Item Detail
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27705
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2
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0
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English
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Struggling to find Zion : Mormons in Colorado's San Luis Valley
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Denver, Colorado
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University of Colorado Denver
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191
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Master's Thesis
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In 1876, an eclectic assemblage of Danish people, Hispanics, Southerners from Alabama, Georgia and other southern states, and members of the Catawba Indian tribe from South Carolina colonized in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado. Under the unified banner of Mormonism, they were thrown together by their religious faith and their struggle to find `Zion', symbolic of a place to establish a society where all inhabitants lived in harmony. They came to settle along the Rio Grande near the spot where Mexico's Governor Don Diego de Vargas crossed in 1694 and the banks of the Conejos River where Zebulon Montgomery Pike built a log stockade in 1807. The Valley is historically best remembered for other events, both real and mythical. Spanish conquistadors searched for gold and explored pathways westward to California. Trappers and traders crisscrossed the area leaving only slight traces on the landscape. Before all of them, Folsom people, Ancestral Pueblo Indians and later other Native Americans occupied the San Luis Valley. But the arrival of Mormon colonizers in the spring of 1878 near the town of Los Cerritos in Conejos County is less well known. Historians Andrew Jensen and Nicholas G. Morgan published journal articles on the subject more than forty-five years ago; two thesis papers were written in the 1960s; in 1983 an institutional history was compiled for the local LDS Church in La Jara, Colorado; and in 2003 historian Edward R. Crowther contributed an article published in the San Luis Valley Historical Society Journal. These historical publications focused on Mormon colonizers from southern states and the Danish who came from Utah to assist them. A history of the Catawba Indian people who arrived in the San Luis Valley as Mormons from South Carolina in 1886 has previously been omitted. The plural wives of social and financially elite practicing polygamists from Utah spent years of exile in the colonies but like the Catawba, this also has been omitted. The interwoven histories of each of these groups and individuals contribute additional context to the historiography of the multicultural diversity in the San Luis Valley, which is often over shadowed by the dominant Hispanic history of the region. The experience of early Mormons in Colorado broadens and compliments Colorado historical scholarship and it is both relevant and deserving of recognition as a significant contribution to the states' history. This is just one example of the surprising diversity to be found in many a region.