Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Newsline website (Chase Woodruff):
January 30, 2026
In the years leading up to Colorado statehood, nearly all of the territory’s western half still belonged to the Ute people, who had inhabited the northern Colorado Plateau for centuries.
An 1868 treaty between the U.S. government and six bands of the Ute tribe reserved nearly all of the western half of the Colorado Territory for their “absolute and undisturbed use and occupation,” and stated that “no persons … shall ever be permitted to pass over, settle upon, or reside in the territory described.”
The agreement lasted just four years.
By 1872 prospectors for gold and silver in the San Juan Mountains were routinely trespassing on Ute lands, and the following year the federal government — under pressure from territorial leaders demanding access to the region’s “large bodies of mineral and agricultural resources” — pushed the Utes to cede a 3.7-million-acre area surrounding the San Juans in what was known as the Brunot Agreement.
So began the Colorado Territory’s next major mining boom, and the first to be concerned principally with silver — the extraction and minting of which would dominate the soon-to-be state’s economy and politics for the next several decades.
By 1876, fortune seekers could reach the San Juans by taking the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad to Cañon City, and from there traveling on grueling mountain toll roads to mining settlements like Ouray, Silverton and Lake City. In late January 1876, the Silver World of Lake City advised that despite “the unusual quantity of snow,” the wagon road that passed through Saguache was manageable with sleighs, but the more southerly route through Del Norte was “almost impassable.”
The silver rush had helped revive the fortunes of southern Colorado, turning towns like Pueblo and Cañon City, where residents had long felt ignored by the territory’s northern establishment, into important transportation and commercial hubs serving the remote San Juan mining district.
Other Front Range towns, including Colorado Springs, regretted “the outflow of men consequent upon the San Juan and other mining excitements.” A gold rush to the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory was also underway at the time — another treaty-breaking incursion into Native American lands, which would soon lead to a war with the Lakota people and the Battle of Little Bighorn later in 1876.
The San Juan mines, wrote the Silver World, required “earnest, energetic men … who can submit to the deprivation of the luxuries of a higher civilization.” The paper’s weekly editions from the winter of 1876 contained few reports of serious crime, though the threat of “snowslides,” frostbite and mountain lions were often mentioned.
But by then the region’s boomtowns were beginning to evolve from rough-and-ready mining camps into something more established — incorporating municipal governments, forming school districts and issuing bonds for the construction of new wagon roads and other public improvements. Ordinances approved by Lake City’s new board of trustees included a schedule of fines levied for misdemeanors, published in the Silver World on Jan. 15.
“Read the ordinances which appear in this issue,” the paper’s editors advised, “and save yourself the possibility of being fined or getting in the ‘jug.’”
Public intoxication or animal cruelty could cost an offender up to $50, while the penalty for impersonating a police officer or “immoderately” riding or driving horses on town streets could run up to $100. To “quarrel in a boisterous manner” was considered a breach of the peace and carried a fine of between $5 and $25.
Arriving in Denver for the meeting of the territorial Legislature in January, Rep. Reuben J. McNutt of Silverton had brought a petition from his fellow settlers for the creation of a new county encompassing the western San Juan boomtowns. The Legislature soon passed House Bill No. 1, and Gov. John Routt signed it into law on Jan. 31, officially creating the new San Juan County, from which the present-day counties of Ouray, San Miguel and Dolores would later be carved out.
Alongside these administrative necessities, some inhabitants of the remote mining towns aimed for the cultural betterment of settlements like Lake City, where the Silver World reported billiards were still the “principal amusement.” The Lake City Dramatic Club staged its first theater production on Feb. 2, 1876, performing George Melville Baker’s “Among the Breakers,” and the cast of amateurs won a rave review from the local paper.
“The universal testimony of all who witnessed it was that it would have been difficult for professionals to have surpassed it,” declared the Silver World. “The play was in all respect (was) well mounted and in no instance were there any of those hitches so common in entertainments of this nature, and which tend alike to embarrass the performers and distract the attention of the audience.”
The gradual dispossession of Ute lands in western Colorado would not end with the Brunot Agreement and the rush to the San Juans. The so-called northern or White River Utes were expelled from Colorado beginning in 1880, and today reside on the Uinta and Ouray Indian Reservation in Utah. Three other bands of the tribe grouped together as the southern Utes — the Capote, Mouache, and Weenuche — agreed in 1878 to cede all but a small portion of their lands in far southwest Colorado along the New Mexico border.
The southern Utes later split into the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, consisting of the Capote and Mouache bands, and Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, made up of the Weenuche band. Today, the Southern Ute and the Ute Mountain Ute are the only two federally-recognized tribes within Colorado’s borders.
