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As a continuation of my look at Southeast Colorado Boom towns (1886-1889) I thought I would toss out an interesting town ad for Lamar. Almost all of the towns which popped up during that era had an advertisement that was placed in newspapers “back east” (usually Kansas) to encourage settlers to come west. This is…
The town, Wilde, Colorado is not Baca County. It was technically in Old Bent county or what is now Prowers County just west of Two Buttes Mountain and north of Butte Creek. However, most of us from Baca County feel the mountain, just over the county line, and the area just north of Two Buttes…
Sam Konkel told us much about the first wave of settlement in the 1886-1887 time frame. In this article from the December 21 1917 issue of the Springfield Herald he offers some observations comparing that first wave with the second wave starting in 1907 Sam as always is entertaining with his writing. I will leave…
The “Noted Burying Ground” or Boston, Colorado Cemetery shown in the Dec 2018 photo below is all that is left of what was Boston, Colorado of the Southeast Colorado plains. There are two issues that must be clarified as we give you a bit of this story. Old west stories often focus on brothels, lynchings,…
Many of you are familiar with Judge JDF Jennings who was Vice President of the Boston or Atlantis (Colorado) Town Company from my book “Old Boston: As Wild As They Come.” The Judge aka Judge Jennings aka John D.F. Jennings was a former plantation owner, an attorney, and a physician. He served the Confederacy during…
I have been collecting artifacts of the Dust Bowl as it relates to Baca County for awhile. My focus is compiling a resource that tells the “Dust Bowl” story from the perspective of the Baca County Newspaperman, in particular, Springfield Democrat Herald, Editor Ralph Williams. However, the research from other newspapers across the country…
We have had several conversations about the portion of the Santa Fe Trail which crosses Baca County. Most recently we posted Jim Womack’s “Ruts of the Santa Fe Trail, The Aubrey Trail Cutoff.” The following article in the Springfield Herald (Springfield, Colorado) May 31, 1907, is attributed to the Syracuse Journal, but no specific issue. It…
In “Old Boston: As Wild As They Come” we tell the story of many of the characters of the that short-lived (1886-1889) and wild Colorado Boomtown, Boston, Colorado. The key resource for this story are the 1918-1919 writings of Sam Konkel, who ran one of two newspapers in that town. Konkel told us much about the…
We have all heard the cry: “Two Buttes is Running!” or “Bear Creek is Running!” When I was a young boy I often wondered how such a little creek in my own neighborhood (Bear Creek) could occasionally usher so much water. At the time, I was not aware of the tremendous infrastructure that produced…
UPDATED: March 29, 2020- In the American west, it was common practice for early large cattle operations to file on only parcels of land that contained access to water. This allowed those operations to control a great deal of the public domain land. The J.J. Ranch was founded in 1869. By 1879 the JJ controlled…
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