Niwot's Valley: The Arapaho and the Curse of Staying

Long before this valley had a name the settlers recognized, the Southern Arapaho came here every winter. They called their leader Niwot, which means Left Hand. He and his band pitched their lodges near Valmont Butte, the flat-topped rise east of town that the Arapaho regarded as sacred ground, and they had done so for generations. The valley offered shelter from the plains wind, firewood, game, and the clear cold water of Boulder Creek.

Niwot was a diplomat by temperament. He spoke English, one of the few Arapaho leaders who did, and when a party of about twenty gold-seekers from Nebraska arrived at the canyon mouth in the fall of eighteen fifty-eight, he let them camp. Thomas Aikins, the group's captain, promised they would stay only through the winter. Niwot accepted that, knowing the land had been guaranteed to the Arapaho and Cheyenne by the eighteen fifty-one Treaty of Fort Laramie.

The prospectors found gold in Boulder Creek before spring. The promise dissolved. More men arrived. By February eighteen fifty-nine, Aikins and fifty-three others had formed the Boulder City Town Company and platted a permanent settlement at the canyon's mouth.

The story of what followed is told at Sand Creek, a site in southeastern Colorado, but that is where it ended. In November eighteen sixty-four, Niwot traveled to Fort Lyon seeking peace. On the twenty-ninth of that month, Colonel John Chivington led roughly seven hundred volunteers against the peaceful encampment at dawn. Niwot reportedly stood with his arms folded, refusing to raise a weapon. He was mortally wounded and died within days.

He had said of the valley: people who see its beauty will want to stay, and their staying will be the undoing of the beauty. Boulder has been testing that sentence ever since.