The Trading Post on the Wrong Side of the Treaty

The site on the Arkansas River where Pueblo now stands was not empty when the first Euro-American traders arrived. It was Cheyenne and Arapaho territory, formalized by the Fort Laramie Treaty of eighteen fifty-one, which drew a map of the southern plains and assigned the Arkansas River valley to those nations. The assignment was legal under American law. It also meant that the trading post a small group of traders built at the junction of Fountain Creek and the Arkansas River in eighteen forty-two was built on land that did not belong to them.

This is not a complicated legal question. The treaty came nine years after the trading post; the post was illegal under the treaty's terms. But the post had been operating for years by the time the treaty formalized what the Cheyenne and Arapaho had been saying all along.

On Christmas Day in eighteen fifty-four, a group of Ute and Jicarilla Apache warriors, led by a chief named Tierra Blanco, attacked the settlement. Approximately fifteen people were killed. The attack was recorded in American newspapers and histories as an unprovoked atrocity. It was not unprovoked. The Ute had their own grievances against the traders, and the settlement itself occupied contested ground.

The El Pueblo Museum now occupies the site where the trading post stood, with a reconstruction of the original adobe structure. The interpretive materials there have become, over decades of revision, substantially more honest about the treaty context. The attack is still described. So is what preceded it.

The city of Pueblo grew from that site. The steel mill and the labor wars and the immigrant neighborhoods and the floods came afterward. All of it sits on the same ground.