Railroad Population
Clovis points have been found in the South Park Basin, providing evidence of humans in the area dating back about 12,000 years.[1] These points refer to tools carved with a lance shaped tip and sharp edges that were attached to spear shafts and thought to be used as hunting tools. These archaeological markers have provided aid in identifying some of the region’s earliest inhabitants including the Utes, an Indigenous people of North America. The Utes and in particular a Ute tribe identified as the Tabeguache, or “People of the Sun Mountain” have lived seasonally in the area since the 14th or 15th century. Other Indigenous plains tribes that were known to come to hunt in the South Park basin include the Arapaho, Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne.[2]
As an increasing number of European-American settlers arrived in the area, the Indigenous tribes were driven out through United States federal government-brokered treaties such as “the Treaty of Fort Wise in 1861” which removed the Arapaho and in 1864. Congress also approved a treaty with the Utes that handed over the rights of all land east of the Continental Divide in Colorado to the federal government.[3] This treaty ended the ‘Indian Wars’ in eastern Colorado and mandated the removal of Indigenous peoples. This cleared a path for European-American settlers to establish presumably safer wagon trails across the plains at the expense of those who had originally settled the land.[4] The population of Bison was one of the original reasons that the area known today as South Park was home to many indigenous tribes. Because of this, the government encouraged the new settlers to kill these animals in order to accelerate the removal of the indigenous peoples. “In 1897 the last wild bison in Colorado were killed in South Park.”[5]