Colorado Reader April 2019: Where does our water come from? | Page 4

Historical Perspective:
Benjamin Eaton
Benjamin Eaton
Can you imagine vast open
rangeland covered with only
cactus and grasses covering the
South Platte River Basin? No
farms in sight? This is what the
Colorado Front Range would
have looked like had it not been
for someone who did not let
unexpected turns in his life make
him quit. Through persistence
and using what we have learned
from the past, people can take
those unexpected turns and create
something memorable, just like
a man named Benjamin Eaton.
Imagine a young man who, in the
early 1800s, joined the Ohio Line
Railroad’s engineering crew to
survey lands in the west. He
spent summers farming and winters
teaching school with no idea what
his future might hold. Life took a
tragic turn in 1857, when his wife
passed away, while giving birth to
his son, Aaron. After this heartbreak,
the 21-year-old left his son with his
mother and traveled west to Iowa
where he purchased a farm. Two
years later, he would join a group
from Iowa that would travel west
to join the thousands of “59ers”
who were going to find gold!
In 1859, Eaton and other farmers
from Iowa traveled through the
San Juan country of Colorado
looking for illusive gold. They were
unsuccessful and most headed back
to farm in Iowa, but not Eaton. He
decided to take a turn south and
experiment with irrigation ditches
in New Mexico as a part of the
Maxwell land grant. Who knew that
this detour would later become one
of the foundations for his lasting
impact on the state of Colorado?
In 1862, during the Civil War,
Eaton joined up with Colonel “Kit”
Carson in New Mexico. The Civil
War campaign ended quickly for
4 - Colorado Agriculture in the Classroom
Eaton and he headed back to
visit his son in Ohio and marry a
woman named Rebecca Hill.
Rebecca, Aaron, Eaton, and two
more of their children left Ohio
and traveled west to Colorado.
Eaton had noticed the land on his
previous journeys and thought
that with irrigation this Colorado
land could produce many crops. He
settled near Windsor and purchased
25,000 acres, laying claim to the
Cache la Poudre River waters from
the Union Pacific Railroad. There he
began to create irrigation systems
that would forever change the
future of Colorado by allowing
farmers to have access to water.
In1870, Nathan Meeker was sent
west by Horace Greeley to the
confluence of the South Platte and
Poudre Rivers to start a colony.
(Confluence means the junction of
two rivers.) The colony was called
Union Colony but is now known as
Greeley. The farmers of the colony
would need water for crops in
this semi-arid location. Nathan
Meeker talked to Benjamin
Eaton who promised