This is the first in a NiCHE series that investigates if rivers can be heritage, and if so, what kind of heritage. A companion to our series on Canadian Heritage Rivers, authors focus on the epistemological, historical, and cultural place of rivers with lessons and parallels for Canada, including comparative stories and/or lessons.

My first real impression of Colorado was the vastness of its plains. I had travelled across the state a few years before beginning my time at Colorado State University, driving across the country on some adolescent pilgrimage. It was then that I had crossed from Kansas into the eastern part of the state and watched the mountains spring up from the horizon. Two years later, the Rockies were on my left side as I rode up the I-25 towards Fort Collins and the Cache la Poudre River. The air was thin and hot. A great storm played out some hundred miles away.

The landscape was vastly different to the ones I had known before. The River Trent, flowing through the rolling, green East Midlands of England was medieval by comparison. Armies had fought time and time again over the limited crossings. The English Civil War, which confirmed the principles of democracy and parliament in the mid 17^th century, had been settled over a series of sieges at Newark on the banks of the Trent. I had volunteered as a teenager tending to the canal here, beneath ancient stone walls and surrounded by brown water. A national heritage decided by the meandering flows of a river. The waterway continues to hold meaning, and re-enactors play out scenes of conflict nearby each year. Heritage made manifest through clouds of musket smoke and thick wool uniforms. This emotion is consciously connected to the specifics of the environment  that surrounds it.

Even a year spent in western Washington felt more recognisable than the high plains of the Front Range. The greenery remained, replaced by towering pines and ferns. The phrase ‘temperate rainforest’ entered my vocabulary, and I marvelled at the sight of Coho salmon swimming up channels of turquoise. It had been a defining moment sitting on the banks of the Willamette during an out of state excursion, when I realised that rivers carried powerful narratives that directly linked humans, animals, and forces beyond both. The geologic age presented before the eyes of creatures with greater plans. For those in the Pacific Northwest, rivers carry heritage in the form of hydroelectric power, salmon fisheries, and federal projects. Richard White described this as a kind of energy: labour, experience and transformation¹ Rivers are links between communities, heritage, and values. Most importantly, they change just as much as these categories do over the years. Fluid in both physicality and meaning. Always influenced by local condition.

The Cache la Poudre was a shock to an otherwise green, brown, and high flow system. Originally a meeting place for Indigenous groups in the area, it received its French name sometime in the early 1820s. Spanish explorers had roamed parts of Colorado as early as the 16^th century, but it wasn’t until the advent of western hunting industry that the final name for the river was attained.²Trappers moving westward into the mountains traversed the 126 miles of river and during a blizzard stored powder for later use. Forty years would bring the establishment of a military outpost named Camp Collins in 1864 and the rest, as they say, is history. Other settlements thrived in this arid environment too. The City of Greeley, originally named the Union Colony of Colorado, sprang up some forty miles downstream where the Cache la Poudre meets the South Platte. Both settlements depended on the snow melt that the river brought then and still does now. Both were defined by their relationship to the river’s water.

The channel itself has a variable flow. Spring melt brings water down from the mountains, where it is collected in reservoirs and then dispersed across the long summer months. It is not unusual to see the river go from a roaring beast to a shallow stream showing riverbed boulders. Fort Collins has been subjected to repeated flash flooding across the years, most strongly remembered from 1997 when heavy July precipitation led to the deaths of five residents and inundated large parts of the city.³ There have been attempts to control the river regime both physically and legally since the advent of western water law and irrigation in the Poudre basin. A particularly hot season in 1874 had left water in the river stretched, and conflict arose between farmers in Greeley and Fort Collins.⁴ From this need to provide water for competing purposes, prior appropriation emerged as the dominant method for resolving dispute. It would be adopted at a state level and then implemented across the western United States. It remains a potent legal precedent to this day, with prior appropriation being of chief importance during debates over Colorado River water in the face of unprecedented regional drought throughout 2026.⁵

By the time I was tasked with documenting the development of a river trail along the Cache la Poudre, industry, infrastructure and laws preserving a delicate system of management had all matured significantly. The trail crossed two counties and at least five settlements. The river had several congressional designations, including recognition as a National Heritage Area. After several years of lobbying and a previous designation as Wild & Scenic, in 2009 the Cache la Poudre National Heritage Area was established to promote the agricultural and cultural significance of the river.⁶Crucially this meant appreciating the NHA concept of a ‘working river’. Water in the river is still used for a variety of industrial purposes, including farming and the processing of aggregate. Water is also used downstream for making some of the region’s best beer. Other commercial uses compete for the limited resource also, including white river rafting. Yet still it remains a symbol of nature in the less populated areas between Fort Collins and Greeley.

Differences between the two cities abound. The City of Greeley built sections of the trail using privately raised funding, in line with its predominantly right leaning politics and approach to public infrastructure. Fort Collins, on the other hand, adopted centralized tax rates for infrastructure as early as the 1960s when the final placement of I-25 had caused some tension between the two communities, and fuelled an informal antagonism. Industry too, came head-to-head with environmentalists, anglers and those who wanted to preserve the natural environment for more leisurely pursuits. Despite this, both communities agreed on the importance of a trail that would celebrate the river and its heritage.

 In a way, the trail mirrors the river. Its cultural construction, and the place it occupies in the minds of those local to Northern Colorado is fluid and ever changing. The trail sought to connect communities who achieved construction through different, and at times conflicting means. Interpretation differed too. Largely sculpted by the history of the area, the contemporary river is not insulated from argument either. Attempts to dam the river upstream of Fort Collins in the 1980s prompted a series of protests that would be revisited each time later diversions were planned. Most recently, the region’s largest water provider, Northern Water, met massive legal resistance from a longstanding environmentalist group, ‘Save The Poudre’, over the construction of a reservoir north-west of Fort Collins.⁷ Over the two years I spent at Colorado State University, and over multiple conversations with peers, locals, and developers, it became apparent that water was implicit in the minds of almost everyone there for one reason or another. But it presented very differently to how I had seen it in the Pacific Northwest, and in England.

It was an appreciation that was sculpted by the specifics of the landscape. Chiefly water scarcity. My training had told me that this was bioregionalism as defined by Dan Flores.⁸ He supposed that a culture was influenced by the specificities of place. But it was not a concept or word that the people in Northern Colorado used frequently. To them, it was about the history of the river, either in the long form or in their own personal histories. How they had known some of the early trail builders, some of whom I had spoken with and recorded. How they had spent days running, or cycling, or fishing. How they had watched farms come and go, the land and the water rights bought out and turned into housing developments. How they lamented the loss of cattle drives, or how they had known the places along the river from the 1960s through the 80s. It was not some grand narrative, bounded by academic theory, or dressed up in the fund-raising language of a non-profit. It was human. Cultural. Storied.  Specific to the people that lived and worked in Northern Colorado.

It was a lesson I did not appreciate fully until after I left. It is a lesson that is deceptively simple: rivers store forms of heritage and hold important meanings for those who live along them. Sometimes this is communicated through law, sometimes through productive use. More often than not, it is communicated through simple, human conversation that often carries the cultural imprints of a regional setting. One need only to observe and listen.

Informal References:

Flores, Dan. ‘Place: An Argument for Bioregional History’. Environmental History Review 18, no. 4 (1994): 1–18.

Moncaster, George, A Tale of Two Counties: Transregional Planning and the Poudre River Trail, 2024.

‘Cache La Poudre River | Rivers.Gov’. Accessed 3 July 2026.

White, Richard. The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River. First Thus Used edition. Hill and Wang, 1996.

‘1997 Spring Creek Flood: Fort Collins History Connection’. Accessed 3 July 2026.

Communications. ‘1874 Water Wars: Was There Really Almost a Pitchfork Fight over Water 150 Years Ago?’ Cache La Poudre River National Heritage Area, 2 July 2024.

Wendland, Tegan, and Sam Brasch ·. ‘Colorado Is Now in a Statewide Drought Emergency’. Colorado Public Radio, 4 June 2026.

‘Cache La Poudre River National Heritage Area (U.S. National Park Service)’. Accessed 3 July 2026.

Hager, Alex. ‘New Northern Colorado Reservoirs Moving Ahead after Settlement of NISP Lawsuit’. KUNC, 5 March 2025. .

Informal and general information of the region can be found here; https://poudreheritage.org/history/

1. Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River, First Thus Used edition (Hill and Wang, 1996) ↩︎
2. ‘Exploring the River’, Cache La Poudre River National Heritage Area, n.d., accessed 6 July 2026, https://poudreheritage.org/history/exploring-the-river/. ↩︎
3. ‘1997 Spring Creek Flood: Fort Collins History Connection’, accessed 3 July 2026, https://history.fcgov.com/explore/flood. ↩︎
4. Communications, ‘1874 Water Wars: Was There Really Almost a Pitchfork Fight over Water 150 Years Ago?’, Cache La Poudre River National Heritage Area, 2 July 2024, https://poudreheritage.org/1874-water-wars-was-there-really-almost-a-pitchfork-fight-over-water-150-years-ago/. ↩︎
5. Tegan Wendland and Sam Brasch ·, ‘Colorado Is Now in a Statewide Drought Emergency’, Colorado Public Radio, 4 June 2026, https://www.cpr.org/2026/06/04/colorado-drought-emergency/. ↩︎
6. ‘Cache La Poudre River National Heritage Area (U.S. National Park Service)’, accessed 3 July 2026, https://www.nps.gov/places/cache-la-poudre-river-national-heritage-area.htm. ↩︎
7. Alex Hager, ‘New Northern Colorado Reservoirs Moving Ahead after Settlement of NISP Lawsuit’, KUNC, 5 March 2025, https://www.kunc.org/news/2025-03-05/new-northern-colorado-reservoirs-moving-ahead-after-settlement-of-nisp-lawsuit. ↩︎
8. Flores, Dan. ‘Place: An Argument for Bioregional History’. Environmental History Review 18, no. 4 (1994): 1–18. https://doi.org/10.2307/3984870. ↩︎

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George Moncaster

George Moncaster is a Public and Environmental Historian interested in river politics, power, fisheries and agriculture. He completed his BA in American Studies at the University of Hull, and graduated from Colorado State University with an MA in History. He is the author of a short monongraph concerning the Poudre River Trail in Northern Colorado and also publishes for History Link. He will be beginning doctoral studies at the University of Oregon in 2026.

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