"A Look Back"

The Stories presented here are about people and events during the early days when this corner of Colorado was first settled.

Historical Movers and Shakers
By Shannan Koucherik for the Museum of NW Colo

Earthquakes in Colorado are few and far between, despite the many dormant volcanoes that dot the northwestern region of the state. Unlike Californians who treat “minor” earthquakes with indifference, Coloradans take note of the smallest shakings and talk about them for weeks or months afterward.

The Empire-Courier of February 27, 1952 recapped some of the earliest reported earthquakes in Northwest Colorado. The first was on February 8, 1889, when early settlers felt their homesteads shake;

“Mrs. Ossa Cooper remembers the event distinctly. She reports that the dishes in their house a half mile east of what is now Craig were rattled noticeably. The Haughey boys (her brothers) felt the shock in the barn and thought it was due to the horses kicking until they learned from the house that the dishes had been rattled.

“Mrs. Robert Ratcliff remembers distinctly the talk about the earth tremor of 1889. She says that her family, the Deal family, were then living on…Williams Fork and that they distinctly felt the earth shocks of that tremor.

The next documented earthquake in Moffat County was in 1891, when a winter evening was shaken;

“The quake occurred about 4 p.m. The earth was convulsed by ‘waves’ that rolled at intervals of a few seconds, lasting for a minute or more.” (Empire-Courier August 6, 1942)

Hortense Fitzpatrick of Craig gave an account of the shaking for the newspaper. She was alone at home tending her little brother when she “heard the rumble and felt the pulsations of the quake.” (ibid)

Hortense and her brother ran out of the house and saw their milk cow shaken off her feet into the side of the log home. Thousands of boulders – some of them as large as houses – rolled from an 800 ft. cliff half a mile from the house. The shaking was followed by the signature silence that falls over an area after a quake. The quake was something that neither of the Fitzpatrick youngsters would ever forget.

In 1906, tremors shook the area at the same time as the great San Francisco earthquake and fire that devastated that large city.

Roy Templeton described the event; “My cousin, Earl Templeton and I were just getting out of a boat on the Yampa River west of our place below Maybell. I was on the bank and he was still in the boat when the earth started to tremble. It shook dirt from the bank near me and the water of the river was agitated. We saw a stick of wood about an inch in diameter and two feet long pushed out of the water and up on the bank.

“We secured the boat and went up to the house. My mother said that the pans in a pantry which was built out from our log house rattled and clattered and one was shaken from the shelf. She said it was so bad that she thought we kids were pounding on the pantry wall and ran out of the house to stop us.

“We learned afterwards that Mrs. Patterson, who was living on a ranch below the Two Bar (Ranch) was sitting in a chair with her feet up on a box reading when the tremor struck. She said she was so startled that she tipped over backward in her chair but was not hurt.” (ibid)

“A light earthquake shock was felt in the vicinity of Craig about 9:00 Sunday Night. At the improvised depot, Mr. Brown, the agent, felt the shock quite perceptibly, dishes rattling on the shelves and the cars rocking from side to side. At the Haughey ranch above town the west end of the cellar caved in, falling on a table loaded with canned fruits and preserves and completely destroying the table…”(Moffat County Courier, May 7,1914)

It was nearly a decade before shaking was felt again – this time south of Craig;

“Monday evening, February 26, 1923, between 5 and 6 o’clock, a slight earthquake tremor was felt in the Buford neighborhood. It was heavy enough to rattle dishes on the shelves and the loose windows and doors, and the people thought it might be a snow slide. It is said a few people here in Meeker noticed the oscillation.” (White River Review, February 28, 1923)

Hundreds of small earthquakes are recorded around the globe each week, but the ground didn’t move noticeably again in the Craig area until 1943 when several temblors rumbled through. They were not strong enough to do any damage, but the people who felt them definitely remembered them for years to come.

Things were pretty quite for several more decades until a series of earthquakes centered in eastern Utah shook the Brown’s Park area in August 1988. The quakes began with a 3.5 temblor that was followed a few minutes later by a 4.3 shaker. An hour later, a stronger shock, at 5.6, shook central Utah and western Colorado.

Aftershocks continued for more than a day, leaving the people of the region a bit shaken.

By the 1970s, there were seismic sensors across the country and it was easy to pinpoint where the quakes originated and how strong they were. Unlike California, which has distinct, strong seismic faults, Northwest Colorado has only a system of “inferred faults.” (Craig Daily Press February 15, 1994)

Earthquakes have hit the region every few years, frequently going unfelt by busy residents.

The two latest earthquakes in Northwest Colorado occurred on August 17 and 18, 2009. The first, recorded at 3.7, did little more than rumble windows and shake a few foundations. The second, with an epicenter exactly the same as the first, registered a mild 2.7.

It is unlikely that Colorado will experience an earthquake as strong as those that hit California and other parts of the world, but they still provide living history anecdotes to be passed on from generation to generation.