Map of the Colorado river basin as the river flows from the state of Colorado through Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and California to the Gulf of California
2 August 2021
Indigenous peoples living in what is now the state of Colorado include the Arapaho, Apache, Cheyenne, Pueblo, Shoshone, Ute, Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Navajo. Since the state of Colorado is a settler-colonist creation, there is, of course, no Indigenous name that corresponds to the region. But there are many Indigenous names for specific places in Colorado. One of the most prominent is Tavakiev (sun mountain), the Tabeguache name given to the mountain settler-colonists call Pike’s Peak. The Tabeguache are a band of the Northern Ute tribe. Tava is the Ute word for sun.
The name Colorado comes from the Spanish colorado (red). The Spanish word has referred to red since c.1300, but earlier, since at least 1215, it meant colored. It comes from the classical Latin coloratus (colored).
The state’s name comes from the name of the river, in Spanish Rio Colorado, so called because of the color of the sediment in the river. English adopted the Spanish name for the river, and it appears in English writing from at least 1721, where it can be found in Bernard and Collier’s appendix to Morery’s encyclopedic dictionary. The river’s name appears in the entry for California (i.e., what is now called Baja California, Mexico):
CALIFORNIA, a Peninsula in Northern America, upon the South Sea: It lies to the West of New Mexico, from whence ’tis parted only by the river Colorado.
What is now the state of Colorado was originally claimed by Spain. France acquired the eastern portion in 1802 and the next year sold it to the United States as part of the Louisiana purchase. The western portion passed from Spain to Mexico and was annexed by the United States in 1848 in the wake of the Mexican-American War. The Colorado Territory was organized in 1861, and in 1876 Colorado became the thirty-eighth state.
When it comes to U.S. territorial names, it is common to see a name applied to different areas prior to the formal organization of the territory, and such is the case with Colorado. We can see just such an early use in this article in the Massachusetts Ploughman of 24 August 1850. The area described an unofficial territory that included what is now Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico:
Colorado Territory, is that section of country bounded upon the lower west portion by the lower eastern boundary of California and the Colorado river, and the south by the dividing line between Mexico and the United States, on the East by the Sierra Madre, or Western limits of Mexico, and on the North by the curved ridge or 37th degree of latitude, which constitutes the southern boundary of Utah, until the line extends to the 42d degree of longitude, and is farther bounded North by the same.
Sources:
Bernard, Jacques and Jeremy Collier. An Appendix to the Three English Volumes in Folio of Morery's Great Historical, Geographical, Genealogical and Poetical Dictionary. London: George James, 1721. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020. Oxfordreference.com.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2011, modified March 2019, s.v. Colorado, n.2; modified June 2021, s.v. colorado, n.1.
“The Territories of the U.S.” Massachusetts Ploughman (Boston), 24 August 1850, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Image credit: Shannon1, 2018. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.