Community and Conflict

Community and Conflict. . , Ancestral Puebloans, Beginning around A.D. 600, Ancestral Puebloans built Colorado's first permanent towns in the canyon country south of here. Hundreds of these settlements sprawled across the desert, with an overall population possibly greater than the region holds today. Two of the larger communities, known to us as Yellow Jacket and Lowry Pueblos, lodged several hundred souls apiece. The residents lived in great houseblocks with scores of rooms, stored their food in stone granaries, built small dams and reservoirs for water storage, and raised corn, beans, and squash in terraced plots. After prospering for hundreds of years, these ancestral peoples left their homes for a variety of reasons, including climatic changes, increased warfare, and social upheavals. By 1300 they had left these extraordinary communities empty and silent., Beaver Creek Massacre, Anglo-Ute [relations?] in Colorado reached a low point on June 19, 1885, when a group of cowboys ambushed a peaceful Ute camp on Beaver Creek [illegible] miles southeast of here. Racial tensions had never [illegible] after a bloody 1879 conflict at the Ute agency in northeastern Colorado ever since, "The Utes must go" had been a [illegible] white settlers. The cowboys who attacked the Beaver Creek camp took this slogan quite literally, murdering at least six and perhaps as many as ten people, women and children among them. The Utes retaliated by killing a white rancher, and [illegible] followed, only the mediation of Indian [illegible] prevented [illegible]. But there [illegible]. The Utes had [illegible] but the far [illegible] of Colorado., [Photos and their captions are illegible, except for bottom right caption, which reads] , Unidentified Utes, 1880. The cowboys involved in the Beaver Creek Massacre had vowed to kill any Indian found off the reservation. Yet, the Utes murdered that morning had official permission to hunt in this area in order to supplement their meager government rations.