Copyright 2015 by Thomas G. Andrews
All rights reserved
Jacket design: Tim Jones
Jacket image: 2006 Erik Stensland
978-0-674-08857-3 (hardcover)
978-0-674-49535-7 (EPUB)
978-0-674-49534-0 (MOBI)
The Library of Congress has catalogued the printed edition of this book as follows:
Andrews, Thomas G., 1972
Coyote Valley : deep history in the high Rockies / Thomas G. Andrews.First edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Rocky Mountain National Park (Colo.)History. 2. Indians of North AmericaColoradoKawuneeche ValleyHistory. 3. Frontier and pioneer lifeColoradoKawuneeche Valley. 4. TourismEnvironmental aspectsColoradoRocky Mountain National Park. 5. NatureEffect of human beings onColoradoRocky Mountain National Park. I. Title. II. Title: Deep history in the high Rockies.
F782.R59A54 2015
978.8'69dc23
2015009840
FIGURES
A glacial valley
Scenes in the Life of a Trapper
Coloradothe Late Ute Outbreak and Massacre at the White River Agency
Wanzits, or Antelope
A Nuche delegation to Denver
Reducing the U.S. Army Again
Lulu City
The Grand Ditch
Harbison Ranch: Plowing in the Meadow
The Harbison family
Enos Mills
Dedication of Rocky Mountain National Park
Early tourists at Lake Irene
Planting Fish in Glacier Creek
Fall River Road at Big Drift
Fall River Road: Clearing for New Road
The Grand Ditch scar
Dude ranch visions
Holzwarth Living History Museum
Fishing in the Beaver Dams of the Colorado River
Bull elk, Kawuneeche Valley
Bull moose, Kawuneeche Valley
Mountain pine beetle and elk herd
MAPS
The Ice Age Valley
Settlement landscapes
Park expansion, 19302013
WHAT IF you were to take one small stretch of soil and explore the story of people and nature there over as long a span of time as the scientific and historical evidence would allow? What could you learn about that placeand what, in turn, could that tiny corner of the earth reveal about broader patterns of human-environment interaction across time and space? From Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold to William Cronon and Terry Tempest Williams, this exercise of attending closely to little pieces of the planet has propelled nature writers, environmental historians, and kindred spirits to produce microhistories of place that fulfill William Blakes injunction to see a world in a grain of sand.
In recent decades, though, scholars have increasingly treated small-scale investigations as pass, implicitly rebuking them as too parochial to shed much light on the urgent global predicaments confronting humanity. Historians in particular have dramatically expanded the scales on which their analyses unfold. Big history, transnational history, global history, and planetary history: since the 1980s, these buzzwords and the trends they signify have reshaped our understanding of the past by exposing the ligatures and interconnections that bind seemingly disparate peoples, places, and processes into larger patterns of change. Given the stunning insights that these broader-scale approaches are generating, it may seem quaint to devote an entire book to a tiny, seemingly insignificant speck of the globe. I want to convince you, however, that attending to small places remains not just worthwhile, but more important than
Coyote Valley relates the story of people, nature, and history in one little-known place from its emergence in the last Ice Agean epoch geologists have long known as the Pleistocenethrough the Anthropocenethe current era in which skyrocketing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the earths atmosphere are posing potentially catastrophic threats to our planets climate, ecology, and human populations. The central character throughout these pages is not a person or group of people, nor is it an institution, an idea, or a process. Instead, this book tells the tale of the Kawuneeche Valley, a small, high trough perched just below the source of the Colorado River on the western side of Rocky Mountain National Park, about a hundred-mile drive northwest of Denver.
For millennia, this wondrous but formidable stretch of the Colorado high country has figured as a place of vital importance to small and mostly transitory groups of people who have left few archaeological or historical vestiges. But there is more to this place than meets the eye, as the stories behind two of the many names this part of the Rockies has borne over the eons suggest. In 1921, the U.S. Congress bestowed a new moniker on the magisterial stream that coalesces at the valleys head: the Colorado River. When American explorers and settlers first penetrated the Rocky Mountains in the early 1800s, they borrowed place names from the French-speaking fur trappers who preceded them. The newcomers called the lake at the Kawuneeches southern edge Grand Lake, after the French grand or big. Thereafter, the stream that flowed out of the lake and beat a swooping path toward the Gulf of California became known as the Grand River. When miners and homesteaders first began to push northward from Grand Lake into the valley above, they christened the stream that snaked along its floor the North Fork of the Grand.
Colorado representative Edward Taylor revolutionized the way his fellow Americans thought about how water coursedand thus how power flowedin the arid interior of the western United States by convincing his colleagues in Washington to forever banish the Grand River from the American map and extend the Colorado River all the way to the head of the Kawuneeche Valley. For many decades, American car
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the Colorados descent from the Kawuneeche through the canyons of the Colorado Plateau and across the southwestern deserts to the Gulf of California might seem to offer a perfect metaphor for the ecological fall from grace resulting from the American conquest of the arid West. Environmentalists, scientists, rafters, writers, and many others have spent more than half a century lamenting the once-wild Colorados domestication and defilement. At first glance, this narrative of environmental decline appears to map remarkably well on to the rivers actual course. At its source, the Colorado rages strong and unchecked through the Kawuneeche, a valley that strikes most visitors as a timeless wilderness: a place unsullied by human hands and maintained in its primeval state by the U.S. National Park Service. After reaching Grand Lake, though, the Colorado begins to veer downhill rapidlyfiguratively as well as literally. The river, many critics contend, has been reduced to a mere instrument of human will. Dammed up, siphoned off, and frittered into oblivion, this wellspring of the runaway development that has enveloped so much of the western landscape seems to embody a tragic story in which we squandered the lands Edenic promise.
