Carl Howelsen came to Steamboat Springs from Norway in 1913 and spread his love of skiing and ski jumping. The town memorialized his important contribution to local skiing by naming their municipal ski area after him. Howelsen may have pioneered skiing in the Steamboat Springs area, but who actually built the first ski runs there? […]

Elvin Urquhart was a code breaker who helped the United States Navy break the Japanese Navy General Operational Code, or JN25, during World War II. Captain Joseph Rochefort handpicked Urquhart to be part of Station Hypo, a code breaking unit of the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence based in Pearl Harbor. In an interview with […]

Adrienne Kaga has been a valued employee of Mesa County Libraries for many years. Our Fruita branch manager is an excellent research librarian. If you want a piece of information found, obscure or not, Adrienne can find it. She also speaks Spanish, German and fluent financial-ese, as her previous career as a principal in a […]

Let’s be clear: In the 1920’s, The Ku Klux Klan was a social and political power in Western Slope towns just as it was elsewhere in Colorado. White Protestants throughout the state joined because they were drawn by the Klan’s anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, anti-immigrant, anti-corruption message, and by the Klan’s hatred of African Americans. Yet some […]

Since the settlement of Mesa County, its citizens have formed community groups to bond socially, for charitable causes, or for the ritual of belonging. Some founded local chapters of established organizations. In 1883 and 1884, recent arrivals formed Masonic Lodge Charter Number 55, Grand Army of the Republic Post 35, a local chapter of the […]

Before Grand Junction took its water from the Grand Mesa’s watershed, citizens took water directly from the Gunnison River, and with it Diphtheria, Typhoid Fever, and other interesting diseases that were not remedied until the twin advances of proper water management and vaccinations came into being. A May 1883 issue of the Grand Junction News […]

The Mesa County Oral History Project recently digitized interviews with Lebrado “Lee” Serna and Anna (Garcia) Gallegos, descendants of the long-standing Hispanic community that still exists today along the Colorado-New Mexico border. Spanish-speaking peoples first came north to Northern New Mexico in the late 1500’s and up into Southern Colorado not long after. There, in […]

In Grand Junction, Colorado, we have a street named Chipeta Avenue. As a kid, I had no idea what that signified or who Chipeta was, nor was I taught in school. Yet there was a time when Chipeta was famous in Colorado. She played an important role in the history of the Ute people and […]

The recently removed Ute Indians loomed large in the imagination of Grand Junction’s early settlers. The Utes allowed the U.S. Army to remove them peaceably to the Uintah Reservation in Utah in 1881, and in historical retrospect, it seems there was no real risk that they might threaten the town. Some Utes stayed behind and […]