Saguache: Blue Earth and the Pathmaker's Crossroads

The small town of Saguache , pronounced "Sa-watch" , takes its name from the Ute language, though sources differ on whether the word means sand dunes or blue earth. That name speaks to this place's character: it sits where the open San Luis Valley, one of the largest alpine valleys in the world, funnels toward the mountain passes that lead in all directions.

Saguache received its post office in eighteen sixty-seven, and the man most responsible for its early prominence was Otto Mears, one of the most consequential figures in Colorado's territorial period. Mears arrived in the late eighteen sixties, raised wheat, and opened a store. He brought the first mower, reaper, and threshing machine to the San Luis Valley, turning subsistence farming into a market enterprise. But it was road-building that made him famous. From Saguache, Mears pushed toll roads over Poncha Pass to the Upper Arkansas Valley, connecting the San Luis Valley to the mining camps rapidly filling the mountains to the north.

Saguache's growth accelerated dramatically after eighteen seventy-three, when the Brunot Agreement removed the Ute people from the San Juan Mountains and opened those peaks to mining. Mears, who had helped negotiate the agreement , a transaction whose human cost the Ute people paid , quickly built the Saguache and San Juan Toll Road to Lake City. Overnight, Saguache became one of the two major supply depots for miners heading into the San Juans, the other being Del Norte to the southwest.

The town's commercial moment was brief. As railroads penetrated the mountains in the eighteen eighties, the toll road traffic evaporated. But Saguache survived as a county seat and agricultural center, sustained by the irrigated potato and hay farms that blanket the valley.

Today Saguache County is one of the least densely populated counties in Colorado. The town has fewer than seven hundred residents. The valley around it, however, holds some of the most dramatic scenery in the state: the Great Sand Dunes rising to the southeast, the Sangre de Cristo range beyond, and the flat floor of the ancient lake bed stretching in every direction.