It's Good To Be Different

Post written and copyright by Doris McCraw

We all like to have our work favored by the public. To that end, we may sometimes try to fit what we write into the template that we think readers want. Not everyone mind you, but sometimes we do wonder if only...

Here is what some early women wrote about the same area, Colorado Springs and the surrounding region, and for fun I thought I would share there words with you. Each different, each worth reading.

I will start with Grace Greenwood, aka Sara Jane Lippincott. If you wish to know more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sara_Jane_Lippincott

Sara was the first to arrive in the territory, traveling through Colorado in 1871. She did later return to the area and lived here for a while. As she says in her book “New Life in New Lands: Notes of Travel”:

“The narrow-gauge road, when finished to El Paso, will be a wonderful route, for pleasure as well as commerce, as it will be almost unrivalled for variety and grandeur of scenery. The mountain view, the pictures of river and park and place, between Denver and Colorado City, are especially magnificent.”*

She goes on to say “I shall be obliged to leave Colorado without seeing Pike's Peak and the Garden of the Gods....It may be that heretofore my descriptions of life here have been colored by my own pleasant personal experiences. Other tourist less fortunate or enthusiastic than I, might tell a slightly different story...”

They did.

Next, Isabella Bird, an English lady who traveled in the Rocky Mountains on horseback, by herself in the 1870's. For more in Isabella: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabella_Bird She arrived in Colorado Springs from the area around Monument, Colorado. Her arrival was somewhere between the end of October, early November of 1873. Her words from the collection of letters she wrote to her sister titled "A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains":

The next morning was gray and sour, but brightened and warmed as the day went on....[I] was directed to leave the main road and diverge through Monument Park, a ride of twelve miles among fantastic rocks, but I lost my way and came to an end of all track in a wild canyon. Turning about six miles, I took another track and rode about eight miles without seeing a creature. … The track then passed down a valley close under some ghastly peaks, wild, cold, awe-inspiring scenery. After fording a creek several times, I cam upon a decayed-looking cluster of houses bearing the arrogant name of Colorado City and two miles farther on, from the top of one of the Foot Hill ridges, I saw the bleak-looking scattered houses of the ambitious watering place of Colorado Springs, the goal of my journey of 150 miles. I got off, put on a long skirt, and rode sidewise, though the settlement scarcely looked like a place where any deference to prejudices was necessary. A queer embryo-looking place it is, out on the bare Plains...”

The third and final woman to comment is Helen (Hunt) Jackson. She arrived around the same time as Bird, (October/November 1873)but there is no indication they met or knew each other. Here is what Helen remembered of her first view of the area in her essay “Colorado Springs” from “Bit of Travel at Home”

“...my first impression of the Colorado Springs. I shall never forget my sudden sense of hopeless disappointment at the moment when I first looked on the town. It was a gray day in November. I had crossed the continent, ill, disheartened, to find a climate which would not kill. There stretched before me, to the east, a bleak, bare, unrelieved, desolate plain. There rose behind me, to the west, a dark range of mountains, snow-topped, rocky-walled, stern, cruel, relentless. Between lay the town—small, straight, new, treeless.
“One might die of such a place alone,” I said bitterly. “Death by disease would be more natural.”

As you can see, three different women, basically talking about the same area. Each, with their own experience told a similar, but different story of their impression.

Each of us has experiences that allow us to tell our own story. It is good to be different!

* Certain of these searchers arrived from Kansas in July, 1858, under the leadership of John Tierney. Certain stragglers in their wake, under command of O'Donnell, mapped out on paper the magnificent town of El Paso. It never existed off the map, but it should have covered the town site of Colorado Springs. The sole actuality at the time was one log cabin, a number of tents, and some wagons collected near the Monument, on the present site of Roswell, and then called Red Rock Ranch. The tents and wagons eventually drifted over to Colorado City. (From the history of El Paso County, Colorado)


HOLD THE PRESSES: While editing this piece I received word that my short story/novella "Home for His Heart" will be arriving soon from Prairie Rose Publications. 

Haiku - http://fivesevenfivepage.blogspot.com