I took a walk around the square block where the Fort Collins, Colorado downtown library and Heritage Courtyard are located, and took the photograph on the left of the Auntie Elizabeth Stone Cabin, the oldest residence in Fort Collins. It was built in 1864 by Elizabeth Stone and her husband, Judge Lewis Stone, who moved to Colorado to operate the officers mess at Camp Collins, which was built to protect settlers and travelers along the Overland Trail. Just three years later it was decided that the area no longer needed protecting, and the camp was closed, but the town of Fort Collins was born. There never was a fort, but obviously Fort Collins sounds like a much better name for a town than Camp Collins.
Another cabin in the Heritage Courtyard is the Joseph Antoine Janis Cabin, built in 1859 and originally located in LaPorte, just to the west of Fort Collins. Janis was a French-American who worked as a scout and interpreter at Fort Laramie (in Wyoming), and moved to the Fort Collins area because he found it so beautiful. He married a member of the Oglala Sioux tribe, and in 1878 his wife was ordered to move to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, due to the mandatory removal of American Indians from that part of Colorado. How sad is that? Janis accompanied his wife to the reservation and died there in 1890. Pine Ridge, by the way, is the poorest Indian Reservation in the country. I have a sneaking suspicion it was no great shakes back in 1878, either.
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