Four Corners is an ancient crossroads.
Way before maps were drawn up, the ancestral Puebloan people lived here. Then the Navajo, Hopi, Ute and Zuni. Spanish explorers and settlement came in the 1500s. Americans in the 1800s.
But even into the 1860s, there was as yet no "Four Corners.” New Mexico Territory at that time extended across all the Southwest from Texas to California. During the Civil War, the southernmost half of that territory seceded to join the Confederacy. Union proposed an Arizona shaped differently, with a borderline running straight down from the point where the newly defined corners of Colorado and Utah met.
When the Union won the war, it also settled the question of the map. Lines were drawn, and the Four Corners were created – in a land that is still home to Navajo Nation and the Ute Mountain Ute – a crossroads for a quarter million every year from all across the globe.
About Colorado Postcards
Colorado Postcards are snapshots of our colorful state in sound. They give brief insights into our people and places, our flora and fauna, and our past and present, from every corner of Colorado.
