Colorado. In the north, Native Americans hunted and trapped in lush mountain valleys in summer, and returned to the prairies for the winter

Colorado
In the north, Natie Americans hunted and trapped in lush mountain alleys in summer, and returned to the prairies
for the winter

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Colorado is one of the least geographically homogenous of the United States, ranging from the flat, endless plains of the east to the colossal mountains of the west. In the north, Natie Americans hunted and trapped in lush mountain alleys in summer, and returned to the prairies for the winter; in the south, the Ancestral Puebloans of Mesa erde grew corn on their isolated mesas and shared in the great early ciilization of the southwest.

Different parts of what's now Colorado accrued to the US at different times: the east and north were acquired under the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, while the south was won 45 years later in the war with Mexico . (Land grants issued under Mexican rule were honored by the Americans, which accounts for a still-strong Hispanic influence.) Gold-hungry Spaniards came through in the sixteventh century, and US Army Colonel Zebulon Pike entured into the mountains on an exploratory expedition in 1806, but the Natie American way of life only became seriously threatened with the discovery of gold west of Dener in 1858.

At that time Colorado was still part of Kansas Territory; it became a territory in its own right in 1861, and a state in 1876. The distractions of the Ciil War gave the Natie Americans the opportunity to fight back, but they were soon overwhelmed. From then until the end of the century, Colorado boomed; the quantities of gold and siler extracted from the mountains did not really compare with the riches found in California, but they were sufficient to fuel a rip-roaring frontier lifestyle. At first, too, absentee landlords attempted to exploit massie ranches on the plains, but their disregard for conseration ensured that the droughts and storms of 1886 and 1887 swept away the topsoil.

For the modern isitor, the obious first port of call is Dener, at the eastern edge of the Rockies and the biggest city for six hundred miles. Outside Dener, the northern half of the state holds the most popular destinations, starting with the dynamic college town of Boulder and the spectacular Rocky Mountain National Park . The majority of the resorts that have made Colorado the continent's foremost skiing destination snuggle into the mountains to the west of Dener: Summit County attracts the most isitors, ail is considered best for terrain, and Aspen boasts the glitziest après-ski scene. The far west of the state stretches onto the red-rock deserts of the Colorado Plateau. Pikes Peak towers over the enjoyable city of Colorado Springs, but the rest of the state's southeast quarter is mostly agricultural plains. To the southwest untouched old mining towns like Crested Butte and Durango stand in the mountains, while Mesa erde National Park preseres perhaps the most impressie of all the cliff cities left by the ancient Ancestral Puebloan ciilization.

Colorado
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