Marv Sundstrom: There is a hole in the ground by the Yampa River, near where the railroad tracks run now, and for most of the time this valley has existed, it made a noise. A chugging. Rhythmic. Loud enough that people who had never seen this place before wrote it down when they heard it. Loud enough that a town three miles away ended up named after it. It doesn't make that sound anymore. We'll get to why. But start here: that spring was doing that for thousands of years before anybody in this story arrives. Before the town. Before the ranches. Before the people the town credits with finding it. It was running, and it was making that sound, and people were coming to it.

Marv Sundstrom: This is Back in the Boat — the history of Steamboat Springs and the Yampa Valley. What happened here, who it happened to, and how much of what gets repeated about this place is actually true. We use AI to research and produce this show. We say so up front, every time. It would be a strange show about honesty that started with a lie. And this episode needs a second disclosure, bigger than the first one, so we are putting it here at the top rather than burying it in the credits. This is a pilot, and part of this episode is a placeholder. Most of this hour is about the Nuche — the people most records call Ute — and about the band associated with this valley, the Yamparika. Everything we are going to tell you about them, we assembled from written sources. Museum material, city records, published history. All of it produced by people who were not Nuche. The people who actually hold this history are alive. Most of the ones removed from this valley are enrolled in the **Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation**, in northeastern Utah — the Northern Ute Tribe. And here is a detail worth sitting with: that tribe is made up of three bands. The Uintah, the Uncompahgre, and the Whiteriver. The last two are the exact bands who were forced out of this country in 1880 and 1881. They are not a historical footnote. They are a government, with an address, roughly a valley and a half west of here. We have not spoken to them yet. We intend to, and it is the first thing on our list, because it is the longest lead time in this entire project and everything here improves once it happens. So take what follows as our best assembly of the available record, and not as testimony. When we get it from the source, we are not going to patch this episode. We are going to make it again, properly, with the people whose history it is. You will be able to hear the difference and you should. That is the deal. Now let's get on with it.

Marv Sundstrom: This is the first episode, so there is no "last time." There is instead a question, and it is the one the whole series hangs off: What was this place, before it was ours? That matters because of what comes after it. This valley has an origin story it likes to tell — a trapper, a spring, a founding family, a name. It is a good story. It is also a story that begins several thousand years late. So this hour is about the part that comes first. And we are going to be unusually careful with it, because we are going to run into the limits of what we actually know faster than you might expect — and when we do, we are going to say so rather than fill the space with atmosphere. One more thing before we start. This episode has no jokes in it. This show usually has a lighter beat somewhere in the middle. This one doesn't, on purpose, and we'd rather tell you that than have you wait for one.

Marv Sundstrom: Deep time first, because the ground is the oldest character here. What you're looking at, if you stand anywhere in this valley and turn around, is a basin with a river through it and mountains on the sides. The Yampa runs west, which is worth noticing — most of what people know about Colorado rivers is that they run away from the Front Range, and this one keeps going, out through sandstone country, toward the Green and eventually the Colorado. And underneath it, something less common. Water finds its way down through rock, gets warm, picks up minerals, and comes back up. Not in one place. In roughly a hundred and fifty places. That's the actual number, as best it can be counted — around a hundred and fifty springs and seeps in and around this town. Ten of them are named. In December of 2023, nine were granted local historic designation. We tend to say "the hot springs" like it's an amenity. It is a geological system. Steamboat Spring, Heart Spring, Iron Spring, Black Sulphur, Soda — each one with its own chemistry, its own temperature, its own smell, its own character. Some you'd bathe in. Some would take the finish off your car. And one of them, before the twentieth century got to it, was a geyser. An actual geyser — reportedly the only natural one in Colorado — spouting somewhere in the range of five to fifteen feet and making that chugging noise. There's a cave here too. Sulphur Cave. The air in it is, in the technical sense, lethal — the gas coming off the water displaces what you need to breathe. And living in there, in that water, are blood-red worms found nowhere else on Earth. Not rare. Not unusual. Nowhere else. A species whose entire known range is one hole in the ground in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. That's not a colorful aside. That's the point of this section. Before there is a single human being in this episode, this valley is already unusual. The reason people kept coming back to this specific stretch of river is not sentimental. It is that the ground here does something the ground around it does not. And it's worth being precise about which spring is which, because the town itself

Marv Sundstrom: gets this wrong constantly and we're going to be strict about it for eight episodes. The Steamboat Spring — the one that chugged, the one the town is named for — is down by the Yampa, near the railroad tracks. That is not the one you soak in. Old Town Hot Springs, where people have gathered and bathed for as long as anyone here remembers, is a different spring in the same system. They get conflated in almost every casual retelling, including by us, until somebody who actually knows this valley set us straight. So: the named one and the warm one are not the same hole in the ground. Two different springs, two different jobs, one system.

Marv Sundstrom: Now people. And here is where the show has to start being careful with itself. The oldest question we can ask is: who was here first? And for a long time the answer given locally has been vague — "Native Americans," or a guess at a name that turns out to belong to a different part of the state entirely. So we went looking, and there is a real answer, and it isn't the one that gets guessed. The Fremont. Not the Ancestral Puebloans — the people often called Anasazi. Those were a Four Corners people, hundreds of miles south. The answer for northwestern Colorado is the Fremont culture, and northwestern Colorado is not incidental to them. Some of the significant Fremont sites sit on tributaries of the White, the Yampa and the Green. Rock art. Granaries. Places people lived. Here's what makes them interesting, and it cuts against what you'd assume about people in this country two thousand years ago. They stayed put. The Fremont were largely sedentary — unlike the peoples before them and the peoples after them. They built pit-house villages. They built adobe structures to store food, which tells you they had food worth storing and expected to be there to eat it. And they farmed. Corn, beans, squash. With irrigation. In this country. They hunted and gathered as well, but they were running agriculture in northwestern Colorado somewhere between roughly two thousand and seven hundred years ago. Think about what a granary implies. You don't build storage for food you intend to eat this week. You build it because you harvested more than you needed, and because you expect to still be standing in that spot four months from now when you need the rest of it. A granary is a statement about the future. It says *we are staying.* They left rock art, too. Figures worked into stone out along those river drainages — made by people who were here long enough, and settled enough, to spend daylight on something that was not food and was not shelter. Then, sometime around the thirteenth or fourteenth century, they're gone. And here is where we do the thing this show is going to do a lot, so we may as well set the pattern in the first episode.

Marv Sundstrom: What we know: the Fremont were here, they were sedentary, they farmed, and the archaeological record of them thins out and ends. What we can reasonably infer: something changed — climate, water, food, pressure from other groups, or several at once. That's the general shape of what tends to move agricultural people off land they've committed to. What we do not know: which of those it was. Or where they went. Or what they called themselves. We are not going to dress that up. It is a genuine open question in the archaeology, not a mystery we're building suspense around, and we'd rather leave it standing as a question than hand you a confident answer that isn't one. There's a smaller version of that question we can actually go and answer, and we intend to: what specifically has been found in this valley, as opposed to the wider region. That's a museum question, and we have a museum.

Marv Sundstrom: While we're being strict with ourselves — one correction, aimed at us. There is an earlier version of this episode. We published it. In it we said human presence in this valley goes back to around 1820. We went looking for where that number came from and could not find it. The earliest account we can actually source and point at is 1839. So either 1820 comes from something real we haven't located, or it came from nowhere, and we think it came from nowhere. We're telling you that because a show that corrects other people's history and never its own isn't worth listening to. The old episode stays up. It stays up with this attached to it. And while we're at it: 1839 is not when people got here. It's when somebody wrote it down. Those are different numbers by several thousand years and this show is going to keep separating them.

Marv Sundstrom: Which brings us to the people who were here when the written record starts — and who are still here now. The Nuche. That's what they call themselves. In most of what's been written about this place they're called Ute, and the specific band associated with this valley is the Yamparika — the Yampatika — whose name and this river's name are the same word. The city of Steamboat Springs, in a 2020 proclamation drafted by Dr. Enrique Maestas and reviewed by members of the Ute Tribe, names them as Colorado's oldest documented inhabitants. Notice the word in the band's name. Yamparika. Yampa. The same word as the river. The same word as the valley. The same word that's on the sign when you drive in, on the side of the rafting company, on the letterhead of half the businesses in this town. We use it constantly. Most of us could not tell you where it comes from. We are not going to guess at it on air — the etymology is exactly the kind of thing that should come from a Ute source rather than from us reasoning out loud. But we'd point out that the oldest surviving name in this entire valley is not Steamboat. It's Yampa. It was here first, it's still in daily use, and it's the one piece of this that never got replaced.

Marv Sundstrom: And what the record consistently says about how this valley was used is a single fact that I'd argue is the most important sentence in this episode: It was seasonal. The Yamparika wintered lower and further west, where it was survivable. In the warmer months they came up into the Yampa Valley — to hunt, to gather, and to use the springs. The springs were not a bath. They were medicine springs. Sacred ground for physical and spiritual healing. Other peoples came to them too; the Arapaho are recorded among them. For hundreds of years, this was a place you went to in the good months, for what it had, and then you left.

Marv Sundstrom: Now — remember the disclosure at the top, because this next stretch is the part it was for. What follows is a reconstruction. It is what the written record supports, put together by us. It is not testimony, and where we move from record to reasonable inference we are going to say the word. So. A year. What the record supports: the movement was up and down, not back and forth. Winter was spent lower and further west, in country where the snow was survivable and the game was. As the year warmed, people moved up into the Yampa Valley. Hunting, gathering, the springs. Then back down before the valley closed for the winter. What we can reasonably infer from that, and we are flagging it as inference: that is not wandering. A seasonal round like that is a route — the same country, in roughly the same order, at roughly the same time each year, because you know where the elk will be in September and where the plants come on in June. It's a schedule kept without a calendar, held in memory and taught. People who move like that are not moving because they lack somewhere to be. They are moving because they have several places to be and they know when. What the record supports: the springs were not incidental to that. They were a reason to come. Medicine springs — sacred, for physical and spiritual healing. Not a bath. Not scenery. And other peoples came for them as well; the Arapaho are recorded among them, which tells you this valley was a destination for more than one nation. What we can reasonably infer: if a place is worth the trip for its water, and more than one people makes that trip, then this valley had a reputation. Somewhere out there, for a very long time, this was a known place. Steamboat Springs has spent fifty years marketing itself as a destination. It was one for centuries before anyone here thought of it as a business. What we genuinely do not know, and will not perform: what any of it felt like. What was said at those springs. What was sung, if anything was. What a person thought coming over the last rise and seeing the valley open up. We have no source for that, and the difference between describing a route and inventing

Marv Sundstrom: an inner life is the whole difference between history and costume. That is where our version stops, and it stops there on purpose. Because here is the situation with our sources. Nearly everything written down about the Nuche in this valley was written by people who arrived later, who did not speak the language, and who within a few decades would be arguing publicly for their removal. That is not a neutral record. It is a record kept by one party to a dispute, and we have been reading it all hour. The people who can correct all of this are alive and reachable. We said their name at the top and we'll say it again: the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation. Three bands, two of which were removed from this ground. We're going to go ask. Until we do, what you just heard is our best assembly and it is labeled as such. And here's what to hold onto regardless, because it's real and it's ours to notice: This valley was seasonal for the Nuche for centuries before it was a seasonal resort town. People came up in the warm months for what the ground offered. Then they went back down to somewhere more livable in the winter. That's the whole modern economy of this place, running in reverse and eight hundred years early. And when we get to the Crawfords — the founding family, the permanent settlers — you're going to find out that they left for Boulder in the hard winters too. Nobody has ever fully lived here year-round without deciding to. That thread runs the entire length of this series.

Marv Sundstrom: Two more things before we close, both of which are open questions rather than facts, and both flagged as such. The first: this ground has been claimed by governments that no longer exist, and by some that do but not from here. There's a version of the story where a Texas claim reached up into this part of the world, and where the region brushed Wyoming territory at various points, before any of it was Colorado. **We have not verified that**, and we're not going to assert it on the strength of it being a good line. It's on our list. The second is the contrast, and it's the one that sets up everything after. While this valley stayed quiet and stayed Nuche, the rest of Colorado Territory was detonating. Gold at Pikes Peak in 1858 and '59. Denver going from nothing to a boomtown. Silver at Leadville and at Aspen through the seventies and eighties. Statehood in 1876. Everywhere else in this territory, boom. Here — remote, seasonal, occupied, and not yet worth enough to anybody with an army. That gap is the last quiet this valley ever got.

Marv Sundstrom: And you can see it in the ages of the towns around us, which is a thing worth doing once because it recalibrates where Steamboat sits in the order. Hahns Peak is the elder. A gold strike in the 1860s, and it pulled the first prospectors into what would become this county — the earliest outside interest of any consequence in this corner of Colorado. Craig doesn't settle until the 1880s. Oak Creek and the South Routt coal camps are turn-of-the-century — twentieth century, which is more recent than most people here would guess. Those coal towns feel ancient because they're gone. Gone and old are not the same thing. And then there's Meeker. The town of Meeker, west of here, is named after a man. A federal Indian agent named Nathan Meeker. We are not going to explain that tonight. That's next episode, and it's the hinge the whole valley turns on. But hold the shape of it: almost every neighbor we have was founded after the thing that happens in the next episode. This valley's towns are, nearly without exception, downstream of 1881. Steamboat included.

Marv Sundstrom: So that's the valley on its own terms. A basin with a river running the wrong way. A hundred and fifty springs, one of which was a geyser and chugged like a steamboat. Worms in a cave that exist nowhere else. Farmers two thousand years ago who built granaries and then vanished for reasons nobody has settled. And a people who came up every summer for the medicine water, for centuries, and are still here to be asked about it. Next time, the two worlds overlap. Trappers, prospectors, one settler family in a valley with a hundred Ute teepees on the mesa — and a federal agent, a plowed horse pasture, and 1881. The spring stopped chugging in the early 1900s. Railroad construction disrupted it and the sound never came back. The town silenced the thing it was named after. We'll get to that too.

Marv Sundstrom: Last thing, and it's the reason this show exists at all. We're looking for the stories that hold the history of this valley — the ones in people's heads that aren't in any archive. If you have one, we want it. And if you heard something in this episode you know more about than we do — especially if we got it wrong — that's the most useful thing you can send us. backintheboat.com/stories. We read every one.