From inside the dustcover:
As rivers go, the South Platte Trail is poorly arranged—often shallow, sprawling into undisciplined streams and muddy channels, but it was a major source of water for migrants from the east: first buffalo, then Indians, then whites. And, along its southern bank a major trail developed in the 1850s and 1860s.
The Cheyennes and Arapahoes, following the bison, came first, some time in the first or second quarter of the nineteenth century. Fur traders arrived soon afterwards, the first of many whites moving into eastern Colorado to explore, hunt, mine, farm, and trade. Increasing migration set the stage for conflict, and the concentration of activity along the South Platte trail made it a focus of hostilities in the high plains region during the Indian war of the 1860s, until the coming of the Union Pacific Railroad ended the usefulness of this primitive thoroughfare.
Drawing on fragments of report and legend, journals and correspondence of explorers, settlers and military men, newspaper accounts, and the early work of the Cheyenne-historian, George Bent. Doris Monahan constructs, in this story of the South Platte trail, a history of eastern Colorado during the mid-nineteenth century.
Through the personalities and events involved in the growth of trade, the spread of settlements, the Indian and white attacks and retaliations, Monahan traces the development and eventual demise of a route that brought into focus the dramatic conflicts of America’s move west. |
