Las Animas - Bent County Library District

Colorado Collection

In 1879 a small band of Ute Indians went wild in the Colorado Rockies and ambushed a force of soldiers, murdered their Indian agent and his employees, and took three women hostage. This was the Massacre at White River, and its consequences included the removal of the Ute tribe to barren lands, while the western slope of Colorado was opened to white settlement.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) was established as a result of an agreement between Canada and the United States to defend against increasing Soviet military capabilities. In the early years of World War II, the leaders of the United States and Canada agreed to military cooperation, thus beginning strong defense relations still evident today. Military and civilian personnel from both countries work together for the defense of...

Army scout Kit Carson rode the Southwest in many capacities. He served and retired in Colorado, and so Fort Carson is appropriately named. On land once traversed by Lt. Zebulon Pike, Camp Carson was constructed almost overnight under the watchful eye of Pres. Franklin Roosevelt and with the approval of the neighbors in Colorado Springs. Since its creation, the post has been the home and training grounds for thousands of soldiers who have fought in...

"On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 9066, forcing the evacuation of more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans from the West Coast to "settlement camps" inland." "This shameful dislocation of so many lives has been well-documented in such popular books as Farewell to Manzanar, but none, until now, have focused on the internment camp known as Amache, located on the southeastern plains of Colorado. This book not...

Deep Enough, first published in 1956, is the adventure-filled autobiography of Frank Crampton in the mines, mining camps, and frontier towns of the American wild west in the early 1900s. At age 16, Crampton ran away from home, traveling west aboard freight trains in the company of hobos and 'bindle stiffs.' A fast learner, Crampton mastered hard-rock mining skills, and went on to work in most of the important western mining camps in Arizona, California,...

Phantoms, that's what they're called, the soldiers that ski. You can't even see them when they're in the mountains. They disappear like ghosts.... In this gripping journey, a fifteen-year-old pacifist must decide what he believes as he faces the reality of World War II. The year is 1944, and fifteen-year-old Noah Garrett's parents have died from smallpox. Without any other family nearby, Noah is sent to live with his uncle, whom he has never met,...

In his acclaimed memoir German Boy: A Refugee's StoryComing to Colorado charts the path of Samuel's eventual triumph. In 1960, his proud mother saw pinned on his shoulders the gold bars of a second lieutenant in the United States Air Force. It was the end of a struggle for the German boy, who had become, as he wished, the ultimate American.