History - Colorado - page 731

Exploration & Settlement
The first European explorers were Spaniards moving north from Mexico. They founded
Santa Fe at the end of the 16th century, and established land grants as far north as the
Arkansas River in present-day Colorado. In the search for overland routes to California, the
Domínguez-Escalante Expedition of 1775-76 explored the Colorado Plateau.
Early 18th-century French explorers and fur traders converged on the northern plains
from eastern Canada, but by the early 19th century the Spanish had moved throughout the
western half of present-day Colorado, the southwestern corner of Wyoming and even
shared, at least formally, occupation of parts of Montana with the British, who had estab-
lished trading posts. Virtually all of New Mexico, Arizona, California, Utah and Nevada
were under Spanish authority.
In 1803, the USA acquired the French territorial claim known as the Louisiana Purchase.
It included the coveted port of New Orleans, virtually all of present-day Montana, three-
quarters of Wyoming and the eastern half of Colorado. Then president Thomas Jefferson
invited army captain Meriwether Lewis to command an exploratory expedition. Lewis in-
vited colleague William Clark to serve as co-commander.
Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery set forth to benefit American commerce by seek-
ing a 'Northwest Passage' to the Pacific Ocean. Meanwhile, the expedition managed to
make serious scientific observations on flora, fauna, climate and the inhabitants of the re-
gion.
Lewis and Clark's was the most successful of early US expeditions to the west; others
ended in disaster. After a foray into Colorado in 1806-07, Zebulon Pike was arrested in
New Mexico by Spanish police. Pike never climbed the famous peak that bears his name.
In 1839, journalist John L O'Sullivan suggested in his essay 'Manifest Destiny' that it
was white America's destiny to own the American continent from coast to coast and tip to
tip. Inevitably manifest destiny became US policy under then president James Polk. This in
turn spiked westward settlement and caused inevitable violent clashes with both Mexico -
which owned southern Colorado - and native peoples. The Mexican-American War raged
in the mid-1840s, and by its end Charles Bent, appointed first governor of New Mexico,
had been assassinated by Pueblo Indians in Taos, and his brother William was married to a
Cheyenne woman in Colorado. The less-publicized Indian Wars were the euphemism for
the violent subjugation of Colorado's native people by the Colorado Volunteers. The ex-
clamation point to this process was the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre ( Click here ) .