Sam: So picture this: it's the early 1880s, you've hauled a wagon over a pass, you're standing in a valley with a river running through it, and there's basically nobody here to sell you a nail.

Sean: Right, and before we go anywhere with that — I want to be careful. When we say 'nobody here,' we mean nobody in the sense of a permanent Euro-American settlement. The Ute people had been using this valley for a very long time before any of that.

Sam: Yeah. That's a distinction that gets flattened all the time, and it matters. The Yampa Valley wasn't empty. It was a seasonal landscape people knew intimately — hunting, the hot springs, moving through with the seasons.

Sean: And by the time the first homesteaders show up in what becomes Steamboat Springs, the Utes have largely been forced out of northwestern Colorado. That's after the events of 1879 and the removals that follow. So the 'empty valley' the settlers describe is empty because it was emptied.

Sam: Which is a heavy thing to hold onto while we talk about the next ten years, but I think we have to hold onto it. Otherwise the settlement story sounds like it starts from zero, and it doesn't.

Sean: Okay. So — the first decade. What are we actually talking about, timeline-wise?

Sam: Roughly the mid-1870s through the mid-1880s, depending on who you count. James Crawford is the name that shows up first in most local accounts — he and his family are generally credited as the first permanent Euro-American settlers here.

Sean: And that's according to the local histories and the museum record, right? Not a thing we're pulling out of the air. Crawford is the anchor name in the earliest accounts I've seen.

Sam: Right. And the town-naming story — the one everybody in Steamboat has heard — is that French trappers, further back, heard the chugging sound of one of the hot springs and thought it was a steamboat on the river.

Sean: Which is a great story. It's also local tradition. I've never seen a primary document from those trappers saying, 'we thought it was a steamboat.' It's the accepted origin, but it's oral tradition dressed up as history.

Sam: And the spring they're supposedly referring to — the one that chugged — got quieted when the railroad came through and the blasting changed it. So the naming sound isn't even something you can go stand next to and verify.

Sean: So that's two claims stacked on each other, and only one of them — that the spring existed and was later altered — is really documented. The trapper anecdote itself is legend.

Sam: Okay, but forget the plaque version for a second. What was it actually like to try to live here in year one? You're in a valley at, what, sixty-seven hundred feet, winter is not a metaphor, and the nearest supply town is a serious ride away.

Sean: The practical answer is: you're building a cabin, you're running a few head of cattle if you can, you're trying to grow hay in a season that's too short, and you are spending an enormous amount of time on firewood.

Sam: Firewood is the unsung main character of frontier life. Nobody puts it on the plaque. But if you're a family in that first cabin in January, that's the whole day.

Sean: And winter is the thing that breaks people out here in that first decade. This isn't a valley where you can casually overwinter. The snow comes early, it stays, and if your provisions don't hold, you're in real trouble.

Sam: There's this thing I keep coming back to — the settlers who stayed weren't necessarily the toughest or the smartest. A lot of it was just who happened to have enough hay, enough cabin, enough family, to make it to April.

Sean: Which is not the story people tell about themselves later. The story later is grit and vision. In the moment it was probably closer to luck and hay.

Sam: So who else is here in that first decade, besides the Crawfords? Because the founder-family framing can crowd everyone else out.

Sean: Honestly, this is a place where I have to say I don't know as much as I'd like. There are other homesteading families that show up in the county records in the late 1870s and early 1880s, some of them further down the Yampa toward what becomes Hayden, some up toward Elk River. The names are in the record; the day-to-day is thinner.

Sam: And there's a whole population that barely shows up in the written record at all — hired hands, cooks, itinerant workers, women whose labor kept these homesteads running and who don't get named in the founding stories.

Sean: Right. The census will catch some of them. The county histories, less so.

Sam: Ranching is the economic story of that first decade, more than anything else. Cattle first, sheep coming in a bit later, and that's a tension that plays out for years. But in the first ten years it's mostly cattle and hay meadows.

Sean: And no railroad yet. The railroad doesn't reach Steamboat until much later — early 1900s. So in this first decade you're moving cattle out and supplies in over wagon roads and passes.

Sam: Which is why the road argument is the argument of the era. Where does the road go, who pays for it, who benefits, whose ranch does it pass — that's the local politics.

Sean: It's very funny to me that the founding-era political fight in Steamboat is basically a road fight, because that has not changed.

Sam: No. You could run that same meeting today with different coats on.

Sean: The other thing worth flagging: this is before Steamboat is meaningfully a 'town.' There's no ski area, obviously. There's no real main street in the way we'd recognize. It's a scatter of homesteads with a hot springs in the middle that people already know about.

Sam: And the hot springs are doing a lot of quiet work in this story. They're the reason people knew this spot existed long before anybody filed a homestead claim on it. Indigenous use, trapper knowledge, early travelers — the springs are the landmark.

Sean: So if you had to say what Steamboat was, ten years into permanent settlement — what was it?

Sam: A handful of families, a lot of cattle, a road argument, a hot spring, and a winter that decided who stayed. That's honestly closer to it than any of the founding-myth language.

Sean: And no idea, from anyone standing here, that this becomes a ski town. That's not in the frame yet. Nobody in 1885 is looking at Storm Peak and imagining a chairlift.

Sam: Nobody in 1885 is imagining a chairlift anywhere. That's a good place to stop, actually.

Sean: So next time we'll pick up where this leaves off — the town starting to organize itself, the arguments about what kind of place it wants to be, and eventually the arrival of skis, which is a whole separate conversation.

Sam: Thanks for sitting with us in the uncertain parts. There's a lot we still don't know about that first decade, and we'd rather say that out loud than paper over it.

Sean: If you've got family stories from those early years, or you know something we got sideways, tell us. That's how this gets better.

Sam: We'll see you back in the boat.