Animal hides, skins and pelts were in demand worldwide as the 19th century began. Trappers roamed the Rocky Mountains hunting and trapping for decades, but each year brought increasing challenges. By 1840 land disputes, declining animal populations and plummeting prices for pelts were bringing an end to the trapper-traders era in our region. Although the hunters knew the trails, passes and rivers, the region had not been surveyed or mapped.

The Mexican American War (1846-48) brought new opportunities for exploring the southern lands. The Compromise of 1850 created the expansive Utah Territory, which included today’s Western Slope. The boundaries for this new land were California to west, Oregon Territory to the north, the summit of the Rocky Mountains to the east, and New Mexico to the south.

In 1853 Congress authorized the U.S. Army to establish four engineering surveying teams. Their mission was to find a practical route for a railroad through the region from the Mississippi River to the California coast. The “railroad rush” began.

John William Gunnison (1812-1853) was a graduate of West Point and an officer in the Topographical Engineer unit. He had surveyed Lake Michigan, Lake Erie and the U.S.-Canadian border in the 1840s.

In 1849 Gunnison joined Capt. Howard Stansbury’s expedition to survey the Mormon Trail and the Great Salt Lake Basin.

Following his work in Utah, Capt. John Gunnison received his new orders: Lead a new expedition and find a railroad route between the 38th and 39th parallels. Leaving Ft. Leavenworth in Kansas in June 1853, the party moved west. When they got to the Rockies, they chose to cross the Sangre de Cristo Range into the San Luis Valley. They moved northwest through the San Luis Valley to tackle the Continental Divide at Cochetopa Pass.

One of the expedition members, Lt. Edward Beckwith, noted that with this route “no mountain pass ever opened more favorably for a railroad than this.”

Following the river and heading west, the party began to encounter challenges. Hostile bands of Utes provoked and harassed them as the group entered the lands they had roamed for centuries. The thick sagebrush often blocked the path, and the rivers were running fast.

The expedition then came upon their biggest engineering challenge yet — the “knife-cut” into the land that became known as the Black Canyon. Captain Gunnison wrote that the land around the canyon was “the roughest, most hilly and most cut” land he had ever encountered.

Gunnison believed that a railroad should not be built through the canyon along the river. He then led his party around the southern rim. They eventually reached the site of present-day Montrose.

After leaving the Western Slope, the expedition moved into Utah following the Green River through the Wasatch Mountains into the Sevier River Valley. Believing that the real danger was behind them, they entered the Mormon settlement of Manti in central Utah.

They found the residents barricaded in their homes fearing an imminent raid. Warriors from the Paiute nation attacked the military team. They killed Gunnison and seven others. Four men survived the raid.

Although the expedition met a tragic end, Captain Gunnison’s Pacific Railroad Survey guided the development and settlement of the Western Slope. The Rio Grande Southern Railroad built its tracks from Gunnison west in the 1880s. Homesteaders and ranchers followed into the region in the decades that followed.

John Gunnison’s legacy lives on with Gunnison County, the Gunnison River, the Gunnison sage-grouse and the town all named for him. The Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park is also a tribute to his explorations.

Thanks, Captain Gunnison, for bringing all of us here to the western slope of Colorado.

Sources include “Frontier in Transition: A History of Southwestern Colorado,” BLM Cultural Resources; nps.gov; coloradoencyclopedia. org; and legendsofamerica. com.

Carolyn Snowbarger is a retired educator. After teaching middle schoolers in Olathe, Kansas, for 28 years, she and her husband Vince moved to Washington, D.C. She directed the Teacher-to-Teacher Initiative at the U.S. Department of Education and then managed continuing education programs for the American Institute of Architects. The Snowbargers moved to Ridgway in 2013 after decades of San Juan family vacations.