The little town of Meeker marks the site of the Meeker massacre. Here is a little village of a thousand inhabitants, located on White River, among the most beautiful of the mountain ranges,--the location being very much like that of Florence, in Italy,--which is the centre of a very rich agricultural and grazing region. Meeker is now forty-five miles from a railroad, the nearest station being Rifle, on the Denver and Rio Grande, a few miles from Glenwood Springs; but the Moffet road brings to it railroad connection with Denver. There is an extensive stage line of over one hundred miles, starting from Rifle and going on through Meeker up into the mountains, where the hunting attracts a great number of travellers, and especially many Englishmen. It is in this region that President Roosevelt's happy hunting-grounds lie, and he is a familiar and favorite figure in Meeker.
There is a little gray-stone Episcopal church among other churches that adorn this town, which has laid out a handsome park and which has the perpetual adornment of the beautiful river that flows through it. The mountains about supply streams that make irrigation easy, and the great fields of wheat, potatoes, and alfalfa are fertile and prosperous. Irrigation makes it everywhere possible to control the climatic conditions.
Meeker is the county seat of Rio Blanco County, in which uranium has been discovered in two different places; and two oil wells, each at a cost of four thousand dollars, a creamery, costing nearly six thousand dollars, and water-works at a cost of sixty thousand dollars, have been established within the past two years. Fifteen reservoirs and eighty miles of irrigation ditches were constructed in 1905, and in that year was harvested, in this county, a quarter of a million bushels of wheat, oats, and rye.
The basis on which Greeley was founded is thus outlined in the official documents drawn up by Nathan Cook Meeker:
"I propose to unite with proper persons in the establishment of a Union colony in Colorado territory. A location which I have seen is well watered with streams and springs; there are beautiful pine groves, the soil is rich, the climate healthful, grass will keep stock the year round, coal and stone are plentiful, and a well-travelled road runs through the property."