Meandering water defines us — then and now
By KEVIN DUGGAN
KevinDuggan@coloradoan.com
People have known and traveled along the Cache la Poudre River and its broad valley for thousands of years.
| Names along the Poudre
Bellvue: Named by residents of Pleasant Valley in 1882 in recognition of the beautiful view. The name also recognizes the influence of French Canadians who established LaPorte and likely named the Cache la Poudre River. Cameron Pass: Named for Gen. Robert A. Cameron, who played a key role in the settling of the Poudre Valley and discovered a pass through the Medicine Bow Mountains to North Park. Chambers Lake: Named in honor of Robert Chambers, a trapper who set up a camp near the lake in 1858 with his son, Robert Jr. Colona: The initial name for the area that would become LaPorte. Named for J.B. Colona, a companion of Antoine Janis, first white settler in the Poudre Valley. Fort Collins: The military fort was named in honor of Lt. Col. William O. Collins, commander of Fort Laramie. The town retained the named after the fort was closed. Greeley: Named for Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, whose vision for an agricultural community was followed in planning the town. Halligan Reservoir: Named for D. Monroe Halligan, a settler in the Lone Pine Creek area. Joe Wright Reservoir: Named for Joe Wright, a trapper who collected beaver pelts along the creek that also carries his name. LaPorte: French for gate or door, a reference to the area serving as a gateway to the mountains. French Canadian trappers initially settled in the area. Larimer County: Named in 1861 in honor of Gen. William Larimer, an early settler in Denver. The name for the county initially approved by the territorial legislature was LaPorte. Livermore: Derived from the names of Adolphus Livernash and Stephen Moore, early settlers in the north of the river. Pingree Hill and Park: Named for George W. Pingree, a trapper who built a cabin north of the river in 1860. He also as-sisted the railroad in obtaining lumber for railroad ties from the surrounding forest. Rustic: The origin is not clear, but it could be a reference to the condition of early lodgings in the area. Seaman Reservoir: Named for Milton Seaman, who was county assessor when the reservoir was built in 1911. Stove Prairie: According to local lore, an old camp stove was found in the area, hence the name. Ted’s Place: Named for Ted Herring, who bought the land in 1922 and established a landmark store. Herring was a state legislator and influential businessman. Timnath: Named by the Rev. Charles Taylor after a town mentioned in the Old Testament. Windsor: Named for a visiting Methodist minister from Fort Collins, the Rev. Samuel Asa Windsor. Weld County: Named for Lucius Weld, first secretary to the territorial legislature. |
Over the centuries, the river, which changes its face many times as it roars through a hard-rock canyon and then meanders across the plains, has meant countless things to the people who have lived near it.
Its water has been a source of life and destruction; it has provided recreational thrills and sparked human innovations that touched the country and the world.
The Poudre holds a unique place in history. Its presence is the reason the hundreds of thousands of people who live within its reach are here.
The river gets its name
Archaeological evidence indicates humans have inhabited the area that is now Northern Colorado for more than 10,000 years.
Attracted by the Poudre’s water and the animals and vegetation it supported, Paleo-Indians and their descendants hunted in the area, leaving behind stone tools and arrowheads as proof of their presence.
Examples include the Lindenmeier Site near the Wyoming border that dates to the time of Folsom man, and the 2,700-year-old Kaplan-Hoover bonebed near present-day Windsor, where the skeletal remain of more than 200 bison have been found.
The river would have been a natural travel route for ancient people, said local historian Wayne Sundberg, as well as for various tribes of Plains Indians who populated the region centuries later.
At the time the first people of European descent arrived on the Poudre in the early 1800s, prominent tribes in the area were the Arapaho, Cheyenne and elements of the Sioux. In the mountains where the river begins, the Ute held dominion.
What name the Indians used for the river is not known, Sundberg said. Also unclear is how the river received its French name, although the tale has been repeated often in books on local history.
There are numerous variations on a central legend: Traders (or sometimes trappers) on their way to a rendezvous on Green River in 1836 were caught in a fierce snowstorm near present day Pleas-ant Valley.
Unable to continue on in their wagons with the heavy load of supplies, the party decided to dig a hole and “cache” a large amount of gunpowder to keep it out of the hands of Indians and other traders. Hence the name Cache la Poudre — roughly “hide the powder” — was given to the river.
Legend has it that when the party returned, the powder was undisturbed. But many problems plague this account, Sundberg said.
“Apparently this is a completely fictitious story,” he said.
Traders (or trappers) were not likely to be traveling through the roadless West in wagons in winter. Also, a journalist traveling with Col. Henry Dodge wrote about passing a waterway called Cache la Poudre in 1835 — a year before the traders were supposedly trapped by the snowstorm.
Although the source of the name may never be known, it probably came from a French-speaker. Undocumented accounts have French-Canadian trappers living and working in Poudre Canyon in the early 1800s, Sundberg said.
Sundberg said his favorite version of how the river was named has two French-speaking trappers traveling on the river and facing an Indian attack. One turned to the other and shouted “cache la poudre.”
“That to me is an even more colorful story,” Sundberg said.
Early settlement
The first person to stake a land claim in the Poudre Valley was Antoine Janis, a trader of French heritage who was enthralled by the natural beauty of Pleasant Valley when he passed through in 1844.
In 1859, Janis and other traders established a settlement named Colona near present-day LaPorte The following year the settlement was moved a mile to the east and LaPorte was born.
LaPorte, which means “gate” or “door” in French, was named for its location as an entryway into the mountains and routes west. The inhabitants had hopes of capitalizing on the number of prospectors flooding the mountains in search of gold and the possibility that a railroad line would follow.
The town was laid out on 1,280 acres spanning both sides of the river and had a good crossing, roughly where present-day Overland Trail bridges the river. When Colorado Territory was organized in 1861, LaPorte was designated the seat of Larimer County.
A station for the Overland Stage Line was established in the flourishing town. From LaPorte, the route went north along the foothills through Livermore and Virginia Dale and into Wyoming.
In response to Indian attacks, the U.S. Army established a series of small military outposts to protect the route. One such facility, Camp Collins, was set up west of LaPorte along the river in 1862.
The camp was named in honor of Lt. Col. William O. Collins, commander of the Ohio Cavalry out of Fort Laramie. The facility, of which no trace remains, was short-lived. In 1864, it was heavily damaged in a flood.
Concerned about the potential for more flooding and the number of people living in LaPorte, Collins moved the camp about five miles east to a spot on the south side of the river. Fort Collins was born.
As a military installation, Fort Collins remained in place only three years. But the town that was born to support the fort remained, nourished by agriculture and industry made possible by water from the river.
Water rules the land
Early settlers in the Poudre Valley were easterners accustomed to wet conditions and abundant water. The dry, barren landscape away from the river’s edges was a surprise to many, Sundberg said.
“Other than little feeder streams and the river, there really wasn’t any water,” he said. “It was a hardscrabble life. It was a lot of work to establish your farm and find water for your crops.”
Settlers soon took to digging ditches to get water from the river to irrigate their fields. The first along the Poudre was the Yeager Ditch built in 1860. It and many more that followed were designed to divert water from the river, irrigate land a short distance away and return to the river.
Early ditches served one or two farms adjacent to the river. In time, farmers learned they could irrigate more distant fields by taking water from the river farther upstream. The drop in terrain and push of the river’s flow allowed the moving of water for miles.
Ditch systems quickly expanded. Homesteaders in the areas that would become Timnath and Windsor began raising abundant crops of vegetables and hay. In time, orchards and endless fields of sugar beets would appear.
The ditches were dug by hand and by teams of animals pulling plows. “We’re talking pickaxes and shovels,” said Brian Werner, spokesman for the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District and a river history buff. “It was a tremendous amount of work.”
In 1870, the Union Colony of Greeley was founded by Nathan Meeker, Robert Cameron and H.T. West as an agricultural community. The town was platted, and construction of the nine-mile long Ditch No. 3 for domestic and irrigation use began. The ditch proved to be inadequate, so the longer, wider Greeley Ditch No. 2 was begun.
Cooperative efforts by farmers to build ditches were the beginning of ditch and reservoir companies, which proliferated over the following decades and established a system of water distribution that remains in effect today.
Ditches off the Poudre also were being built and enlarged near Fort Collins, which became a town in 1873. As the region went into typical summer dry spells, farmers in Greeley came up short on water because the river was being drained upstream.
The issue came to a head in 1874, when Greeley officials went to court to seek an injunction against Fort Collins water users. A meeting between ditch operators from both towns failed to produce a settlement, but Fort Collins users did agree to allow more water to go downstream.
Out of that agreement came the foundation of what is known as the “Colorado System” for allocating water rights. The underlying principle of the system is the doctrine of prior appropriation, meaning the first in time to use water is the first in right to do so.
The doctrine also maintains that water should not be wasted. Those with the longest-held water rights are obliged to not take more than they need so water can be passed to users downstream.
After years of negotiation, legislation and legal decisions, the state developed a system for water allocation that includes a commissioner for each river basin who determines the amount of water shareholders may have in a given year and a court system to resolve disputes.
The system and variations on it were adopted throughout the West. “What happened here in the Poudre Valley was tremendously significant,” Werner said. “It wound up shaping the state Constitution and water law in 17 Western states.”
Capturing the flow
Poudre Valley settlers learned the river’s flow drops off as the summer progresses and mountain snows dissipate. Storing water became a priority and set off a flurry of dam and reservoir building even as more ditches were built to move water.
A dam was added to Chambers Lake, a natural lake in the upper Poudre Canyon, by the Larimer County Ditch Co. to increase its capacity. Officers of the company included Franklin Avery, founder of First National Bank and one of the early shapers of Fort Collins. The dam was finished in 1887.
On the plains, Terry Reservoir, now known as Terry Lake, was built in 1895 to store irrigation water. Other reservoirs built around the turn of the century were Douglas Reservoir and Cobb Lake.
Work to bring water from the other side of the Continental Divide began in 1890. The first trans-mountain diversion was the Skyline Ditch, which brought water destined for the Laramie River to Chambers Lake.
That was followed by Grand Ditch, which brought water from above the Colorado River to the Poudre through a portion of Rocky Mountain National Park. The ditch now empties into Long Draw Reservoir and carries about 20,000 acre feet of water a year.
Another major project was the Laramie-Poudre Tunnel, which carries Laramie River water directly to the Poudre. The tunnel, which is more than two miles long and goes through Green Moun-tain, carried its first water in 1914.
All of these were precursors to the biggest diversion project of them all, the Colorado-Big Thompson Project, which was built between 1938 and 1957.
The massive project of tunnels and reservoirs brings Western Slope water to Northern Colorado’s cities and farms. Its structures include Carter Lake and Horsetooth Reservoir, completed in 1951. Water from Horsetooth is directed to the Poudre.
The river takes a toll
Flooding has been part of the Poudre’s history as long as the river has been known. The flood that damaged Camp Collins in 1864 is what led to the development of Fort Collins as a city.
Archaeological evidence suggests the river flooded regularly in spring and early summer before settlers came to tame the land, Werner said.
“Without any controls or structures, the river would have been pretty wild,” he said.
One of the largest floods on the river struck in 1904. Torrential rain and a quicker than usual snowmelt sent the river out of its banks in north Fort Collins. The dam at Chambers Lake, which failed and caused flooding in 1891, broke for a second time.
Every bridge along the river was washed out, and more than 150 homes and thousands of acres of crops were destroyed, according to historical accounts. The only person known to have died in the flood was Fort Collins pioneer George Strauss.
More flooding along the Poudre came to Fort Collins in 1921, 1923 and 1938 toward the end of the Dust Bowl era, which saw the river nearly dry up.
Summer thunderstorms have sent the river and its tributaries out of their banks many times in Fort Collins and points east, including in 1983 when Greeley suffered extensive damage.
The worst flood in Fort Collins occurred in July 1997 along Spring Creek, which feeds into the Poudre. The heaviest rainfall ever measured over an urban area in Colorado — 14.5 inches at Quail Hollow — turned the normally placid creek into a torrent.
Five people died in the flooding, and damage citywide was estimated at $200 million. The river, east of where Spring Creek empties into it, rose about 6 feet following the peak of the flooding.
A lasting legacy
Over the years the river has touched the lives of countless people. Its legacy can be measured in many ways, historians say.
For most it’s the water, and how it has nourished the north Front Range for centuries and made possible its development over the last 140 years.
“It’s why we are all here,” Werner said. “Without the river, there would be no Fort Collins.”
Others have a different perspective. Many great cities — including London, Paris and Florence — are known for how they treat their rivers and incorporate them into the lives of their residents, said Rheba Massey, historian at the Fort Collins Public Library.
“For me, its legacy is its natural beauty,” she said. “It’s something most people appreciate and want to see maintained. Its beauty makes people stop and say, ‘Wow.’
“The river adds tremendously to our quality of life. And that’s why we need to protect it.”
Originally published June 6, 2005