Editing Colorado Territory (section)

===Exploration by non-native peoples===
The earliest explorers of European extraction to visit the area were [[Spanish colonization of the Americas|Spanish explorers]] such as [[Francisco Vásquez de Coronado|Coronado]], although the Coronado expedition of 1540–42 only skirted the future border of the Colorado Territory to the south and southeast. In 1776, [[Francisco Atanasio Domínguez]] and [[Silvestre Vélez de Escalante]] explored southern Colorado in the Dominguez-Escalante Expedition.

Other notable explorations included the [[Pike Expedition]] of 1806–07 by [[Zebulon Pike]], the journey along the north bank of the Platte River in 1820 by [[Stephen Harriman Long|Stephen H. Long]] to what came to be called Longs Peak, the [[John C. Frémont]] expedition in 1845–46, and the [[Powell Geographic Expedition of 1869]] by [[John Wesley Powell]].