A major objective of the Bureau of Land Management, Department of the Interior, is to preserve and/or scientifically study cultural resources, including prehistoric, historic sites and values. This study concerns historic sites and values on National Resource Lands in Colorado. Originally derived from a study that was an integral part of the Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) Cultural Resource Program, this report provides a baseline narrative for the history of BLM's Craig District.

The chronicle of Fray Francisco Atanasio Domínguez's remarkable 1776 expedition through the Rocky Mountains, the eastern Great Basin, and the Colorado Plateau to inventory new lands for the Spanish crown....

Father Escalante, who was born in Treceno, Cantabria, Spain around 1750, became a Franciscan in the Convento Grande in Mexico City at the age of 17. In 1774, he came to present-day New Mexico in the Mexican province. He was first stationed at Laguna pueblo and then in January 1775 assigned as a minister to the Zuni. In June 1776, he was summoned by Fray Francisco Atanasio Dominguez, who had arrived in Santa Fe on March 22, 1776, for the expedition to California and remained in New Mexico for two years following the expedition. Father Escalante died at the age of 30 in April 1780 in Parral, Mexico, during his return journey to Mexico City for medical treatment. Author Herbert Eugene Bolton, who was well-known for his books on the Southwest and Spanish Americas, here recounts in detail the story of Father Silvestre Velez de Escalante on his expedition to the Interior Basin in 1776. Bolton also includes translations of Father Escalante’s expedition itinerary and personal journal, in which Escalante described the expeditions he went on. He also includes a translation Bernardo Miera y Pacheco’s report to the King of Spain dated October 26, 1777, as well as two maps. “This dynamic story of Father Escalante’s trek into the Great Basin, by Dr. Herbert E. Bolton, represents the results of a long lifetime of interest, writing, and exploration in Spanish activities in the great Southwest.”—Preface

After the Civil War, four geological and geographical surveys, later called the Great Surveys, Undertook the massive task of finding out what lay west of the hundredth meridian in the vast American wilderness. Parties led by Ferdinand Vandiveer Hayden, medical doctor turned geologist, Clarence King, aristocrat and intellectual, John Wesley Powell, conqueror of the Colorado River, and Lieutenant George M. Wheeler, determined military man and scientist, roamed over the wild country during the years 1867-79, observing, analyzing, mapping, and at the end of each season, returning to Washington to publish their results. For the first time in book form, Richard A. Bartlett has recreated for the reader the hardships, both physical and financial, the discoveries, and the high adventures of the bold, headstrong, and often brilliant men of the Great Surveys as they climbed the Rockies, explored the Yellowstone, or battled the Colorado.

In 1879 a small band of Ute Indians went wild in the Colorado Rockies and ambushed a force of soldiers, murdered their Indian agent and his employees, and took three women hostage. This was the Massacre at White River, and its consequences included the removal of the Ute tribe to barren lands, while the western slope of Colorado was opened to white settlement.