The name Prowers, and the Cheyenne woman behind Amache

Here is a great piece of local history: two names you meet all over this part of the plains are tied together by one family. The county itself is named for John Prowers, a rancher who built one of the area’s first large cattle operations in the 1800s. The name Amache, used for the World War II camp near Granada, traces to his wife.

She was Ameohtse’e Ochinee Prowers, often written as Amache, a Cheyenne woman who married John Prowers in the early 1860s. By the accounts kept of her, she helped bridge cultures in a fast- changing region and was part of the family that helped shape ranching here. Her father was a Cheyenne leader whose life and death are bound up with the Sand Creek Massacre, one of the hardest chapters in Colorado history.

Decades later, Japanese Americans held at the Granada camp took up the name Amache. So a single name links a Cheyenne woman, a county, and a site of wartime incarceration, across more than a century.

This is a short pointer rather than the full story, and parts of it touch deep and painful history. To read her story and how these names connect, the best places to start are the National Park Service and History Colorado, where the records and communities that hold it can tell it in full.