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1 1 “When our small party arrived on the hill they with one accord gave three cheers to the Mexican mountains.”2 It was 2:30 in the afternoon on Saturday, November 5, 1806. Zebulon Pike and his fifteen companions, trekking westward along the Arkansas River, had just glimpsed the peaks of the Rockies clinging to the distant horizon like small blue clouds. Four months earlier the men had left eastern Missouri to explore the southwestern reaches of the vast Louisiana Territory the United States had purchased from France in 1803. To every weary soldier , from Lieutenant Pike himself to Privates Thomas Daugherty and John Sparks, the sight of the mountains signaled that they had almost crossed the barrier of the hot, dry plains. By November 26 Pike and his party were climbing a pine-clad shoulder of the great peak that would eventually bear his name. After forty-eight fatiguing hours of wading in deep snow, Pike abandoned his hopes of conquering “Grand Mountain.” Instead, he turned south to explore the Arkansas River. Mistakenly thinking he had found its source near present-day Cañon City, he then wandered for weeks looking for the Red River, part of the boundary of the Louisiana Purchase. In February 1807 he built a small stockade in the San Luis Valley on what he apparently thought was the Red River. Actually, he was on the Conejos, a tributary of the Rio Grande, on land long claimed by Spain. Arrested by Spanish troops, These vast plains of the western hemisphere may become in time equally celebrated as the sand desarts [sic] of Africa.1 —Zebulon M. Pike, 1810 Mountains and Plains DOI: 10.5876/9781607322276:c01 chapter one 2 he was taken to Santa Fe and later deeper into Mexico. The Spanish returned him to the United States nearly a year after he left Missouri. The next US exploration of portions of what would become Colorado, a twenty-man expedition led by Major Stephen H. Long in 1820, branded the high plains a Great American Desert, “almost wholly unfit for cultivation, and uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for their subsistence.”3 More than two decades passed before the US Army again mounted significant explorations of the region. In 1842 John C. Frémont traveled from Fort Laramie in Wyoming to Fort St. Vrain on the South Platte twenty miles south of modernday Greeley. The next year he crossed Kansas to Fort St. Vrain and journeyed southward along the base of the Rockies to Fort Pueblo, a trading post on the Arkansas River, and then north to Wyoming. During the remainder of 1843 and the spring of the following year he toured Utah, Idaho, Oregon, Nevada, and California before returning through the mountains of central Colorado in June 1844. In the winter of 1848, financed by St. Louis businessmen who wanted him to find an all-weather railroad route from their city to the Pacific Coast, he led another party into the Rockies. He lost ten of his thirty-three men to exposure and starvation in the San Juan Mountains. Frémont characterized Colorado’s plains as a “parched country” of sand hills with an “appearance of general sterility.”4 Early tourists such as Thomas Farnham, Rufus Sage, and Francis Parkman repeated Pike’s, Long’s, and Frémont’s descriptions of sandy, arid wastes. In the late 1850s, fortune hunters and journalists trying the shortcut to the Pikes Peak goldfields across the plains of western Kansas and eastern Colorado raised the same bitter complaint. “We seem to have reached the acme of barrenness and desolation,” wrote Horace Greeley, the widely read editor of the New York Tribune. “Wood and water fail, and we are in a desert indeed.”5 For such travelers, their first sight of the mountains was sweet relief. The “grand outline” of the immense mountain wall cheered Long’s party and delighted Frémont with its beauty. As it emerged into view from a vast pile of thunderheads, Longs Peak astonished Parkman. By the 1860s the contrast between the mountains and the plains had become an artistic cliché. Illustrators and artists such as Albert Bierstadt emphasized the sublime, the grand, the picturesque, and the uplifting. In portraying the plains they tended to show the hardships of travel— buffalo skulls, storms, people digging for water. In contrasting the plains and the mountains, explorers oversimplified the complexities of Colorado’s geography. Compared to the mountains, the plains appear [3.129.13...

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