As soon as I think I have learned something new, and tell you about it, here comes more information to prove me wrong. I think this will fix it for a while. It seems in June, 1864 there was a bad flood down Fountain Creek. It washed out crops from near Colorado City to Pueblo, and even further from there. At the time there was no Colorado Springs, but farming along the creek was well established. Fountain, as a settlement, for those of you who have been reading this column very long know, started in 1859 just like Colorado City. Many of those crops were sold on the camps up near Denver, Colorado City and Pueblo. To make the summer a total disaster, in August clouds of grasshoppers ate what was left of anything standing! Over the years the little critters would regularly prove to be the settler’s worst summer enemy. I have seen pictures of gardens in the area where you could only see grasshoppers by the million!

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