World War I veterans who claimed homesteads near Dove Creek in the early twentieth century faced sagebrush as their most stubborn adversary, and clearing the land required decades of hard manual labor. Among the first settlers was Daniel Brown Hunter, known as “Sagebrush Dan,” who operated a successful pinto bean farm, founded the town’s high school, organized municipal water and power utilities, and established the Dove Creek Press. He moved to Dove Creek with his wife Loula in 1918, began publishing the newspaper in 1919, sold his interest in it in 1945, and continued serving the town until his death in 1958. In the 1930s, migrants fleeing the Dust Bowl arrived, and during the Cold War years miners came during the uranium boom, while tourism later emerged as a growing industry. Dove Creek has remained deeply tied to the land, especially through pinto beans, which local people call the town’s signature crop. The local soil and climate have made the area especially well suited to pinto beans, which have been grown there for at least a thousand years, first by Ancestral Puebloans using many of the same techniques employed today. Locally grown beans filled G.I. ration tins during World War Two, area farmers later helped researchers develop higher-yielding and more durable strains adopted worldwide, and in the 1990s a local supplier began selling heirloom beans grown from seeds reportedly recovered at nearby archaeological sites.