Grace Greenwood - Honorary First Lady of the Pikes Peak Region #PrairieRosePub

As part of an ongoing series about early women in the Pikes Peak Region, October's post is about Grace Greenwood.

To read others post in this series:
Elizabeth McAllister
Cara Bell

Unlike the first two ladies in the series, 'Grace Greenwood' only lived in the area a short time, but her writings sang the praises of Colorado and the Pikes Peak area. But who was 'Grace Greenwood'?

Image from Wikipedia

Grace Greenwood was the pen name for Sara Jane Lippincott. On September 23, 1823, Sara Jane Clarke was born to Deborah and Dr. Thaddeus Clarke in Pompey, New York. She went to school in Rochester, New York and later moved to Brighton, Pennsylvania with her family.

From an early age, Sara wrote and submitted poems and sketches, and had her first piece of prose published when she was twenty. Like others of her time she used a pen name. Once she started using the name Grace Greenwood, it became who she was. Even friends started calling her by the name Grace.

According the Inez Hunt and Wanetta Draper in their book "Colorado's Restless Ghost" Sara was "Exuberant and self-sufficient in an era when frailty was the fashion. Grace [Sara] grew too tall, was too vital, and too clever. She simply didn't fit her time nor her place; she outgrew them all."

Marrying late in life to Leander K. Lippincott, the couple had one child which they named Ann.While Grace traveled about with their daughter, Leander stayed behind. In 1876 he was indicted for land fraud and fled the country.

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Grace first came to Colorado in the early 1870s and it was noted in the 'Colorado Magazine' of September 1871, "Grace Greenwood is one of the literary attractions in Denver. She is here on a visiting, lecturing and observation tour, is corresponding for the New York Times and writing up the country in her most graceful style.''  After a visit to Colorado Springs and Manitou Springs she purchased land in the latter town in 1873 and set about having a cottage built for her . While the 'cottage' was being built she stayed with relatives, the Mellons, and enjoyed the company of the town leaders. After moving in, there was an attempted burglary but Grace took her Italian stiletto and went in hot pursuit. After the incident the following appeared in the local paper:

             

          We now give warning to all gentlemen of burglarious proclivities that a good and gallant friend having provided us with a six shooter, we intend to practice diligently with it, firing promiscuously from our balconies o'nights. I am not Mrs. J.B. Lippincott, and haven't any diamonds, our silver is plated, our money in the bank if we haven't over-drawn...I intend setting the shrubbery full of steel traps...no use for them to call again at Clematis Cottage [the name she gave her home] and may be slightly dangerous. P.S. another friend has lent us a brindle-bull terrier--very powerful.

Grace traveled, wrote, lectured and pursued many different causes in her lifetime. She lived in Europe for a time in the 1880s and wrote a a biography of Queen Victoria while there. She died at the home of her daughter on April 20, 1904 at the age of eighty-one.

In the end this woman who championed prison reform, woman's rights, the end of the death penalty and was staunchly anti-slavery, is little known today. To quote the Hunt/Draper book "Her brilliant flash across the Colorado skies had been meteoric and spectacular, but her flame burned out quickly and left no trace." Perhaps it is time to remember the Honorary First Lady of the Pikes Peak Region. 

Doris Gardner-McCraw -

Author, Speaker, Historian-specializing in
Colorado and Women's History

Member of National League of American Pen Women,

Women Writing the West,

Pikes Peak Posse of the Westerners

Angela Raines - author: Where Love & History Meet

For a list of Angela Raines Books: Here 

Photo and Poem: Click Here 

Angela Raines FaceBook: Click Here

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