Prowers County, established along the Kansas border in 1889, contains Colorado's lowest altitudes. Its prairie bottomland supports irrigated and dry-land farming and ranching. Trail City, one of the wildest Colorado cattle towns, flourished during the 1880s on the National Cattle Trail, but it is now a ghost. Prowers County commemorates the huge cattle kingdom of John Wesley Prowers, whose 20,000-head herd once occupied much of the Arkansas River valley. Indigenous vernacular structures in Prowers and adjacent counties of southeastern Colorado are of an earth-tone sandstone used for everything from commercial buildings to barns in this largely treeless country of short-grass prairie and big sky.
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