Picture this: you are an industrialist in the late nineteenth century, and you’ve come into possession of something that could make you very rich. It’s not oil, it’s not gold, and it’s not steel. It is a coal mine, actually, but that’s not what has you so excited. It’s the small spring located above the […]

Living in Grand Junction, founded in 1882, can skew your perception of just how far back much of Colorado’s history goes. Comparatively speaking, the towns and cities on the Western Slope are much younger than the towns and cities located elsewhere in the state, in large part because this land was reserved by treaty for […]

Deserted, remote, forgotten. With over 1,500 named ghost towns, few states possess more abandoned settlements than Colorado. The promise of prosperity brought thousands into these settlements, only to be left behind when fortunes dried up. The vast majority of ghost towns in Colorado were mining settlements, founded to extract or process raw material from Colorado’s […]

Content Warning: This story contains graphic descriptions of violence and suffering committed against animals. Reader discretion is advised. In the late 19th century, competition between cattlemen and sheepherders over the open range often came to a bloody head in a series of conflicts known as the Sheep Wars. There were huge fortunes to be gained […]

Some criminals achieve fame through cunning, working as masterminds and manipulating law enforcement to evade capture for as long as possible. Others become famous through building criminal empires, creating massive gangs that can rival multinational corporations in scale. Others, like Mesa County’s pioneer bootlegger, Abe Ong, seemingly become famous through sheer audacity. In my last […]

In 1909, Mesa County voted to prohibit the sale of alcohol a decade before the rest of the nation followed suit with the Eighteenth Amendment. Within two months, the first case involving the sale of illegal liquor had made it to county court. “Doc” Powell, a retired bus driver living in a barn, was found […]

The Grand Valley has a reputation as a small, rural area, despite the fact that it’s actually quite urban and populous. As of 2020, Mesa County sports a growing population of 155,703 people, the vast majority of which live in the Grand Valley. With over 10 different communities, it’s the only true metropolitan area in […]