Towns Along The Tracks - Peyton, CO - Colorado Historical Markers on Waymarking.com

Indian Paint Mines/Artus Van Briggle: Legend has it that the Indian Paint Mines were a source of war colors for the Cheyennes and Arapahos. Legend, as usual, has it wrong. The Cheyennes and Arapahos spent little time in this spectacularly eroded terrain, although prehistoric Indians did frequent the site, about six miles southeast, and may have used its clays to make pottery. However, the most famous visitor to the paint mines was ceramist Artus Van Briggle. He came to Colorado Springs in 1899, hoping for a tuberculosis cure, and there perfected a unique glaze—a variation on the ancient Chinese matte, or “dead” glaze. The innovation brought Van Briggle international renown, and although he died in 1904, his company continues to produce pottery in his signature style. Van Briggle pottery today remains heavily sought by collectors around the world.

While lavish mansions boomed in nearby Colorado Springs in the 1890s, sod houses and cottonwood shacks rose in eastern El Paso County. The latter straddled the tracks of the Chicago Rock Island & Pacific Railroad (CRI&P), which pushed through here in the late 1880s and established towns at ten-mile intervals. The CRI&P communities—Ramah, Calhan, Peyton, and Falcon—and the homesteads around them occupied one of North America’s most challenging landscapes. But the settlers (many of them central European immigrants) made good homes on these high, dry, and isolated prairies, cultivating potatoes and pinto beans, raising livestock, and operating feedlots. They prospered until the Great Depression, when drought and collapsing prices devastated Great Plains agriculture. The CRI&P eventually went bankrupt, and the tracks were removed in 1993. But these towns remain, their soddies and shacks replaced with handsome suburban homes.

Pikes Peak Guidebooks - Many a greenhorn who rushed to the Colorado goldfields in the 1860s bought a guidebook to aid his journey west, only to find that he was not half as green as the man who wrote the guidebook. Purportedly written by experienced travelers, these pamphlets generally contained more exaggerations, misconceptions, and outright lies than useful facts. They overstated the gold regions’ size and ease of access while downplaying the hazards—including storms, drought, outlaws, and unfriendly Indians—one would likely encounter en route. Many travelers followed the guidebooks straight into trouble, and not all lived to tell of their disappointment. Yet a market remained for these publications and the fantasies they spun, for the simple reason that people wanted to believe them. They stand as early chapters in the nation’s great myth of the West.

Pikes Peak: During his famous 1806–7 expedition, Lt. Zebulon M. Pike estimated the elevation of Grand Peak at 19,000 feet. The mountain, which now bears the intrepid lieutenant’s name, actually stands 14,110 feet high, but its stature in the American psyche is immeasurably higher. As the first mountain to appear to pioneers traveling west, Pikes Peak was a beacon of hope, a harbinger of frontier freedom and boundless opportunity. “Pike’s Peak or Bust” became a gold-rush mantra, a prayer for deliverance into the Promised Land. Katharine Lee Bates inscribed those sentiments in “America the Beautiful,” which she conceived atop the summit in 1893. Like Mounts Everest, Fuji, and Kilimanjaro, Pikes Peak is more than a mountain—it’s a symbol of national majesty.

Teeming with Wildlife: The great prairies of eastern Colorado once supported animal populatins as vast as the land itself. Immense herds of bison ranged freely across the unfenced land, grazing on a sea of grass alongside elk, dee, pronghorn antelope, and wild horses. The native plants they fed upon -- mainly blue grama and buffalo grass -- were hardy enough to survive wildfires, drought, and freezing winter, as well as the pounding of millions of hooves. Althought rainfall was scarce, rivers and springs carried enough water to sustain this rich ecosystem.

The mining towns in the shadow of Pikes Peak enjoyed the greatest gold boom Colorado has ever known. The Gold Belt Tour Scenic and Historic Byway retraces three historic travel routes through these towns, sometimes along narrow and rugged roads, and always through breathtaking scenery.

Known as “the richest square mile on earth,” Cripple Creek flourished in the 1890s. Scores of millionaires made their fortunes in the district’s gold mines, just as silver magnates went broke with the great silver crash of 1893.

Millions of years ago, volcanic activity trapped this region’s ancient plant and animal life. Today, the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument is internationally recognized for its variety and number of fossils.

Fort Carson began its life as Camp Carson during World War II. The post is named for Kit Carson, the famous army scout and frontiersman who explored much of the West in the 1800s.