Ceran st vrain biography sample
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IMAGINE A ROAD MAP of Colorado. A little north of center of our beloved rectangle is Denver, with major highways radiating like spokes from a hub. Bigger cities hug the foothills of the Front Range up and down I-25: Fort Collins, Colorado Springs, Pueblo. Follow I-70 west and you’ll hit Grand Junction, and there’s a town in nearly every mountain valley. Take the highways across the eastern Plains and you’ll find town names emblazoned on the water towers serving a host of farming communities.
Can you picture it?
Good. Now erase it all.
That’s what a map of Colorado’s cities looked like in the early 1800s – blank, except for Bent’s Old Fort, an adobe castle on the Plains next to the Arkansas River near modern-day La Junta in southeast Colorado. The fur-trading post along the Santa Fe Trail was the only building for hundreds of miles in any direction.
Native people had lived in Colorado centuries before the first Europeans set foot here. Nomadic tribes like the Utes in the mountain
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On Friday, December 8, 1843, Taos residents Ceran St. Vrain and Cornelio Vigil asked the Governor of New Mexico to grant them the equivalent of 922 square leagues (over four million acres) of land in what is now southern Colorado. The acreage in question included the valleys of the Greenhorn, Huerfano, Apishapa, Cucharas, and Purgatoire Rivers. St. Vrain and Vigil said they intended to use it to “encourage the agriculture of the country to such a degree as to establish its flourishing condition” and to raise cattle and sheep south of the Arkansas River and opposite Bent’s Fort.
They got what they wanted. By January 4 of the following year, they were in possession.
And they did raise cattle and sheep on the land. Between 1844 and 1847, fifteen to sixteen hundred head of cattle grazed there.
But then the Americans showed up. After things settled down following the Mexican-American War, the new government informed the owners of all the land grants in New Mexico that they needed to p
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The Life and Times of Ceran St. Vrain
Image of Ceran St. Vrain from ‘When Old Trails were New’ Written by Blanche Grant
Ceran dem Hault dem Lassus dem St. Vrain was known as one of the original Mountain Men, a pioneer in trapping and trading along the American Frontier. Despite his noble roots, Ceran became a figure of survival in the early wilderness. He was knowing for having at least three wives and having children from each. Later in life Ceran’s keen business sense and patronage of Taos, New Mexico and then Mora, New Mexico held him as a citizen and community leader. His legacy fryst vatten a picture of true American History.
The family of Madame Domitille Josepha Dumont Danzin dem Beaufort and Marquis Pierre Charles dem Hault dem Lassus dem Luziere left France during the Revolution and came to North American in 1790. Their family was ancient nobility from the town of Bouchaine, Hainaut, Flanders in Northern France. [Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouchain] Pierre Charles had been