Colorado is the mountainous destination around which Miller’s hunting expedition takes shape and the setting of his discovery of a hidden valley rich in bison. Its significance lies in the contrast between the apparent abundance Miller finds there and the violence required to exploit it: the valley first appears to William Andrews as an untouched expanse, then becomes the site of a hunt that continues until the herd is nearly gone.

Discovery and remembered landscape

Miller’s account of Colorado begins in autumn 1863, when he was trapping beavers and hoped to find bears. The beavers’ fur was late in coming, so he left his traps by the river and rode his mule toward the mountains. After nearly three days of climbing, he reached a narrow gorge and descended, expecting to find a stream where animals might drink. There was no water. Instead, he found a flat, hard-packed track, ten or twelve feet wide, pressed into the earth by bison moving along it over many years.

Miller followed the trail through the rest of the day. By evening it led into a level valley winding among the mountains, where small herds grazed as far as he could see. He estimated that three or four thousand bison were visible from where he stood, with more concealed in folds of the valley. Their autumn hides were thick and full. He spent two days there and saw no sign of human presence, either in the valley or on his return. The route was hidden by trees along the river, helping explain why he believed the place had escaped notice. The discovery joined a specific landscape to Miller’s conviction that bison could still be found by anyone who knew where to look.

Route into the mountains

Colorado is also the expedition’s destination in the present action. Miller says the party must reach the mountains by mid-September, when the weather will be cool and the hides ready. He expects about fifteen days of travel, followed by a week or ten days of hunting and a two-week return. To prepare, he plans to go to Ellsworth for a wagon, oxen, and cheaper supplies. Fred Schneider recognizes Colorado as the proposed hunting ground and, rather than join the expedition, decides to return to Ellsworth.

The route west makes the decision to leave reliable water consequential. At the Smoky Hill River, Miller explains that following the river toward Arkansas would provide water but cost at least a week. The party continues on a more direct course. Later, the men see the parallel lines of a railroad crossing the plain and Miller touches the rail before looking toward the mountains. The sight places the expedition’s remote destination within a region already being traversed and transformed by new routes of travel.

At the foothills, the land rises through wooded slopes before opening onto a broad, level stretch near a river. From its bank, Andrews sees the pine forest as a dense, seemingly measureless mass, like a sea arrested in motion. The forest’s scale overwhelms familiar boundaries: in his vision, a person could walk across its surface only briefly before sinking into its green depth and becoming part of it. That experience anticipates his first view of the valley. After the wagon is laboriously maneuvered through the mountains, the trail descends through pines and the land suddenly flattens into a long, narrow basin. Grass ripples across it, and Andrews tries to breathe without disturbing the apparent stillness. A dark, moving patch at a distance reveals the bison herd.

Hunting and ecological change

The valley’s abundance becomes the basis for an increasingly destructive enterprise. Miller’s earlier comparison with the Kansas hunting grounds gives the Colorado herd a history as well as a commercial value: four years earlier, he recalls, the Kansas plains had been dark with bison, and a fortnight’s hunt could yield a thousand or fifteen hundred hides. By the time he tells the story, hunters may be fortunate to bring back two or three hundred animals in a trip, and he expects Kansas to be exhausted within a year or two. Colorado offers a new field after that decline, not an alternative to the logic of depletion.

As the valley hunt proceeds, Fred Schneider and Andrews struggle to skin the animals Miller kills. They work later into the day and rise before dawn to cut into carcasses stiffened by cold, while Miller’s rifle continues to sound through their labor. The herd grows thinner; bodies lie across the ground, and the surviving bison graze among them. Andrews understands that Miller will not leave while any animal remains alive. He begins to measure the expedition’s duration by the number of bison left rather than by the passing days. The valley’s apparent abundance is thus progressively converted into carcasses and hides, and Andrews’s sense of time becomes bound to the extermination unfolding there.

Wilderness, settlement, and significance

Colorado’s valley is initially presented through the men’s sense that no human being has entered it. That perception is not the same as proof that the larger region is uninhabited: on the westward journey, the party passes a riverside encampment where children play near makeshift shelters and several Indigenous people sit nearby. Miller dismisses them contemptuously. The scene complicates the expedition’s image of a blank frontier, even as the valley itself remains, in the hunters’ experience, remote and unmarked by visible human tracks.

The railroad and the bison trade further qualify the idea of remoteness. In Butcher’s Crossing, Miller recalls that the town’s hunters had once supplied abundant hides; later, McDonald points out that the railroad is being built fifty miles north of his land and that hunters now sell bison meat to the railway company while leaving hides to rot. His remark makes plain that hunting practices and markets change with transport and demand. Colorado’s distance offers the hunters an apparent refuge from the depletion of Kansas, but the valley’s isolation cannot protect its herd once it is reached and treated as a source of profit.

For Andrews, Colorado’s landscape exerts a pull distinct from its commercial value. The immense forest and silent valley inspire awe, and after the hunt begins the valley becomes the center by which he measures his life; the plains and Butcher’s Crossing recede in his memory. That attachment is inseparable from the damage done there. Colorado therefore serves not simply as a wilderness beyond the settled world, but as the place where the expedition’s ideal of discovery meets its practice of killing—and where apparent abundance proves vulnerable to the same appetite that has emptied the hunting grounds farther east.