Here are the spacious skies, stretching without interruption hundreds of miles eastward from the foot of the Rocky Mountains. Here also are the golden, rolling, irrigated fields of wheat and corn, spreading along the valleys of the South Platte and Republican rivers and their tributaries.
A different Colorado exists on the sparsely populated plains, one that inspired James Michener's novel Centennial. Alive are stories of the prehistoric buffalo hunters who first inhabited the region; trailblazers and railroad crews who opened up the area to Anglo settlement; hardy pioneer farmers who endured drought, economic ruin, and so many other hardships; and ranchers such as John W. Iliff, who carved a feudal empire built on longhorn cattle. Pioneer museums, frontier forts, old battlefields, and preserved downtown districts won't let history die. Vast open stretches -- wetlands swollen with migrating waterfowl, the starkly beautiful Pawnee National Grassland -- remind us that Colorado is not just the Rocky Mountains.
