Fort Collins is a home rule municipality that is the county seat and the most populous municipality of Larimer County, Colorado, United States. The city population was 169,810 at the 2020 census, an increase of 17.94% since 2010. Fort Collins is the principal city of the Fort Collins, CO Metropolitan Statistical Area and is a major city of the Front Range Urban Corridor. The city is the fourth most populous city in Colorado. Situated upon the Cache La Poudre River along the Colorado Front Range, Fort Collins is located 56 mi (90 km) north of the Colorado State Capitol in Denver. Fort Collins is a midsize instructor town, home to Colorado State University and Front Range Community College’s Larimer campus.

Northern Arapaho were centered in the Cache la Poudre River Valley close present-day Fort Collins. Friday, who attended school in St. Louis, Missouri in his youth, was a leader of the band of Arapahos as with ease as an interpreter, negotiator, and peacemaker. He made associates of white settlers who moved into the area, but was pushed out of Colorado in the 1860s.

Fort Collins was founded as a military outpost of the United States Army in 1864. It succeeded a previous encampment, known as Camp Collins, on the Cache la Poudre River, near what is known today as Laporte. Camp Collins was erected during the Indian wars of the mid-1860s to guard the Overland mail route that had been recently relocated through the region. Travelers crossing the county upon the Overland Trail would camp there, but a flood destroyed the camp in June 1864. Afterward, the commander of the fort wrote to the commandant of Fort Laramie in southeast Wyoming, Colonel William O. Collins, suggesting that a site several miles farther the length of the river would make a great location for the fort. The proclaim was manned originally by two companies of the 11th Ohio Volunteer Cavalry and never had walls.

Settlers began arriving in the vicinity of the fort approximately immediately. The fort was decommissioned in 1867. The original fort site is now adjacent to the gift historic “Old Town” portion of the city. The first moot and church opened in 1866, and the town was platted in 1867. The civilian population of Fort Collins, led by local businessman Joseph Mason, led an effort to relocate the county chair to Fort Collins from LaPorte, and they were well-to-do in 1868.