Rabbit Creek Country: Three Ranching Lives in the Heart of the Mountain West

4: Seeing the Land in Time

z 71 z z F OU R z Seeing the Land in Time n I The first major explorer of the interior West to see Rabbit Creek country was John Charles Fremont, who passed near the mouth of the stream in 1843. Fremont was leading his second expedition into the Rocky Mountains to find, as he put it, a new “road of emigration” to the west coast—a quicker, more southerly route for the Oregon Trail, which was already in use. His sponsors’ goal was to open the West to white settlement . Fremont’s second expedition did in fact play a key role in extending the American empire westward. The vivid reports of his explorations (written by him and Jessie Fremont) inspired thousands to emigrate, and the maps made by Charles Preuss, his German cartographer, were used as itineraries by the Forty-Niners and emigrants on the Oregon Trail in the 1850s and 1860s. In July 1843, Fremont’s company entered the eastern foothills of the Rockies in what is present-day Larimer County, Colorado. At that time, this country was uncharted—“an uncertain and dangerous region,” Fremont called it. He noted that few trappers remained in the area; he heard some had been killed by Indians. No one was able to tell him of an easy passage over the mountains to the west coast. Christopher “Kit” Carson served as guide to the company, but he did not know, and Fremont evidently did not ask the local Indians. chapter four 72 It cannot be said that Fremont was lost in these eastern foothills of the Colorado Front Range, yet neither was he precisely where he thought he was. He had mistaken the river he was following for another. Fremont believed he was ascending the main branch of the Cache la Poudre River, but he was wrong. He was in fact going up the North Fork, whose main watershed is the Livermore region. In what is probably the first written account of this landscape, Fremont described the North Poudre River. The lower canyon was “almost a chasm,” and “the scenery was very wild and beautiful.” Passage through the canyon was rough. The company had to ford the river eight or nine times, and it rained heavily. Fremont reflected that with a little effort a good road might be put in. Thisfoothillslandscapemadeastrongimpressiononhim.“Towering mountains rose round about; their sides sometimes dark with forests of pine, and sometimes with lofty precipices washed by the river; while below . . . the green river bottom was covered with a wilderness of flowers , their tall spikes sometimes rising above our heads as we rode among them. . . . The mountains appeared to be composed of a greenish gray and red granite.” That night (July 29) they camped within a mile or two of what, twenty-five years later, would be called “Livermore.” Rain continued to fall. The explorers built large fires to dry out their clothes, and hunters brought back “a fine deer.” Next morning, the company broke camp and passed near the confluence of Rabbit Creek and the North Poudre (see the map in the introduction). They then proceeded north up a large broad valley “bounded on the right by red buttes and precipices, while to the left a high rolling country extended to a range of the Black Hills.” This “high rolling” terrain and the “Black Hills” to the west of the company were in fact the upper Rabbit Creek country, seen at a distance of four miles. “The Black Hills” were so called because they were crowned with groves of dark-looking Ponderosa pine, which sharply contrasted with the tans of the predominant grass and shrublands. Middle Rabbit Creek flows through this higher terrain and then joins with the North Rabbit and South Rabbit to form the main stream that drops down into the parklands of the lower Livermore region. Fremont’s brief description of the Livermore valley records some of its salient features. The heavy rains that plagued the expedition were part of the short monsoon season that typically occurs at the end of Seeing the Land in Time 73 July in this part of the country. Herds of mule deer still pass through the brushlands. The southernmost canyon of the North Poudre, though now partly filled by a reservoir, is still unspoiled and dramatic, and the river is no easier to ford. I know this from personal experience. As of this writing, there...