1. THE ARAPAHO CAMP

Palefaces pouring into Colorado in 1858-59 were greeted—in English—by Arapaho camped along the base of what that tribe called "the shining mountains." Chiefs Little Raven and Left Hand welcomed "the spider people" with a generosity that they later regretted.

Long before Denver began, the Arapaho had been camping along Cherry Creek near its junction with the South Platte. They named the creek for its wild choke cherry bushes. French traders and trappers, whom the Arapaho also befriended, baptized the Platte River with their word for shallow or flat.

The Arapaho fondness for Cherry Creek led the St. Louis fur trader, Auguste P. Chouteau, to host a trading camp on the creek in 1815. Forty-five mountain men attended the rendezvous to trade directly with the Indians. Another St. Louis fur trader, Louis Vasquez, built a cottonwood-log fort in 1832 near the confluence of the South Platte and Clear Creek, which was originally called Vasquez Creek in his honor. At this short-lived fort, in what is now suburban Adams County, Vasquez traded with the Arapaho and other tribes for buffalo robes, beaver pelts and wild horses. Louis also built the better known and longer lived adobe Fort Vasquez about 40 miles downstream on the South Platte at Platteville, now reconstructed and operated as a museum by the Colorado Historical Society.

Of the tribe on the site of Denver, little but the name remains. The name "Arapaho" may be derived from the Pawnee word meaning "buyer" or "trader." The Arapaho called themselves "bison path people" or "our people." The earliest known use of the name Arapaho comes from John Bradbury, the English naturalist, who wrote of "Arapahays" robbing fur traders around 1810.

During the 1840s and 1850s, as many as 1,500 Arapaho camped on the future site of Denver. This small tribe of Plains Indians with their light skin and prominent noses, were also known as the "Tattooed People." After scratching their breasts with a yucca leaf needle, they rubbed wood ashes into the wound to make an indelible chest tattoo.

The Arapaho, part of the Algonquin family, once lived in the Great Lakes area. They were pushed west by other tribes, who were retreating from advancing whites. After crossing the Missouri River, the tribe split. The northern Arapaho headed for what would become Wyoming, the Southern Arapaho for Colorado. Around 1750, the Arapaho reached the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains. The Utes, Colorado’s ancient mountain tribe, resisted Arapaho expeditions into the high country. So it was in eastern Colorado that the Southern Arapaho would make their last stand.

As one of the smaller plains tribes, the Arapaho found it wise to befriend rather than to fight larger tribes such as the Sioux and the Cheyenne. The Arapaho did take on the Utes, a small tribe with a different language and roots. The Utes, a Shoshonean people, are physically shorter, darker and stockier than the Plains Indians. The Arapaho, believing themselves much better looking, claimed that the Utes raided Arapaho villages and kidnapped Arapaho women in hopes of improving the tribe’s appearance.

The Arapaho called whites "spider people." Too late the Arapaho realized the significance of the web of roads, survey lines, and fences with which palefaces were measuring and seizing the land. At first, the Indians welcomed the palefaced gold seekers trespassing on what the federal government recognized as Arapaho land in the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty. That treaty promised to the Arapaho and their allies the Southern Cheyenne the territory between the Platte and the Arkansas rivers at the eastern base of the Rockies. Seven years later that treaty promise was undone by the discovery of gold in the sands of Cherry Creek and the South Platte.

A tattered assortment of mountain men, prospectors, town promoters, and gamblers rushed to the frontier crossroads at the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains, confident that the creator had endowed a future metropolis with unlimited riches of the earth. The Arapaho chief Little Raven entertained newcomers in his own handsomely decorated tipi and visited with them in their strange square houses.

The Blue Brothers

Arapaho acceptance of the argonauts flooding into Denver after 1858 is well illustrated by the saga of the Blue brothers. The Blues and a few others made the mistake of leaving the Platte River road for a shortcut into Denver. When Daniel and his two brothers ran out of food and water, they survived only by cannibalism. An Arapaho found Daniel, the sole survivor, and took him into his tipi to nurse the lost, starving goldseeker back to physical and mental health. The Arapaho then took him to Denver, where he reported in his statement of May 12, 1859:

"Alexander, my eldest brother, died, and at his own last request, we used a portion of his body as food on the spot, and with the balance resumed our journey towards the gold regions. We succeeded in traveling but ten miles, when my younger brother, Charles, gave out, and we were obliged to stop. For ten days we subsisted on what remained of our brother’s body, when Charles expired from the same cause as the others. I also consumed the greater portion of his remains, when I was found by an Arapaho Indian, and carried to his lodge, treated with great kindness, and a day and a half thereafter brought to ...Denver City."

General William Larimer, Jr.

Townsfolk raised a collection to send Daniel Blue back to Illinois to tell his family the terrible truth. Unlike Blue, most ‘59ers arrived safely at the frontier crossroads that proclaimed itself to be Denver City. General William Larimer, Jr. founded the upstart "city" by crossing cottonwood sticks at the center of a square mile town plat on November 22, 1858. Larimer chose the east side of Cherry Creek because it was higher ground and on the more accessible side of the Cherry Creek and South Platte River trails. Larimer named the newborn metropolis for James W. Denver, governor of Kansas Territory, to help ensure that it would be chosen as the county seat of what was then Arapaho County, Kansas Territory.

In a letter to the wife and nine children whom he had left behind in Kansas, Larimer boasted that: "It is well the Pilgrims landed upon Plymouth Rock and settled up that country before they saw this one or that would now remain unsettled. Everyone will soon be flocking to Denver for the most picturesque country in the world, with fine air, good water, and everything to make man happy and live to a good old age."

Larimer fancied calling himself "General" after capturing that title in the Pennsylvania State Militia. The "general" did not discover gold or found the first town at the confluence of Cherry Creek and the South Platte. He had merely followed the Russell party, which first discovered gold and platted the original settlement—Auraria on November 1, 1858. William Green Russell and his group of Georgians headed back to the South to join the Confederate Army. Larimer, the claim jumper, proclaimed himself Denver’s founding father. Without false (or true) modesty, Larimer boasted "I Am Denver City."

Arapaho County and Arapahoe City

Larimer and other leaders named the huge surrounding area, stretching from the Front Range of the Rockies to the Kansas border, for its rightful owners—the Arapaho. Arapaho County, Kansas Territory also contained an early town called Arapaho.

It originated in the autumn of 1858 when Marshall Cook’s party of soldiers pushed a few miles beyond Auraria to the base of Table Mountain and founded on November 29, 1858 a winter camp they called Arapahoe City. They were joined by the Arapaho Chief Left Hand (Niwot), who spoke English well. He told Cook that he hoped "to clear up the mystery of how their white intruders obtained their bread by the sweat of their brow, while the redman alone procured his meat by the chase."

Mexican Diggings

Arapaho, like many other would-be "cities," quickly shriveled and died. So did Mexican Diggings on the South Platte River about where Overland Park now stands in Denver. This 1857 gold camp of pioneer Mexican miners was dismissed by Anglo "discoverers" a year later. These Yankee newcomers ignored the camp’s original name and its Hispanic origins.

Mexican Diggings is mentioned by Jerome Smiley in his History of Denver. Smiley reported that John Simpson Smith, a mountain man who married into the Cheyenne tribe, was already there when Denver’s "founders" arrived. As Smiley put it, "Smith, in company with some Mexicans had, in the summer of 1857, discovered and taken out considerable gold at a place on the Platte River, about three miles above the mouth of Cherry Creek. The spot thus became known in the local annals, as ‘the Mexican Diggings’ — or, by some, as `the Spanish Diggings.’"

Uncle Dick Wootton, another pioneer of 1858, pointed out in his autobiography, that "the old Spanish mine on the Platte River... probably brought gold hunters to the point originally." These 1857 digs along the banks of the South Platte near today’s South Santa Fe Drive and West Alameda Avenue predated both the October 30, 1858 founding of Auraria by the Russell brothers and the November 22, 1858 founding of Denver City by General William H. Larimer, Jr., and company.

Like the Arapaho camp, Mexican Diggings has largely disappeared from historical records. The Mexican pioneers and their original gold strike have been overlooked by English-speaking settlers. Not only were these Hispanic roots buried, but the City of Denver passed ordinances outlawing construction with adobe bricks. By restricting the size of bricks to 8 1/4 x 4 1/4 x 2 1/4 and requiring that all bricks be kiln—fired, Denver kept adobe-dwelling Mexicans from feeling at home.

Besides Mexican Diggings, another early rival—Auraria—was absorbed by Denver City. General Larimer’s colleague, Richard E. Whitsitt, the first president of the Denver City Town Company, proclaimed Denver’s victory over Russell’s town of Auraria in a May 16, 1859, letter to Daniel Witter: "Them Southern desperados from Georgia that located their city on the west side of Cherry Creek have reached the end of their rope. They have lied about our town-site and traduced its obvious merits wherever they had a chance to wag a tongue or write a letter. But their doom is sealed already and Denver is the city of the present and the future."

The rival towns on Cherry Creek were finally brought together by an outside threat—from Golden City, which aspired to become the territorial capital and economic hub. "Countermeasures of consolidation and more congenial relationships between Denver and Auraria are not only our alternative," Larimer reported, "but an absolute necessity for the survival of all." Auraria was absorbed in a moonlight ceremony on the Larimer Street bridge over Cherry Creek on April 6, 1860. Denver had gobbled up its first great rival.

General Larimer had predicted as much in a November 18, 1858, letter to the mayor of Leavenworth, Kansas Territory: "Denver City is situated at the mouth of Cherry Creek where it forms its confluence with the South Platte. This is the point where the Santa Fe and New Mexico Road crosses to Fort Laramie and Fort Bridger, also the great leading road from the Missouri River; in short, it is the center of all the great leading thoroughfares and is bound to be a great city."

Despite the bluster of town founders, Denver City was a long shot. It lay hundreds of miles from Santa Fe, Omaha, Salt Lake City, or any other sizable city. Not until the struggling hamlet actually became a city did Denverites feel secure enough to drop the word "city" from the town’s official title.

Realizing that his town had to have connections to the outside world to survive, Larimer bribed the Leavenworth and Pike’s Peak Stage Company with fifty-three town lots to make Denver its Rocky Mountain headquarters. The first stagecoaches, traveling in pairs for safety, arrived May 7, 1859.

The hallmark of any viable western city was a newspaper and William Byers wasted no time establishing his Rocky Mountain News. Diplomatically, he located his newspaper in the middle of Cherry Creek, straddling the line between the rival cities of Denver and Auraria so as not to impede sales to either community. The Arapaho shook their heads when Byers and other whites began building Denver City, a town of shacks and shanties in and around the sandy creek bottoms.

Sooner or later, the Arapaho warned, the creek would rise and sweep away anything in its path. Byers and other town builders just laughed—and kept on building. When the editor and his newspaper office were washed away in the flood of 1864, he barely escaped with his life. The News managed to keep above water after that by retreating to higher ground in Denver City.

Little Raven

In the May 7, 1859 News, Byers allowed that: "Little Raven, the head chief of the Arapaho nation... is highly spoken of by those who know him.... Little Raven said he likes all the whites that he had anything to do with, and was glad to see so many here." Little Raven and the Arapaho, the News claimed, "are desirous of being instructed in agriculture, manufactures and the arts of peace to live in quiet with the whites and the surrounding tribes of Indians."

The Arapaho watched as some 100,000 gold seekers swarmed into Colorado Territory. Some Indians suggested that the East must now be empty of whites and perhaps the Arapaho should go there.

The argonauts’ welcome wore thin and there seemed to be some confusion as to who was visiting whom. Byers’ Rocky Mountain News, on May 14, 1859, reported: "Our city and vicinity has been visited recently by great numbers of the native population...coming in large numbers, erecting their lodges in our midst, they spend a few days and then move on to other hunting grounds." The same article recounted cordial visits from both Little Raven and Left Hand before the Arapaho bands departed "on a Buffalo hunt." Other newspaper accounts described in lurid detail the Arapaho war dances at their camp in Denver, long nights of dancing, singing, and celebrating the capture of Ute scalps.

Arapaho continued to camp in Denver during the early 1860s. Albert D. Richardson, in his book, Beyond the Mississippi, described his visit to an Arapaho village between Blake Street and the South Platte. There, in his words, "barbarism had thus far maintained its ground against the advancement of (nominal) civilization." Influenced perhaps by the cigar Little Raven gave him, Richardson called him "the nearest approximation I ever met to the Ideal Indian. He had a fine manly form and a human, trustworthy face." However, he quite accurately predicted that the Arapaho encampment would be crowded out before long.

William McGaa

The land, of course, belonged to the Native Americans, as recognized by the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty. This inconvenience led General Larimer to confer with William McGaa, a mountain man who had long camped on the banks of Cherry Creek. The story of William McGaa demonstrates how boosters banished less edifying characters in order to polish the city’s reputation.

For starters, McGaa was condemned as a "squaw man" for living with Indian women. Some Arapaho freely shared their women with whites (whites, however, charged for the sexual favors of their prostitutes).

McGaa claimed to be married into various Indian tribes and was willing, on behalf of his wives’ relatives, to convey the land to Larimer and other town-founders. To reward the Indians, McGaa supposedly asked that streets be named after his "wives"—Wewatta, Wazee, and Champa [Sioux for chokecherry] . McGaa further requested that a major street be named for himself and another for his ancestral castle in Scotland, Glenarm Place.

One of McGaa’s wives, according to Jerome Smiley, was a handsome high-cheeked, half-breed who wore fine, frilly, flower-bedecked Victorian dresses and dressed her black hair in stylish curls. Smiley thought less highly of McGaa himself: "McGaa had promised more than he could perform, was a troublesome customer to manage, and a hard man to browbeat." When McGaa refused to improve his Denver City lots, his rights to them were revoked.

McGaa, according to Reminiscences of General William H. Larimer and of His Son William H.H. Larimer, boasted of being the son of the Lord Mayor of London. McGaa was Denver’s first great story teller according to the younger Larimer, who fancied McGaa’s tale of why the Arapaho had fled the "Bad Lands" when they became "entirely destitute and barren of every living thing, both vegetable and animal." Furthermore the bad lands were "inhabited by a race of tiny people not more than eighteen inches high." McGaa claimed to have seen not only the Lilliputian Indians but "the ruins of villages and towns...in perfect state of petrification." He said he saw large pine trees "with the limbs and branches turned to stone, and among them deer that were petrified in the very act of running and looked as natural as the living."

Perhaps McGaa, in a drunken fantasy, had imagined Leprechauns on the High Plains. Or perhaps he was retelling some Arapaho folktale which belittled their enemies. The petrified towns are possibly inspired by abandoned Anasazi sites in western Colorado.

McGaa is mentioned in John White’s book, Sketches from America, after White reported that "by some lucky chance" he found McGaa in Denver one Sunday "in a state approaching sobriety." White began an interview, but McGaa kept "throwing such longing looks toward the bar" that White finally obliged him.

Following the custom of the day, the bartender set in front of McGaa an empty tumbler, a tumbler of water, and a whiskey bottle. McGaa, White reported, "did not trouble the water at all." The furry-tongued McGaa poured forth tales of the great city he had founded, showing, White assured his British readers, "what manner of man in reality are [James Fenimore] Cooper’s idealized ‘Pathfinders.’" McGaa, the original resident and promoter of Denver, fathered the first partly white child born here and built Auraria’s first cabin.

This town founder became an embarrassment to respectable pioneers. In 1866, the Denver City Council renamed McGaa Street as Holladay Street, in honor of the man who brought the Holladay Stage line to town. McGaa, the unworthy tosspot, was banished from the ranks of the founding fathers. His presence—and that of his half-Indian wife and children—in the Denver Pantheon of pioneer heroes might sully the reputations of other noble white male founders, whom future generations were expected to celebrate.

McGaa Street fared no better as Holladay Street. By 1880, this thoroughfare accommodated the most notorious red light district in the Rockies. At the request of the Holladay family, the name was changed in 1887 to Market Street—a fitting name for a street where an estimated 1,000 prostitutes marketed their wares in brothel windows with signs such as, "Men Taken in and Done for." Reputable businesses and residents on Market above Twenty-Third Street and below Cherry Creek demanded that those parts of Market be called Walnut Street, which they are to this day.

The Sand Creek Massacre

General Larimer left before Indian wars troubled early Denver. Like many other boosters, Larimer’s loyalties were transferable. When Denverites failed to elect him mayor or territorial representative and President Abraham Lincoln refused to appoint him territorial governor, Larimer soured on his promised land. He returned to Kansas, denouncing Denver’s "lack of comforts."

Friendly relations deteriorated when many Arapaho refused to sign the Fort Wise Treaty of 1861 which expelled them from their homeland in the Cherry Creek and South Platte valleys. Indian agent William Bent, a founder of Bent’s Fort, resigned rather than participate in this treaty which confined the Arapaho to a much smaller, more arid tract of southeastern Colorado north of the Arkansas River around an intermittent stream called Sand Creek. Arapaho chiefs later claimed they were tricked by the treaty that brought them to what they called "no water land."

Albert G. Boone, a grandson of Daniel Boone, succeeded Bent and negotiated the Treaty of Fort Wise, sometimes called Boone’s Treaty. Little Raven, along with three other Arapaho chiefs—Storm, Shave-Head and Big Mouth, signed the treaty although other Arapaho refused. Boone reported that some Southern Arapaho on the Sand Creek reservation were "an indolent community" who are "great lovers of whiskey [and] very licentious, they worship the Sun Earth and smoke and swear by the pipe." Unusually close friendship with the whites had left the Arapaho ravaged by alcoholism and diseases.

The 1862 Indian census counted 720 Northern Arapaho and 1,500 Southern Arapaho. Many of the southerners had left Sand Creek because they were never given the promised agricultural tools and training, or even enough water to farm. Facing starvation, they hunted buffalo and other game—on and off the reservation.

When they could not find wild game the Arapaho sometimes pursued the white man’s cows. At the Van Wormer ranch thirty-five miles east of Denver, the Arapaho stole several head of cattle, horses, and some of the rancher’s personal goods. This was the beginning of a number of incidents involving either the Arapaho or their allies, the Cheyenne.

The most famous incident was the "Hungate Massacre" in 1864, again at the Van Wormer ranch where Ward Hungate was the ranch manager. Amid the burned ruins of the ranch, a rescue party found the two little girls with their throats cut so severely that they were nearly decapitated. Mrs. Hungate had been raped, stabbed, and scalped. Her husband had been shot numerous times, then horribly mutilated and scalped by rampaging Arapaho.

To further inflame public sentiment, the scalped and badly mutilated bodies of the Hungates were taken to Denver and put on public display. No better recruiting device could have been found for a local populace who already hated the Indians. Colonel John M. Chivington was in charge of the pursuit of the renegades. Although the tribe was promised protection at a camp called Sand Creek, a few months later Chivington and his men massacred 163 Indians, mostly women and children. One woman, Kohiss, escaped with a baby at her breast. The babe on her back and a third child in her arms were killed. She lived on the Arapaho reservation in Oklahoma to the age of 104, showing battle scars and re-telling the sad story of Sand Creek.

Little Raven’s Lament

After the battle Chivington spent another week pursuing Little Raven and his band, but could not find them. Following Sand Creek, the surviving Arapaho were shoved out of Colorado and onto reservations in Wyoming and Oklahoma. Bemoaned Little Raven: "It will be a very hard thing to leave the country that God gave us....That fool band of soldiers cleared out our lodges, and killed our women and children.... There, at Sand Creek...Left Hand, White Antelope and many chiefs lie there, and our horses were taken from us there....Our friends are buried there, and we hate to leave these grounds...."

Arapaho no longer camped along the creek and river where they had welcomed the first Denverites. A few names survive as reminders of the Arapaho’s prouder days in Colorado. Much of modern metropolitan Denver lies within Arapahoe County, which was named for its earlier residents—a friendly tribe of Plains Indians who were soon swept rudely away.

After Sand Creek, Little Raven still steered his people toward peaceful coexistence with the whites. He represented the Arapaho at the 1865 Treaty of the Little Arkansas and the 1867 Medicine Lodge Treaty, where one newspaper wrote him off as a "fat, tiresome old man." Little Raven persistently argued that the Arapaho were peaceful and that disturbances were caused by other tribes. Invited to tour the east, he visited Boston, New York and Washington. He returned after a visit to the White House to tell his people that they did not need to raise corn after all. The Great White Father had a heap of money to help Indians and could always mint or print more. Little Raven remained the principal chief of the Southern Arapaho until his 1889 death, of natural causes on his tribe’s Oklahoma reservation.

In 1994 Little Raven Street opened between the 2100 block of 15th Street and Elitch Gardens on the banks of the Platte River, belatedly commemorating the hospitable Arapaho chief. On June 7, 1996 Tsistsis-Hinono’ei (Cheyenne/Arapaho) Park was dedicated at 9300 E. Iowa Avenue in Aurora with a stone monument at the entrance to the park reading "Dedicated to the Arapaho and Cheyenne Nations." Wildflowers frame this park which contains ceremonial Indian circles, red sandstone slabs inscribed with Indian memories and an abstract lodge pole and I-beam sculpture by an Indian artist. Belatedly, the Mile High City is celebrating the Arapaho camp in which it was born.

SOURCES:

Afton, Jean, David F. Halaas and Andrew E. Masich. Cheyenne Dog Soldiers A Ledgerbook History of Coups and Combat. Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1997. 400 p., index, bib., 110 color photos, maps, glossar, 12 x 9 hardcover, $49.95.

Blue, Daniel, "Statement of Daniel Blue, late of Clyde Township, Whiteside Co. Ill., made on the 12th day of May, 1859, at the office of the Leavenworth and Pike’s Peak Express Company, in the City of Denver," reprinted in The Colorado Magazine, VII (November, 1931), p.232-233.

Cassells, E. Steve. The Archaeology of Colorado. Boulder: Johnson Books, 1984.

Coel, Margaret. Chief Left Hand: Southern Arapaho. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981.

Conard, Howard Louis. "Uncle Dick" Wootton: The Pioneer Frontiersman of the Rocky Mountain Region... With an intro. by Major Joseph Kirkland. Chicago: W.E. Dibble, 1890.

Larimer, William Henry Harrison. Reminiscences of General William Larimer and of His Son William H.H. Larimer, Two of the Founders of Denver City. Comp. from letters and from notes written by the late William H.H. Larimer... by Herman S. Davis. Lancaster, Pa.: New Era Printing Co., 1918.

Smiley, Jerome Constant. History of Denver, with Outlines of the Earlier History of the Rocky Mountain Country. Denver: Denver Times, Times-Sun Pub. Co., 1901.

Spring, Agnes Wright. "Rush to the Rockies, 1859." Colorado Magazine, vol. 36, April, 1959, p. 97.

Trenholm, Virginia Cole. The Arapahoes, Our People. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970.

U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. Letters Received by the Office [later Bureau] of Indian Affairs, 1824-1881, Upper Arkansas Agency, 1855-1874., National Archives and Federal Records Center, Denver.

White, John. Sketches from America. London: Sampson, Low, Son and Marston, 1870.

NOTES:

. According to Donald Cultross Peattie, A Natural History of Western Trees (N.Y.: Bonanza Books, 1953), p. 540: "It takes an Indian to eat choke cherries with a straight face, but eat them the red men did, and probably still do, however unpalatable to pale-faces except as a sweetened preserve." Some Indian tribes, such as the Navaho, regarded the choke cherry as a sacred plant.

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