

Posted on by Joan Harvey

by Joan Harvey

Photo by Dave Russell; buffaloheartimages.com

Colorado has been a purple state so long that the last time the Democrats had all down ballot State offices, the State House, and State Senate was in 1936. We’re a cowboy state. On the map we’re a sea of red with a tiny blue area to the east of the Continental Divide, plus the tiny population of Aspen. But those small urban and suburban areas have more and more people, and increasingly those people have a voice. And this time that voice has brought us a gay Jewish Democrat as governor, as well as a Democratic attorney general, secretary of state, and treasurer. Democrats will control the State House and State Senate. We’re so damn Blue we’re almost cobalt.

How did we do it? Can it be duplicated on a national level? It’s national news that we elected the nation’s first openly gay governor. But we also elected Colorado’s first African American congressman and he’s only 34. We elected the first transgender state rep. We elected more Latinxs to the state legislature. We elected the first Democratic woman to the position of secretary of state and she beat the incumbent in a seat that hasn’t been held by a Democrat since the Eisenhower years. All five of the female candidates in competitive districts for State Senate won handily. And for Congress, Democrat Jason Crow aced the previously unbeatable Republican incumbent Mike Coffman, who had won the previous five terms. Trump blamed Coffman for not embracing him, but in actuality it was Crow’s ability to tie Coffman to Trump that helped Crow win.

Maybe it’s marijuana. Coloradans are so relaxed they just couldn’t work up a rage against a small raggedy caravan of women and children hundreds of miles away. But clearly, the real reason for the great Blue success is Trump. Read more »