Kevin - Thursday. As I arose at my customary 6 AM, the expected sunlight outside was subdued. Peeking through the blinds, this is what I saw.
The rain had stopped during the night and things had started to dry off, but, silly me, I’m not biking on roadways if it’s foggy like that. In our haste to ‘get ahead’ because of the expected storm, we’d passed up visiting some key historic sites, so about 9:30 we set out to rectify our earlier decision.
First stop was Fort Vasquez, the next trading post north of Fort Lupton where we were on Saturday last. The original fort was excavated during the 1930’s depression, documented, then a semi-replica constructed by the WPA. It’s really amazing how many historical sites we have to thank Franklin Roosevelt and the WPA for preserving. Much of our history would be lost otherwise.
Fort Vasquez literally sits in the middle of the 4-lane US highway 85. Since the detachments mention Ft Vasquez, we know the original trail came very close to this site. One journal mentions a cannon – which makes it pretty sure he was referring to Vasquez. The other trading posts were not known to have had cannon – except Bent’s fort.
Next, we went looking for a historical marker in the vicinity of Ft St Vrain. This was the fourth trading post the detachment journalists mention descending the South Platte. At St Vrain’s, they crossed from the east side of the South Platte to the west bank, then proceeded north. The marker is at the end of a county road which can be accessed. It goes through the yard of a residence and work buildings, so it doesn’t look like it can be accessed, but if you continue about a half-mile, you are treated to this handsome marker.
As we were pulling into the area, Denny remarked that there was a ‘conical hill’ across the river from St Vrain’s location. Sure enough, there was a conical hill but not like the ones we’d seen down on the Arkansas River and Fountain Creek. This hill was an erosional remnant of a mesa, but since this hill is visible for miles and sat directly across from St Vrain’s post, it’s almost certainly a navigational marker used by the early travelers.
Two more locations were of interest today. The first was the crossing of Cache la Poudre River at its confluence with the South Platte River. The early General Land Office (GLO) maps show three surveyed trail crossings in the area. So we drove out to the area and found it is on a Colorado State Division Wildlife hunting area. It is closed to the general public at this time of the year. I ‘might’ have gone down the trail to the water except there were three cars of hunters already in the area, so prudence governed today. I considered using the drone to go get a view, but these guys were carrying shotguns for birds. Not flying the drone also seemed a prudent course of non-action today. (sigh)
The last spot I was anxious to get to was where Crow Creek empties into the South Platte. This was known as the ‘lower crossing’ of the South Platte. It was where Amasa Lyman and others crossed as they were trying to find the detachments. As noted above, the detachments had crossed at St Vrain’s, so Lyman and the detachments were on separate routes at the time which caused Lyman to miss them. More about that in a few days.
Crow Creek starts way up on the highlands west of Cheyenne. It makes its way east, then turns south, comes off the mesa and follows the base of the mesa south to the South Platte. It’s not a pretty creek by any measure, but it was a nearly constant source of water back then and was a reliable route to follow.
The confluence is on private hunting property, so we got as close as we could, captured some video and photos then headed back to Greeley for our last night there. We started closing down for an early start tomorrow.