Several major events paved the way for the settlement of the Roaring Fork and Crystal River valleys and the establishment of Carbondale. The Colorado Gold Rush of the 1860s precipitated by the discovery of gold in the mountains near Denver drew tens of thousands of gold seekers and settlers to Colorado, although many disappointed “go-backers” would soon return to the East.  The consequences of the “rush” were substantial.  The influx of Anglo-Americans had a disastrous toll on Native Americans.  The Cheyenne and Arapaho were brutally suppressed on the Colorado plains and sent to reservations in Oklahoma. The Ute Indians were forced to cede over half of their traditional hunting grounds and were confined to a reservation within the western part of Colorado by the Treaty of 1868.   At the time, the white population had little interest in that part of the Colorado Territory, but the lure of abundant riches and available land soon brought another wave of western expansion.

  Reports of a land rich in natural resources made the Ute Reservation too valuable to be left to “roaming savages. ”With gold and silver to be mined and farm land to be cultivated, miners and settlers began to encroach upon Ute land, and, despite Ute Chief Ouray’s plea, the federal government refused to prevent this migration.  Politicians in the newly formed state of Colorado designed a land policy that favored miners and settlers.  The policy was based on the determination that the Utes would be removed from Colorado within a period of ten years and their land transferred to settlers as quickly as possible.  “The Utes Must Go,” declared Frederick Walker Pitkin, recently elected Governor of Colorado.  The uprising of a band of Utes that led to the Meeker Massacre in 1879 presented governmental officials with a choice:  extermination or removal.  The latter course was chosen, and in 1881 the Utes were removed to a reservation in Utah.  As a result, western Colorado, including the Roaring Fork and Crystal River valleys, was open to settlement and mineral extraction.

Some of the reports describing the mineral wealth of the Rocky Mountains came from the Ferdinand Hayden expeditions.  In 1873, the U.S. Geological Survey commissioned Hayden to study the Elk Mountain Range in west-central Colorado.  With the reluctant permission of Chief Ouray, Hayden’s crew extensively mapped and William Henry Jackson photographed the Crystal River Valley in 1874.  It was noted in the survey report that this mineralized and complex geological area contained large quantities of high-quality coal resources.  The report would be, as were earlier ones reporting the silver deposits in the Aspen area, an invitation for prospectors and entrepreneurs to come to the region to take advantage of that mineral wealth.

 John C. Osgood, the future “Fuel King of the West” and founder of Redstone, arrived in the Crystal River Valley in 1882 to begin his coal and coke enterprise in western Colorado.  A few years earlier, small parties of prospectors from Leadville with copies of the Hayden surveys in their hands crossed Independence Pass into the Roaring Fork Valley to stake silver claims.  They were soon followed by town builders and mining entrepreneurs who purchased many of the claims and established Aspen, Independence, and Ashcroft mining camps.  The opening of coal and silver mining operations in the two valleys set the stage for the region’s development.

The Colorado silver boom that started with the discovery of silver at Leadville in 1879 was one of the most consequential factors in shaping the area’s early history.  It beckoned thousands of people, mostly single men, to Leadville. Many eventually migrated to Aspen, where they prospected, worked in the mines, or freighted (hauled goods).Aspen, like Leadville before, could not accommodate all of the men who were lured there by the silver boom.  For some, the silver towns were merely transit points to the newly opened land to the west. In the spring of 1882, hundreds of settlers rushed to the Roaring Fork and Crystal River valleys to establish farms and ranches by preemption (the right of a settler to purchase 160 acres of unsurveyed land he had improved for $1.25 per acre) to provide the hay and fresh food for the Aspen population.

Before the railroads expanded the agricultural economy beyond the local area, truck farming (growing produce for the local market) was the primary form of farming and ranching in the two river valleys. W. F. Corhead’s farm on the Crystal River was typical of a truck farm of this period.  In 1882, he planted turnips, potatoes, cabbage, oats, rye, and buckwheat.  He also cut 15 tons of hay.  The growing Aspen market for produce and hay encouraged others to give up mining and take up farming and ranching.  Eugene Grubb achieved recognition by developing the science of potato cultivation on a ranch he purchased on the Crystal River south of the present site of Carbondale.  Through his efforts and those of other Carbondale pioneers, potatoes became the specialty crop of the area well into the 20^th century.

The arrival of the railroads— the Denver and Rio Grande and Colorado Midland— was the last of the events that shaped the area’s early history.  The coal deposits in the coalfields southwest of Carbondale brought the trains to the Grand, Roaring Fork and Crystal River valleys. Their arrival in 1887 ended Carbondale’s isolation and made it an energetic hub of agricultural and commercial prosperity during the early twentieth century. The region’s history from early exploration and settlement to industrialization is a microcosm of the nation’s westward expansion.