Hawkins Preserve
Hawkins Preserve is a 122-acre (0.49 km2) property within the city limits of Cortez, Colorado. It is protected by a conservation easement held by the Montezuma Land Conservancy.
The property for the preserve was donated to the Cortez Cultural Center in the 1990s by Jack Hawkins which includes:
Hawkins Preserve is a natural museum on 120 acres including seven ecological zones:
Hunter-gather 8,000 B.P. to AD 1
Basket Makers AD 1 to 550
Modified Basket Makers 550 to 750
Developmental Pueblo 750 to 1100
Great Pueblo period 1100 to 1300
After 1300 hunter-gathers, ancestors of the Ute and Navajo, moved into the southwestern Colorado and southeastern Utah and came to inhabit the region.
During this period, the Spanish colonial reach extended to northern New Mexico, where they settled in the 16th century. They introduced items for trade, such as guns and horses, new and deadly diseases, and cultural influence in the forms of religion, language, and forms of government. In the 18th century Spanish missionaries visited the area looking for a route to Spanish missions in California. One of the expeditions was that of Spanish friars Silvestre Vélez de Escalante and Francisco Atanasio Domínguez who traveled from New Mexico, through western Colorado to Utah.
The first Anglo American people arrived in the early 1800s, starting with trappers. With the discovery of precious ores in the last decades of the 19th Century, miners and other settlers moved into the region.
The Hawkins Preserve includes land that was near a ranch owned by Henry Mitchell. On his land is an archaeological site of 9 medium-sized pueblos called "Mitchell Springs".
By the mid-19th century the United States government and Native American tribes were at war over land ownership. People were forced to leave their homelands. The Navajo had moved south and the Ute territory was significantly reduced.
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