Destination Denver City: The South Platte Trail Book

Historian Merrill Mattes writes about Destination: Denver City, The South Platte Trail: "Doris Monahan's book will stand as the definitive scholarly work on The South Platte Trail...Her sweep of narrative is relieved by flashes of humor and rapport with the little tragedies and ironies of frontier existence." The story of northeastern Colorado in the 1860s has never been fully told. Buried under a century of legend, it has been distorted, embellished, exaggerated, or simply ignored. It deserves better treatment. Where else can you find, packed into one ten-year period, a gold rush, covered wagons, stagecoaches, and an Indian war? The seeds for the Indian war of the 1860s were sown and nurtured in northeastern Colorado, and climactic events occurred there. These have been overlooked in many accounts of the war because of an emphasis on the Massacre of Sand Creek in southern Colorado; but the revenge exacted by red men in the northeastern section was equally dramatic. The whole story has a momentum and inevitability that made it seem necessary to be more fully revealed. The Cheyenne and Arapahoe, 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. I construct, in this story of the South Platte trail, a history of eastern Colorado during the mid-nineteenth century. Doris Monahan