Almost no settlers lived in present-day Crowley County before 1890 because scarce rainfall and limited water sources could sustain only a few scattered ranches, but the completion of the Missouri Pacific Railroad and the Colorado Canal in the 1890s transformed the region into productive farmland where towns such as Ordway, Crowley, Olney Springs, and Sugar City flourished with mills, canning plants, grain elevators, schools, newspapers, and an opera house. From 1900 to the late 1960s, the National Sugar Company in Sugar City stood at the center of the county’s agricultural economy, processing sugar beets into granulated sugar, employing many laborers, supporting local farmers, and using by-products to feed livestock, until collapsing commodity markets forced the company to close in 1967. Each year from October through January, the sugar-beet harvest and processing campaign demanded long hours from thousands of workers in the fields and factory, with much of the labor performed by immigrants and migrant farm workers, including Germans from Russia recruited in 1900, later Hispano laborers, and during World War II German POWs and Japanese-American detainees. The region then faced repeated hardship: dry summers in the late 1920s, disaster during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and another severe blow in 1987 when the National Sugar Company closed its plant at Sugar City, cutting off a crucial market for sugar beets and forcing many farmers to sell water rights to repay debts, though farmers and ranchers persisted and later adapted with the help of correctional facilities and tourism at Lakes Henry and Meredith. Long before agricultural settlement, these grasslands supported immense bison herds and sustained Native peoples including Cheyennes, Arapahos, Kiowas, Comanches, Plains Apaches, and Shoshones, whose mobile way of life depended on hunting and deep knowledge of the plains, but by 1851 Chief Yellow Wolf reported the buffalo had disappeared from a vast area, and within twenty years none remained on Colorado’s eastern plains as hunting and habitat destruction by Native Americans and Europeans helped bring about the collapse of the herds.