Highlands Ranch, Colorado: Bison Ground to Boom Suburb

The rolling benchland you're driving through was Cheyenne and Arapaho hunting range in the eighteen hundreds, part of the vast bison territory that the Treaty of Fort Laramie in eighteen fifty-one formally recognized as theirs before the Sand Creek Massacre of eighteen sixty-four and the subsequent wars erased that recognition entirely.

The first homesteader filed under the Homestead Act in eighteen sixty-seven, and by the turn of the century John Springer had assembled roughly twelve thousand acres here. The land passed through several ranching operations before Lawrence Phipps Junior, heir to a steel fortune his father built at Carnegie Steel in Pittsburgh before retiring to Colorado, ran Hereford cattle on it as a private estate through the nineteen sixties and seventies.

Phipps died in nineteen seventy-six. Two years later, the Mission Viejo Company, fresh from building a master-planned suburb in California, bought the land and broke ground in nineteen eighty-one. Highlands Ranch grew to become one of the most populous census-designated places in the United States, with more than one hundred thousand residents in under four decades, all on what was living bison range just six generations ago.