News of our evening's experience spread rapidly and created intense excitement in Colorado City and throughout the county. The people of El Paso County now realized that they were face to face with Indian troubles of the most serious nature, and that arrangements for the defense of the town and surrounding country must immediately be made. The fighting strength of the Pike's Peak region was exceedingly limited, as compared with the great horde of savages that occupied our eastern frontier. Probably there were not over three hundred men of all ages in El Paso County at that time. And, as further showing the precarious position of the community, I wish to call attention to the fact that the frontier settlements of the United States at that time extended but little west of the Missouri River, leaving the narrow belt of settlements along the eastern base of the mountains in Colorado separated from the nearest communities to the east by a stretch of plains at least four hundred miles in width, inhabited only by wild and savage tribes of nomadic Indians. The same condition existed on the north to the British possessions, and to the west the Ute Indians held undisputed sway to the Great Salt Lake valley. To the south, with the exception of a small part of New Mexico sparsely settled by feeble and widely scattered communities of Spanish-speaking people, wild tribes roamed over every portion of the country for hundreds of miles. From the foregoing, it will be seen that the settlements of Colorado were but a small island of civilization in a sea of savagery. Our settlements were at times completely cut off from civilization in every direction by this cordon of savage tribes; their very existence was now threatened, with no hope of assistance from the National Government, because of the civil war which was then at its most critical stage, demanding every resource of the nation. Threatened as they were by hordes of hostile savages and under conditions that would have had a disheartening effect upon a people not inured to frontier life, our settlers had no thought of allowing themselves to be driven out or overwhelmed.
Warning was at once sent to every family living down the Fountain and on the Divide, the result being that within a day or two almost every ranch in the county was abandoned. The people for fifteen miles down the valley below Colorado City came to that town. Those living below gathered at the extreme lower edge of the county and there built a place of defense. In Colorado City the work of constructing a fort around an old log hotel was started at once. Green pine logs, ten to fifteen inches in diameter and about fifteen feet long, were cut on the adjacent mountains, brought in, and set in the ground close together, entirely surrounding the building, making a defensive structure about twelve feet high. At intervals through these logs portholes were made for use in repelling an attack. During the next month or two all the women and children of the town as well as those who had congregated there from the country slept at night in this fortification. Throughout this time a picket force of three or four mounted men was maintained night and day on the flat east of the town, and out on the present site of Colorado Springs. There was scarcely a day during this period in which Indians were not seen at various points in the country to the east of Colorado City, and on the borders of the settlements along the Fountain, but as the people everywhere were watchful, the savages had little opportunity of catching any one unawares.