People of the Poudre - Cache la Poudre National Heritage Area

When Fremont reached the Poudre River on July 28, he attempted to follow the river into the mountains.Although it took his party several days and they had to cross the river many times, even leaving it on occasionto find a route through to the Laramie Plains due to the rugged and narrow nature of the canyon, Fremont feltthat the route might provide a viable wagon road in the future. 30- In 1907, a Mr. J. R. Todd related his experience crossing the continent to a Judge Jefferson McAnelly.Todd joined George Pinkerton and a party of emigrants and young men from Iowa heading for the OregonTerritory in 1852. Todd’s recollections have some errors regarding the naming of the Poudre, but hiscomments on the river’s appearance are supported by other accounts of the time. According to Todd,[t]he waters of the river were as clear as crystal all the way down to its confluence with thePlatte. Its banks were fringed with timber not as large as now, consisting of cottonwood,boxelder, and some willow. The waters were full of trout of the speckled or mountain variety.The undulating bluffs sloped gently down to the valley which was carpeted in the mostluxuriant grasses ... [i]n coming up the South Platte River they struck the mouth of the Cachela Poudre River at noon, and on the evening of the first day’s travel on that river they camped.Game was plentiful, herds of buffalo were seen on the plains, as well as deer, elk, and antelope.To the travelers the Poudre Valley appeared to be the hunters’ paradise. Trout were caughtthen along the Poudre River from its mouth to the foothills, and the small streams in themountains were alive with them. 31- In 1859 Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, reported that the Poudre Valley was the“center of antelope country” and the only source of substantial wood for many miles: “[s]ince we crossedClear Creek, on which there is on this trail a decent fringe of cottonwood, we had seen but the merest shredof small cottonwoods and some scrub willow at wide intervals along the larger water courses; but the pinestill sparsely covered the face of the Rocky Mountains. Cache la Poudre has quite a fair belt of cottonwood,thenceforth there is scarcely a cord of wood to a township for the next fifty or sixty miles, and the pine is nolonger visible on the hills near us, because they expose little but rock, and hence are swept by the annual fires.”32Greeley noted the ephemeral nature of streams emerging from the mountains and flowing onto the plains:“[a]ll the streams of this region are largest where they emerge from the mountains, unless reinforced belowby other streams having like origin, the thirsty prairie contribute nothing, but begins to drink them up fromthe time they strike it. The smaller streams are thus entirely absorbed in the course of five or ten miles, unlessthey happen to be sooner lost in some larger creek. Drouth, throughout each summer, is the inexorable anddestroying tyrant of the Plains.” 33- Frontiersman Jim Baker, along with others, hunted along the North Poudre near present dayLivermore and along Lone Pine Creek in 1860-1861. 34 The “plentiful” deer and mountain sheep weremarketed in Denver.- In the early1900s Mrs. John Coy, an early Fort Collins settler who crossed the Plains in an oxendrawnwagon with her husband, described her overland trip of forty years earlier. She recalled Helen Ames,a young girl who was a member of the wagon party in 1862, looking at the Poudre from a bluff near Greeley.The water was crystal clear but Helen was disappointed in not seeing any trout. 35- C. A. Duncan arrived in the Poudre Valley as a child in 1865 wrote in his memoirs:[d]uring the 1870’s the river was nearly always clear and bed clean and covered with gravel14 People of the Poudre