James Pursley was here in 1805 and traded among the Indians; Lieutenant Pike in his report, speaks of him as the first white man who ever crossed the plains. He made the first discovery of gold in Colorado, which he found at the foot of Lincoln Mountain, doubtless at Fairplay on the Platte River, where once extensive placer diggings existed. As late as 1875, the Company operating there had a large number of Chinamen at work. The immense grass-grown gulch, wide and deep and long, at the edge of Fairplay, is the excavation out of which hundreds of thousands of dollars were taken. Colorado has done well to commemorate the name of Abraham Lincoln in one of its loftiest mountains. A Frenchman named La Lande was sent out by an Illinois merchant in 1804, to make an investigation of the country and report. He came along the Platte Valley, crossed over to Santa Fe, where he concluded to remain. There was a party of French Trappers known to have been here about 1800 who went South into Arizona, in search of untouched territory to ply their avocation. Philip Covington in 1827 passed up the Cache La Poudre Valley with a pack train, on his way to Green River with supplies. He returned in 1828 and established a colony of trappers at La Porte, one of the oldest settlements in Colorado, and which is located near Ft. Collins. He was in the employ of the American Fur Company. [Illustration: The Trapper.] The trappers would often go alone into these vast solitudes, with pack horses to carry their supplies in, and their furs but. Sometimes they would die in their lonely retreats, and never be heard of again, only as some sign of the fate that had overtaken them would be found years later. After a time, there were wagon routes of travel along the Arkansas River, with a trading post at Fort Bent and one at Santa Fe; also up the South Platte River, with trading centers at Ft. St. Vrain and at Ft. Lupton; and up the North Platte River, with the business centering at Ft. Laramie. Sometimes trappers who were brought out in the freighting wagons in the Spring from St. Louis by the Fur-Trading Companies, would be left with supplies along the streams, and in the Fall they would be picked up and taken with their peltries back to St. Louis.