The Contested Plains: Indians, Gold-Seekers, and the Rush to Colorado

There are many visions that construct the history of the American West. One popular myth consists of the American nation’s expansion from east to west and includes romantic stories of goldseekers and mining towns, cowboys and gunslingers, and a Jeffersonian perspective toward land. Other visions tell a different story—one of American Indian peoples and their use of landscapes and pre-contact trade networks in shaping the region long before Euro-American settlement. These groups maintained intricate inter-tribal and intra-tribal relationships, adapted to environmental challenges, and dwelled within a complex socio-economic and cultural world—a perspective looking east from the west. Yet, these two narratives converge under a third ecological vision where interactions with geography, animals, insects, weather, climate, and other forces worked to shape and dictate the experiences of both Euro-Americans and American Indian peoples. All of these visions are, according to Elliot West, important in understanding the Great Plains’ past and are quite familiar to the more recent works of plains historians. But as settlers expanded west looking for gold, God, or land, and as American Indian peoples worked to exploit these relationships through visions of their own, a greater story emerges, one about power and energy that incorporates 1850s visions of Euro-American conquest and indigenous agency and resistance with an “old world” of the Pleistocene era and Clovis societies. Thus, for Elliot West, professor of history at the University of Arkansas, the history of the Great Plains is more than “chasing the story of Indians and the gold rush”. Rather, he argues “nowhere else on the continent can we see more dramatically the human envisioning of new lifeways and routes to power, the effects of that search on physical and social environments, and the dilemmas and disasters that so often follow.” In the beginning chapters, West traces these lifeways and energy networks through visions of power. The central plains in pre-contact North America were experiencing myriad changes in social, economic, and ecological relationships long before Anglo-Europeans arrived. Clovis societies hunted megafauna, specifi cally Bison Antiquus, participated in and maintained trade networks throughout the plains, and battled increasingly drastic climate and environmental changes. These groups did exploit resources, but ultimately proved to be remarkably successful in establishing “a sustaining way of life”. However, these diverse cultures living in an equally complex ecological community would meet competing visions toward the plains with the intrusion of Europeans. Thus, the plains “as a system of users and used and as