Lake City exists because of mining on land taken from the Ute people

Lake City and Hinsdale County did not appear by accident. Their story starts with the land’s earlier people and with a silver rush.

Long before prospectors arrived, the San Juan Mountains around what is now Lake City were used by the Ute, who call themselves the Nuche. In the 1870s, pressure from miners led to an agreement, the Brunot Agreement, under which the Ute ceded a large block of these mountain lands. Only after that did mining claims and a town take hold. Lake City grew in the mid-1870s as a supply center for the mines working the surrounding gulches and creeks.

This is worth telling carefully rather than as a quaint origin tale. The mining wealth that built the town came directly after the Ute were forced off this ground. Both facts are part of the same history, and honest local history holds them together.

If you want to understand why Lake City sits where it does, this is the root of it: a homeland, a land cession, and then a mining camp.

For the documented history of Ute land cession and Hinsdale County mining, see History Colorado and the Colorado Encyclopedia, and look for Ute Mountain Ute and Southern Ute tribal sources for the Ute perspective.