From Ancestral Puebloans to modern-day settlers

Photo courtesy John M. Motter
This building is all that is left of the Fort Lewis in Pagosa Springs in 1878-1882. Two of the officer’s quarters were dismantled, the boards numbered, then reassembled as one building on today’s RD Hott ranch on Fourmile Road, where it remains to this day.[/caption]

Pagosa Springs and the surrounding area share at least one thing in common with the rest of the United States — long before the modern-day settlers arrived, peoples we call Native Americans occupied the land.