Colorado is organized as a United States…
February 1861 CE
The region's gold seekers had organized the Provisional Government of the Territory of Jefferson on August 24, 1859, but this new territory had failed to secure approval from the Congress of the United States embroiled in the debate over slavery.
The election of Abraham Lincoln for the President of the United States on November 6, 1860, has led to the secession of nine southern slave states and the threat of civil war among the states.
Seeking to augment the political power of the Union states, the Republican Party-dominated Congress had quickly admitted the eastern portion of the Territory of Kansas into the Union as the free State of Kansas on January 29, 1861, leaving the western portion of the Kansas Territory, and its gold-mining areas, as unorganized territory.
Thirty days later on February 28, 1861, outgoing U.S. President James Buchanan signed an Act of Congress organizing the free Territory of Colorado.
The original boundaries of Colorado remain unchanged except for government survey amendments.
The name Colorado was chosen because it is commonly believed that the Colorado River originates in the territory.
In 1776, Spanish priest Silvestre Vélez de Escalante recorded that Native Americans in the area knew the river as el Rio Colorado for the red-brown silt that the river carried from the mountains.
In 1859, a U.S. Army topographic expedition led by Captain John Macomb located the confluence of the Green River with the Grand River in what is now Canyonlands National Park in Utah.
The Macomb party had designated the confluence as the source of the Colorado River.
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