Bob Meroney, an always entertaining and informative member of our club, brought us up to date on the “Hidden History of the Poudre River” for our in-person meeting at the Lincoln Center on July 27. Bob started by comparing and contrasting what a visitor would have seen in the Fort Collins area 200 years ago vs today. Although the nearby Front Range topography, the Poudre River, and the native vegetation would be much the same, the abundance of roads (especially paved and including I-25), the numerous gravel pits (now mostly admired ponds) and the astounding diversity of vegetation would be dramatically different. Also different would be the population which has evolved dramatically in that time span, with the Apache tribes being replaced by the Comanche and Ute tribes, then by the Arapaho and Cheyenne tribes, all between around 1700 and 1870, before the arrival of any large numbers of white settlers. Even within our lifetimes, the relatively new town of Fort Collins has exploded from about 35,000 people around 1970 to around 340,000 today.
One of the earliest identified local Indians was Chief Friday, the adopted son of trapper Thomas Fitzpatrick, educated at a Catholic school in St. Louis but returned to this area and to his Northern Arapaho tribe in the Fort Collins area and exerted significant influence, especially in keeping the peace, at least in part due to his excellent English. Antoinne Janis, a French trapper, married into the tribe and settled in the LaPorte area (his cabin is now in Library Park, Fort Collins). The Laramie Treaty of 1851, agreed to by only some of the individual Indian tribal leaders and probably poorly understood by most, committed the various tribes to be peaceful with each other and to stay on designated tribal areas, with the Arapaho and Cheyenne area including most of NE Colorado, allowing the whites to pass through unmolested, all for a tribal payment of some $50,000 per year for 10 years to all the tribes – most of the provisions of which were quickly ignored by both sides. With continued white influx and Indian unrest, the Camp Collins military reservation was established, ultimately corresponding to much of the central part of Fort Collins on the south side of the Poudre River today. One of the last pieces of evidence of the Indian importance in the area was the Council Tree, a 110-foot tall cottonwood on the banks of the Poudre near the SE end of the military reservation, which survived until it was burned in a brush fire in 1940.
Although the Spanish conquistadors and gold hunters and Mexican fur trappers came through the area between 1540 and the 1820s, the first real impact of westward white migration came in the 1840s with emigrants to Oregon and California (including whites and Cherokees from Arkansas) who left small pox and cholera in their wake, possibly killing some 2/3 of the Indian population. These emigrants traveled north along the hogbacks to Wyoming, leaving a trail later used by other emigrants, fur traders, and the Overland Stage. Trappers in the area included Kit Carson who led a band of trappers to the headwaters of the Poudre. Although there are other stories about the naming of the river, the most common is that a group of French trappers, under threat of local Indians, buried their gun powder along the river, hence “Cache La Poudre”. The first settler in the Big Thompson Valley was Mariana(o) Modena (Medina), a widely known guide, scout, mountain man, and Indian fighter; he created a toll bridge and fort at Namaqua as well as the first public school in the vicinity of today’s Loveland. Jim Beckwourth, a black mountain man and elaborate story teller, was another local noteworthy. The first permanent settler in Fort Collins (1860) was G. Robert Strauss who built a stone-based cabin about 50 feet from the Poudre and lived there for 44 years, raising vegetables and stock. He helped to develop the first agricultural irrigation ditches in the area. Although Strauss died in association with a flood in 1904, his cabin remained until vandals burned it in 1999, leaving only the stone walls. Brothers Jesse and Fredrick Sherwood (Sherwood Lake and Sherwood Street) arrived in 1860 and quickly established themselves as pillars of the community, becoming territorial commissioners, judges, Indian Agents, and Larimer County Commissioners. For a while, their house served as a swing station for the Overland Stage line, owned by Ben Holladay, but later sold to Wells Fargo not long before the completion of the transcontinental railway put it out of business. Jack Slade, another tough customer (may have killed 45 men) was another of the individuals associated with the Overland Stage, establishing a stage station at Virginia Dale, north of Fort Collins.
As for the origin of the city of Fort Collins, the Army established Camp Collins (it was never a fort and never had a stockade) as a result of Indian unrest between 1862 and 1865 to protect the Overland Trail route. Tensions were increased by the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864. One of the notable residents of Camp Collins was “Auntie” Stone, who came to the post with her husband in 1864 to establish a mess hall for the soldiers. Her husband died two years later, after which her cabin became a boarding house, hotel, and school. She worked until 80 and died at 94 in 1895; the city shut down for her funeral in Grand View Cemetery. The Hayden Survey of 1869, although it concentrated along the route of the railroad, located a number of prominent features in Colorado and provided a large number of pencil sketches of the landscape of the Colorado Front Range area. The Camp Collins military reservation became available in 1872 and the Agricultural Colony bought the land and platted out Fort Collins.
The end of the era of relations with the local Indians came in 1864 when Colorado Governor Evans ordered all of the Indians onto reservations. The Southern Arapaho initially went to Sand Creek (1861) and then on to Oklahoma (1867). The Northern Arapaho went to Montana (1864) but Chief Friday did not agree to move to Wyoming until 1868. Finally, in 1878, the Shoshone tribe at Wind River, WY, agreed to allow the Arapaho band to join them. Thus, essentially no more Indians in Eastern Colorado.
Since Bob ran out of time, there were no questions.