also the usual
aid from the federal government. Experiment stations in connexion with
the college are maintained at different points. Colorado College (1874)
at Colorado Springs, Christian but not denominational, and the
University of Denver, Methodist, are on independent foundations. The
United States maintains an Indian School at Grand Junction.

_History._--According as one regards the Louisiana purchase as including
or not including Texas to the Rio Grande (in the territorial meaning of
the state of Texas of 1845), one may say that all of Colorado east of
the meridian of the head of the Rio Grande, or only that north of the
Arkansas and east of the meridian of its head, passed to the United
States in 1803. At all events the corner between the Rio Grande and the
Arkansas was Spanish from 1819 to 1845, when it became American
territory as a part of the state of Texas; and in 1850, by a boundary
arrangement between that state and the federal government, was
incorporated in the public domain. The territory west of the divide was
included in the Mexican cession of 1848. Within Colorado there are
pueblos and cave dwellings commemorative of the Indian period and
culture of the south-west. Coronado may have entered Colorado in 1540;
there are also meagre records of indisputable Spanish explorations in
the south in the latter half of the 18th century (friars Escallante and
Dominguez in 1776). In 1806 Zebulon M. Pike, mapping the Arkansas and
Red rivers of the Louisiana Territory for the government of the United
States, followed the Arkansas into Colorado, incidentally discovering
the famous peak that bears his name. In 1819 Major S. H. Long explored
the valleys of the South Platte and Arkansas, pronouncing them
uninhabited and uncultivable (as he also did the valley of the Missouri,
whence the idea of the "Great American Desert"). His work also is
commemorated by a famous summit of the Rockies. There is nothing more of
importance in Colorado annals until 1858. From 1804 to 1854 the whole or
parts of Colorado were included, nominally, under some half-dozen
territories carved successively out of the Trans-Mississippi country;
but not one of these had any practical significance for an uninhabited
land. In 1828 (to 1832) a fortified trading post was established near La
Junta in the Arkansas valley on the Santa Fe trail; in 1834-1836 several
private forts were erected on the Platte; in 1841 the first overland
emigrants to the Pac