Grand Junction - (Images of America (Arcadia Publishing)) by Alan J Kania (Paperback)

Number of Pages: 127
Genre: History
Sub-Genre: United States
Series Title: Images of America (Arcadia Publishing)
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing (SC)
Age Range: Adult
Book theme: State & Local, West (AK, CA, CO, HI, ID, MT, NV, UT, WY)
Author: Alan J Kania
Language: English

About the Book

The Ute Indians were hardly out of western Colorado when their land was opened to Anglo settlers. It was on September 26, 1881, when George A. Crawford, William McGinley, R. D. Mobley, M. R. Warner, and others went to the junction of the Gunnison and Grand (later renamed the Colorado) Rivers to claim 640 acres. In the semiarid confluence of the two rivers, a city developed, fruit orchards were planted, and a college grew out of the seeds of a single-room school with a dirt floor. Several newspapers opened, providing news and information to a business community that included coal mining, railroads, dry goods, and even a toffee factory whose products have graced the tables of royalty. How Grand Junction was able to develop into a progressive community of entrepreneurs, educators, and community-minded citizens is a story best told in a small sampling of pictures. None of the founders are still here, but their legacy, stories, and pictures have survived to speak for them.

Review Quotes

Title: Snapshots of Grand Junction history on display in Arcadia book series
Author: Charles Ashby
Publisher: The Daily Sentinel
Date: 6/12/2010

History books sometimes can be, well, history books.

But when those books are about something you know, they can have a little more meaning.

Take Arcadia Publishing Co. s Images of America series.

The South Carolina-based company is known for the books it publishes on local history. Not world history or U.S. history per se, but uber-local history.

That series came out with two more installments in early May that local history buffs might find worthwhile.

Grand Junction and The Uncompahgre Valley are two books that offer a history of this part of the Western Slope from the original Ute tribes that roamed these lands to the modern-day towns that exist here now.

That history is offered in snapshots, literally. They tell the region s story through a series of old photos.

In Grand Junction, author Alan J. Kania compiled photos from several sources, including the Mesa County Genealogy Society, the Mesa County Historical Society and Mesa State College.

The Uncompahgre Valley was complied by former Delta resident Theajo Davis and Royal C. Huff Sr.

Chapter One of Grand Junction starts with how the native Ute tribe that frequented the region, the Tabeguache, were forced from the region to make way for white settlers hungry for free land.

Though the book makes little note of Ute uprisings in protest of the federal government s forced relocation to reservations in Utah that was prompted by the death of an Indian agent s family, it does include a picture of early white settlers around the Ute Prisoner Surrender Tree, where some of them turned themselves in.

The book goes on to show how a city sprang from the desert, started in part by George A. Crawford, founder of the Grand Junction Town Company in the early 1880s.

In a newspaper advertisement offering 4,000 lots for sale, Crawford describes The Future Metropolis of Western Colorado at the confluence of the Gunnison and Grand rivers, which later was renamed the Colorado River.

The ad goes on to describe the region as unsurpassed as a FARM and FRUIT REGION. Climate unrivaled in Colorado! No snow, scarcely any Winter.

Like the Uncompahgre book does for towns south of here, it shows how Grand Junction started with a few structures, including a saloon, of course, but quickly grew into a vibrant town in just a few short years.

Kania also published Colorado National Monument with Arcadia and John Otto: Trials and Trails by the University Press of Colorado."