Dating way back to the years 1000-1400 AD, members of the Upper Republican and Itskari cultures occupied parts of northeast Colorado, including present-day Logan County. They farmed, hunted, and fished in the South Platte River you see before you. They lived in earth Lodges and crafted distinctive ceramic pots. While they thrived here for nearly three centuries, they eventually abandoned it, most likely because of drought. Much later, in the eighteenth century, the Sioux had pushed a number of other peoples from the Northern Plains south, including the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Kiowa. The Overland Trail in what became Colorado was an Indian path that the army developed into a stagecoach route in 1858, the year of the Colorado Gold Rush and the founding of Denver. The trail passed along the South Platte river where you are standing now, through Logan County on its way to Denver.