Baca County and the surrounding southern Colorado plains changed hands and uses repeatedly over time, from bison hunters around 7500 B.C. and later Archaic and Ceramic cultures in local canyons, to Comanche control of the Southern High Plains in the eighteenth century as European traders, the Pike Expedition, and migrating Cheyenne and Arapaho entered the region, followed by the opening of the Santa Fe Trail, Mexican independence, the era of Bent’s Fort, the founding of Kansas Territory, the Homestead Act, the Sand Creek Massacre, Colorado statehood, and the railroad’s arrival at Santa Fe. In the late 1860’s the JJ Cattle Company built a cattle empire on 16,000 acres between Campo and the Arkansas River, with more than 30,000 cattle, sheep, and horses on the open plains until homesteaders moved in and long conflict between farmers and cattlemen gave way to fenced prairies and the end of open range. The 1880’s brought the first homesteaders to Baca County, early good crops, more than 6,000 settlers, and thirteen new towns by 1888, but drought in 1889 reduced the population to 700 by 1893, leaving Springfield, Stonington, and Vilas. Another wave of settlement came from 1900 to 1920 with better rainfall and higher crop prices during World War I, while broomcorn, introduced in 1887, made Baca County the Broomcorn Capital of the World for nearly a century, and Camp was founded in 1909 during this period of resettlement in southeast Colorado. In the 1930’s Baca County lay in the Great Dust Bowl as depression and wind stripped away topsoil, bringing dust sickness, ruined equipment, sand-filled tanks, and wandering cattle. Residents then sought federal relief, and from 1938 to 1954 thousands of damaged farms were bought and removed from cultivation, returning 11.3 million acres to grassland; part of that land is now the Comanche National Grassland, while later land and soil programs continued efforts to stabilize the region and its future remained hopeful in the 1990’s.