Cortez, Colorado

Cortez is a town built to move water. Unlike the mining camps and rail stops that seeded most of Colorado, it began on Christmas Day 1886, when Matt Hammond hauled the first lumber onto the site to raise its earliest buildings. The town was laid out by M.J. Mack, engineer for the Montezuma Valley Water Supply Company, on land owned by the company's president, J.W. Hanna, and its purpose was blunt and practical: to house the men who would build the elaborate network of tunnels, ditches, and laterals needed to divert the Dolores River over a ridge and into the dry Montezuma Valley. By the spring of 1887, hundreds of men were at work on the new system. The town took its name from Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conquistador — a piece with its county, named for the Aztec emperor Moctezuma. The gamble was that the valley's sandy red soil, once watered, would grow abundant crops.

The gamble mostly paid off. Once the valley was watered, it grew crops like alfalfa, potatoes, wheat, and beans, with cattle on the range and orchards down in McElmo Canyon. But the deeper history here dwarfs the town's own. Ancestral Pueblo people had settled the Mesa Verde region by around AD 600, building the mesa-top villages and, later, the cliff dwellings that President Theodore Roosevelt set aside in 1906 as Mesa Verde National Park — the first national park created to protect cultural heritage, holding nearly 5,000 archaeological sites and the great Cliff Palace. Cortez became the front door to all of it. Just south, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe — descendants of the Weeminuche band — established their reservation in the 1890s, headquartered at Towaoc beneath Sleeping Ute Mountain.