Westward Expansion Preview

Westward Expansion Tour Route

The Trappers Trail

The Trappers’ Trail passed close to present day Centennial Village Museum. During the fur-trade era (1820-1846), it extended 425 miles north and south along the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains.The trail connected a string of trading forts between Fort Laramie on the North Platte River in what is now Wyoming, and Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas River in southern Colorado.Trappers and traders used the route to move quickly between the two forts, maintaining the brisk trade in buffalo hides and beaver pelts for goods brought from the east, specifically for their native clients.Little remains today of the trappers trail in Weld County. It is largely a dry creek bed just east of modern day Greeley following the north-south course of Cow Creek.

The Goodnight-Loving Trail

By the end of the Civil War, America had developed a taste for beef. Texas, largely abandoned by ranchers fighting for the confederacy, had a population of free-roaming wild cattle numbering in the thousands and grazing unclaimed.Charles Goodnight and his partner, Oliver Loving, who had been supplying the confederate army with beef, found themselves bankrupt as the confederate money they were paid was completely worthless following the Union victory of April 9th, 1865.Uniting their efforts once more, Goodnight and Loving rounded up a mixed herd of what was called “mustang cattle” and a troop of colorful drifters called “cowboys” and successfully drove cattle from Texas to New Mexico, and then north from Colorado to Wyoming, making a tidy profit at each military post along the way.In 1869 the Goodnight-Loving Trail cut through what only a year later would become Greeley, Colorado. Originating in central Texas, crossing the staked-plains and swinging north through New Mexico to Raton pass and into Colorado, the trail was fraught with bad water, parched deserts and hostile Indians.

Chuckwagon

Overland Forge

Monfort House

Stagecoach

The profit from stage lines was not from passenger’s fairs of approximately $175 each, one way, including meals. The profit was from mail and bank contracts, which both had to be able to transfer communications and funds across the vast Western United States.Before the 1869 completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, a large number of “express companies” insured that mail, money, and people got where they needed to go. Companies like American Express, Wells Fargo and Butterfield and Company all started as express companies. Wells Fargo soon outstripped the competition, absorbing many of the other stage lines across the west. Stage lines connected the rail lines to settlements and stage stops not yet serviced by the railroad.Government contracts were paid to companies that could guarantee deliveries for the Postal Service. Successful companies were paid up to $600,000 annually to deliver the mail via stagecoach. Their goal was to travel from Missouri to California in 25 days or less, regardless of weather or other obstacles.

Windmill

Ditch No. 3

The Cherokee Trail

The first major gold strike of the West was at Sutter’s Mill, California in January 1848. That following year a wagon train bound from what is now Oklahoma, headed north through what would become Greeley; then north to the California/Oregon Trail in what is now Wyoming.At the head of this wagon train was a group of Cherokee Indians who were headed to California to seek their fortunes in the rush for gold. By the 1850s cattlemen, army surveyors, and pioneers used the established trail along the South Platte River into the Rocky Mountains and beyond to California.Today one can follow the remnants of the Cherokee Trail north from Greeley to Laporte, Colorado, then Northwest on Highway 287 to Laramie, Wyoming and finally west on Interstate 80 to California.

Settler's Camp

Appearing as an editorial in the New York Tribune in December of 1869, “A Western Colony,” penned by then agricultural editor, Nathan Meeker, called for enterprising citizens to apply for membership in the Union Colony of Colorado, a utopian agricultural community.After being selected by Meeker himself, each applicant paid a fee of $155 dollars and then selected lots of up to $50 in value which included up to 160 acres of farmable land.The colonists then made the journey by rail to start building the town and improving the bleak Colorado plains into an ideal community defined by the principles of cooperation, temperance, agriculture, education, faith and home and family as their core values.Depicted here are the typical conditions of those early days in 1870. Living in makeshift shelters and tents, the men employed themselves in constructing their town including homes, streets, and irrigation ditches. Meanwhile the women kept house and aspired to create a “home” similar to, or better than, what they had back east.

Buffalo Joe Filer's Shack

Granary

Rattlesnake Kate's House

Silo

Timberwork

Weld County Courthouse

Stone House