Long before Boggsville, the Arkansas Valley was known to Native American peoples. Buffalo were plentiful. Cheyenne and Arapahoe tribes were frequent visitors and Apache, Comanche, Kiowa and Navajo came too. The tribes found food, shelter and rich grasses. They valued the native beauty of the valley.
Hispanic explorers also knew the Arkansas Valley. Legend tells us conquistadors, likely from Coronado’s expedition, became lost and died without last rites, causing their souls to be lost in Purgatory. “Las Animas que son Perdidas en Purgatorio” (“The Souls who are Lost In Purgatory”) lives on as the namesake for both the Purgatoire River and the later town of Las Animas. The region south of the Arkansas River belonged first to Spain and then to Mexico until the United States seized it in the Mexican-American War of 1846.
Early North American explorers told of the area in their diaries. On November 15, 1806, Zebulon Pike described camping on the banks of the Purgatoire River and first sighting Pikes Peak, some two miles south of the Arkansas River. In 1820, Longs Peak explorer, Major Stephen Long, reported camping in the “valley of lost souls in Purgatoire.” Trader and explorer, Jacob Fowler, wrote of camping at the mouth of the Purgatoire on November 13, 1821.
Thomas Oliver Boggs, the first of Boggsville’s two founding fathers, arrived in the Arkansas Valley in 1844. Boggs was the son of Missouri’s fifth governor, Lilburn W. Boggs and great-grandson of Daniel Boone. For the next six years, Boggs worked as a trader for William and Charles Bent at Bent’s Old Fort. He learned to speak Spanish and the languages of 11 Native American tribes. William Bent considered him one of the most useful and trustworthy plainsmen of the time.
Boggs partnered with the large New Mexico landowner, Lucien Maxwell, in the mid-1850s. Maxwell controlled a Spanish land grant of 1.7 million acres on the border between New Mexico and Colorado. Jointly, they owned herds of cattle and sheep, which Boggs brought north to the Arkansas Valley for pasture in the summers.
The Arkansas Valley impressed Boggs. Through the powerful influence of his wife, Rumalda Luna, he secured a 2,040-acre land grant to start a settlement. Rumalda, whom he married in 1850, was the stepdaughter of Charles Bent, who was also the first territorial governor of New Mexico. One of her grandfathers was head of the Taos Customs House, the other a popular Santa Fe Trail merchant. Her great-uncle was Taos’ mayor. Through her grandmother, Rumalda was part heiress to the giant Vigil and St. Vrain Spanish Land Grant of the early 1860s.
John Wesley Prowers, the other founding father of Boggsville, was born in Missouri. A successful merchant and rancher, Prowers also married an influential woman whose land merged in to the Boggsville community. Prowers married Amache Ochinee in 1861. Amache was the daughter of an important Cheyenne sub-chief, Ochinee, or Lone Bear. Her family was at Sand Creek the morning Colonel John Chivington and his soldiers attacked. Her mother escaped, but Ochinee and other relatives were killed. As atonement, the United States government gave each survivor of those massacred at Sand Creek a 640-acre parcel of land. Amache, her mother and the Prowers’ two oldest daughters were all given tracts along the Arkansas River.
These reparation lands and those from Rumalda Luna’s inheritance became the range where John Prowers and Thomas Boggs ran their herds of cattle and sheep. The property lay about three miles south of the confluence of the Arkansas and Purgatoire Rivers, and about two miles south of present-day Las Animas. Boggs built a large adobe house for his family and Prowers built a huge two-story, U-shaped house for his. Boggsville was launched.
In 1867, the army moved Fort Lyon to its present site just a few miles northeast of Las Animas. The fort promised a major market for agricultural produce and livestock. The army bought nearly everything the farmers at Boggsville could produce.
Residents dug an irrigation canal called the Tarbox Ditch. Seven miles long, it irrigated more than 1,000 acres, including the farms of Boggs, Prowers and Robert Bent (son of William). Their success spearheaded large-scale agriculture in southeastern Colorado.
Boggs and Prowers also pioneered large-scale ranching. They raised horses, cattle and sheep. Prowers crossbred his cattle to produce stock that could survive harsh climates. His small 1860s herd eventually grew to about 10,000 head of cattle in the 1880s. In the mid-1870s, sheep numbered nearly 17,000.
Boggsville continued to prosper with over 20 structures, including a general store, stage stop, storage, and housing for residents and laborers. Kit Carson moved to the settlement in 1867 and stayed until his death in May, 1868.
When Bent County was established in 1870, it was a vast area about six times larger than it is today. Boggsville served as the county seat from that fall until 1873.
There were 97 voting residents and county offices were located in the Prowers House. Thomas Boggs became the town’s first sheriff and he was elected to the territorial legislature the following year. Prowers served in the territorial legislature in 1873 and the state legislature in 1880. The first public school in southeastern Colorado opened just north of the Prowers’ house.
All too soon, the railroads came west. Tracks were laid to avoid established communities, allowing rail barons to make fortunes selling choice lands near their new stations. The rails reached the Arkansas Valley in 1873. The new city of West Las Animas became the center of business and Boggsville began its descent.
John Prowers relocated to West Las Animas, where he built a new house and opened a general store. Thomas Boggs remained in Boggsville, but when his wife’s land grant was challenged in 1877, he moved his family to Springer, New Mexico. Shortly after the grant was re-confirmed in 1883, Boggs sold the Boggsville ranch to John Lee for $1,200.
In a few short years, the people of Boggsville proved that one could live and prosper in a bleak desert with only “hostile Indians”, harsh weather and hardship. But Boggsville proved that diverse ethnic cultures could work together to conquer the elements and make progress for future generations. Boggsville was a success!