The open prairie horizon of the Comanche National Grassland, south of the Arkansas River
National Trails Office (US National Park Service) / public domain via Wikimedia Commons
Colorado · Region

The Arkansas Valley & the Santa Fe Trail

Bent's adobe fort on the old border, Sand Creek and the two officers who held back their men, the Ludlow tent colony, and the camp named for a Cheyenne woman.

4 places to explore

The Arkansas was a border before it was a valley of farms. From 1819 it marked the line between the United States and New Spain, later Mexico, and in 1833 the traders Charles and William Bent, with Ceran St. Vrain, raised an adobe fort on its north bank where Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa and Comanche people came to trade buffalo robes; William married into the Cheyenne. The Mountain Route of the Santa Fe Trail followed the river past the fort and turned south over Raton Pass at Trinidad. The Bents abandoned the post in 1849, and the fort standing now is a 1976 reconstruction.

On November 29, 1864, about seven hundred soldiers of the 1st and 3rd Colorado Cavalry under Colonel John Chivington attacked a camp of Cheyenne and Arapaho people on Big Sandy Creek who had been told they were safe there; Black Kettle had raised an American flag and a white one over his lodge. About 230 people were killed, most of them women, children and the elderly. Captain Silas Soule and Lieutenant Joseph Cramer held their companies back, and their letters forced two congressional inquiries and an army commission. Soule was shot dead in a Denver street the following April. The national historic site near Eads opened in 2007.

Two other attacks on families left marks in this country. At Ludlow, north of Trinidad, the Colorado National Guard fired on a tent colony of striking coal miners on April 20, 1914, and two women and eleven children died in a pit dug beneath a burning tent. Near Granada, the government held more than seven thousand Japanese Americans behind wire from 1942 to 1945, at a camp named Amache after Amache Prowers, a Cheyenne woman whose father, Ochinee, was killed at Sand Creek.

What to See in The Arkansas Valley & the Santa Fe Trail

4 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Historic Sites

Rows of barracks at the Granada War Relocation Center, Amache, photographed by the War Relocation Authority

Amache National Historic Site

Granada

A Japanese American incarceration camp kept from vanishing by a Granada social studies teacher and three decades of his high school students, a national park unit since 2024.

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The reconstructed adobe walls of Bent's Old Fort across the grass from the approach path

Bent's Old Fort National Historic Site

La Junta

A cornfield with foundations in it by the 1960s, rebuilt from an army lieutenant's 1845 drawings in 160,000 machine-made adobes for the Bicentennial.

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The 1918 granite monument at the Ludlow tent colony site, with its miner and family figures

Ludlow Tent Colony Site

Trinidad

The coal miners' union bought the ground, raised a granite monument over the pit in 1918, and restored it after someone knocked the heads off its figures in 2003.

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Shortgrass and sage on the open plain at the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site

Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site

Eads

Lost even to the survivors' descendants for more than a century, and found again in 1999 by tribal oral history, archives and a metal detector working together.

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Stories from The Arkansas Valley & the Santa Fe Trail

Geology

The Dinosaur Freeway on the Purgatoire

Below the shortgrass of the Comanche National Grassland, the Purgatoire River has uncovered North America's largest dinosaur tracksite: sauropods walking side by side along a lakeshore 150 million years ago.

6 min read

The Arkansas Valley & the Santa Fe Trail rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.

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