Y
ears later, I renewed my love affair with Colorado maps when I started researching my family history. Maps became more personal as I searched for the mining camp of “Cash Creek,” where my great-great-grandparents first settled in Colorado in 1861. Located between Buena Vista and Leadville, “Cash Creek” became Cache Creek in the later 1860s and disappeared in the 1870s when the new town of Granite sprang up. I visited Cache Creek and walked the land where my ancestors had walked; I even panned for gold in the creek. I began buying county plat maps using township and range to locate homesteads and ranches and U.S. Geological Survey maps to study the terrain and landmarks. One of my favorite map tools, Google Earth, allows me to sit at home and soar over the mountains. I can zoom in on Cache Creek and observe the crater that hydraulic mining left behind. I can also add the global positioning system coordinates of other places my husband and I have visited. It’s a great way to experience places I’m researching and writing about when I can’t actually be there. Colorado maps are works in progress. From the time of Colorado’s earliest explorers to the work of the Colorado Geological Survey (CGS) today, maps have evolved as boundaries change, new roads are built and more detailed maps are produced using modern technology. Knowledge of how Colorado maps have changed over the years gives a better understanding of both the history of the state and the land today.
This map shows Colorado and several western states with their counties as they existed in 1890.
Early Colorado Maps The hope and promise of gold always played a part in the history of Colorado. Early Spanish expeditions sent conquistadors into the mysterious lands north of Santa Fe in attempts to locate mythical cities of gold. In 1540, Francisco Vasquezde Coronado went in search of one of the Seven Cities of Cibola and may have travelled through the southeastern corner of Colorado when he returned to Mexico empty-handed. More Spanish explorers made forays into the mountains searching for gold, writing about their journeys WWW.COLORADOCOUNTRYLIFE.COOP
rather than drawing easy-to-follow maps in hope that it would make it harder for others to follow their paths. The first surviving map of any region in Colorado was drawn by Miera y Pacheco, a member of the Dominguez-Escalante expedition 1776, which passed through western Colorado while searching for an overland route to California. Spain ceded a large parcel of land to France in 1800, then France sold this land to the United States as the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Most of present-day eastern Colorado became a part of the
United States with this transaction, while western Colorado remained under the flag of Spain. The boundaries changed again when Texas gained independence from Mexico in 1836. The new Republic of Texas included not only southeastern Colorado south of the Arkansas River, but also the San Luis Valley with the Rio Grande as the western border, and it telescoped up the Arkansas Valley past the Arkansas River’s headwaters all the way to the 42nd parallel north of present-day Laramie, Wyoming. [continued on page 18] APRIL 2010
Colorado Country Life 17