Within Colorado boundaries are lands once claimed by Spanish kings and Mexican governors.
Resource Guides - Government & Law
Colorado Hispanic/Latino Historical Overview
Colorado has a rich and unique Hispanic heritage. Spanish exploration and prospecting in Colorado was more frequent than the records reveal. Between 1540 and 1542, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, a Spanish explorer looking for the mythical Seven Golden Cities of Cibola, may have crossed into Colorado. Old Spanish records indicate that as far back as 1598 Juan de Oñate reported gold discoveries in the San Luis Valley. These early Spanish expeditions usually traveled trails that Native Americans before them had worn into the deserts, plains and mountains. Native American typically also served as guides to European explorers.
On April 30, 1598, during Juan de Oñate’s expedition north from Mexico up the Rio Grande del Norte, he claimed all of that river’s drainage for Spain. The Adams-Oñis Treaty of 1819 between Spain and the United States more precisely defined, Spanish Territory in present day Colorado as everything south of the Arkansas River and west of a line running due north from the Arkansas River Headwaters on Fremont Pass up to the 102nd parallel.
Juan de Archuleta led a Spanish excursion into what in now Colorado in 1664. Following an unknown route, he chased runaway Taos Pueblo Indians to El Quartelejo, an Apache settlement on the Arkansas River near present day Las Animas. The first traceable Spanish expedition into Colorado came in 1694 when Diego de Vargas, the governor of New Mexico, followed the Rio...
Colorado Native Americans: Overview
For at least the last 14,000 years, people have made the Colorado plains and mountains their home. The first peoples, Paleoindians, followed their food supply across the prairie, hunting mammoth, mastodons, and giant bison. Their skilled hunting of large game required them to live and work together in close cooperative groups. As the giant mammals died off, these indigenous peoples developed technology to hunt smaller game. Some began to plant crops, requiring them to become semi-nomadic, while others continued their nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Among those who took to farming were the Ancestral Puebloans, once referred to as Anasazi. They settled in southwestern Colorado and the surrounding Four Corners area. Known as Basketmakers for perfecting that art, they lived in circular pithouses and grew corn, beans and squash, as well as domesticating turkeys. Between AD 750 and 1100, the Ancestral Puebloans moved to above-ground apartment-style houses. In addition to multi-family dwellings, they retained the use of the circular pithouse design. These ceremonial structures, called kivas, served as centers for Ancestral Puebloan communities. Around AD 1100 the Ancestral Puebloans again changed their architecture and moved into the multi-storied cliff dwellings for which they are best known. After living in these precariously placed structures for only two hundred years, they moved yet again. The great drought of 1275–1300 factored...