page_title: Rocky Mountains
section_title: Indigenous people
hierarchical_section_title: Rocky Mountains / History / Indigenous people
caption_attribution_description: English: Rocky Mountains, Cherokee Pass: "Drawing shows a dirt trail among pine trees leading toward a heavily forested pass between snow-capped mountains. This pass, near present-day Ft. Collins, Colorado, heads north toward the Oregon and California Trail. This was camp 59 for Jenks' party on Tuesday, June 7, 1859. He wrote of that day's camp, 'Our wagons had to be chained to keep them in their places, the hillside was so steep.'" "1 drawing on paper&#160;: graphite, ink, watercolor and crayon"
context_page_description: The Rocky Mountains, also known as the Rockies, are a major mountain range in western North America. The Rocky Mountains stretch 3,000 mi in straight-line distance from the northernmost part of British Columbia, in western Canada, to New Mexico in the Southwestern United States. The northern terminus is located in the Liard River area east of the Pacific Coast Ranges, while the southernmost point is near the Albuquerque area adjacent the Rio Grande Basin and north of the Sandia–Manzano Mountain Range. Located within the North American Cordillera, the Rockies are distinct from the Cascade Range and the Sierra Nevada, which all lie farther to the west.
  The Rocky Mountains formed 80 million to 55 million years ago during the Laramide orogeny, in which a number of plates began sliding underneath the North American plate. The angle of subduction was shallow, resulting in a broad belt of mountains running down western North America. Since then, further tectonic activity and erosion by glaciers have sculpted the Rockies into dramatic peaks and valleys. At the end of the last ice age, humans began inhabiting the mountain range.
context_section_description: Since the last great ice age, the Rocky Mountains were home first to indigenous peoples including the Apache, Arapaho, Bannock, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Coeur d'Alene, Kalispel, Crow Nation, Flathead, Shoshone, Sioux, Ute, Kutenai (Ktunaxa in Canada), Sekani, Dunne-za, and others. Paleo-Indians hunted the now-extinct mammoth and ancient bison (an animal 20% larger than modern bison) in the foothills and valleys of the mountains. Like the modern tribes that followed them, Paleo-Indians probably migrated to the plains in fall and winter for bison and to the mountains in spring and summer for fish, deer, elk, roots, and berries. In Colorado, along with the crest of the Continental Divide, rock walls that Native Americans built for driving game date back 5,400–5,800 years. A growing body of scientific evidence indicates that indigenous people had significant effects on mammal populations by hunting and on vegetation patterns through deliberate burning.
caption: Cherokee Trail near Fort Collins, Colorado, from a sketch taken June 7, 1859
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