A multitude of countries, states and territories at one time or another claimed ownership of this land, beginning with Spain in 1541. About three hundred years later, the county now called Baca was claimed by Mexico, and then in 1836, it became a part of the Republic of Texas. In 1845, Texas was admitted to the union, bringing early day Baca County along with it. Nine years later ownership moved to the Kansas Territory and then to the Colorado Territory in 1861. When the state of Colorado entered the Union five years later, Baca was a part of Las Animas County before claiming its own county name in 1889 through an act of the Colorado legislature.
After hearing speculators’ promises of a land of milk and honey in the late 1880s, farmers and homesteaders (many relocating from Kansas) came to settle and work the prairie. There is still evidence of where explorers, pioneers and homesteaders made their way across the region following one of the three branches of the Santa Fe Trail that crossed the southeastern corner of the county. They followed the lifestyle of earlier cultures, hunting pronghorns and jackrabbits, picking berries and other wild plants from the canyons to supplement the crops that quickly proved so difficult to grow in the arid soil and desert winds. Though many gave up their dreams of settlement and moved on to less harsh and demanding areas, much of the farm and ranch land is still owned by members of original pioneer families.
Several cattle drive trails can still be seen across Baca County where livestock were herded from the southern plains to rail yards farther north for shipment back east. And at one time Baca County was known as the “Broomcorn Capital of the World”. The crop was king in the late 1800s, requiring much hand labor and hard work to harvest and prepare the brush or seed heads for the making of household brooms. With the advent of synthetic materials for brooms and brushes, there is little demand for broom corn in Baca County today. The present-day economy is based on ranching and farming, with irrigated row crops in the eastern part of the county.
Some of the county’s farmland was overgrazed and fell victim to years of drought in the ‘dirty thirties’. After the Great Depression, much of the land was reclaimed by the government and reseeded with native grasses. Today, these high prairie lands and river canyons are among the recreational spaces of the Comanche National Grassland. Hikers can explore trails into and out of the canyons, where they still find Apishapa rock art, and here and there, the scant remnants of an old homestead.
Information for this story was taken from the Baca County history website and Colorado Heritage Magazine, which reprinted a chapter entitled “Two Years on the Colorado Flats” from a memoir by Earle Gillis.
For High Plains Public Radio, I’m Debra Bolton in Manhattan, Kansas.
—
Special thanks to Lynn Boitano for additional production assistance.
High Plains History is a production of High Plains Public Radio.
