History and culture - Mountains
How the Gunnison name landed on the river, county, and town
The river, county, and town of Gunnison all carry the name of Captain John W. Gunnison, a U.S. Army surveyor who passed through during an 1853 railroad survey.
Published June 10, 2026 - Last verified June 11, 2026
You will see the Gunnison name everywhere here: the river, the county, the city, and a deep canyon downstream. They all trace back to one person.
Captain John W. Gunnison was an officer in the U.S. Army’s Corps of Topographical Engineers, the branch that explored and mapped the West. In 1853 he led a survey looking for a workable route for a railroad to the Pacific. His party traveled through this high country and made an early official record of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison River. Gunnison judged that a railroad through that rugged stretch would be very hard to build. Later that same year, far to the west in what is now Utah, Gunnison and several of his men were killed during the expedition.
Why this is worth knowing as more than trivia: the name on so many local maps is not a family name or a Ute word, but a memorial to a surveyor who came through once and never returned. It is a small window into how the federal government mapped and named this region in the 1800s.
For a careful, sourced account of Captain Gunnison and his expedition, the National Park Service pages for Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park are a good place to start.