EARLY COLORADO CHRISTMASES

Post written and copyright by Doris McCraw

As the Christmas and Holiday season approaches, how about some early celebrations? Imagine if you will, 1858, you have followed the siren's call to Colorado in search of the 'golden fleece' known as gold and silver. Life has been busy and the high desert with its mild weather has fooled you. Then when you do the figuring, its Christmas, what do you do? Or maybe you have traveled with your family and now you plan to celebrate in the middle of nowhere. Join me as I share some of the stories I have found.

According to the records, the area around what is now Denver had about 200 men and 5 women (four were married) and assorted children. Perhaps I should add the two towns that made up the area were about sixty days old. Plans were being made in the two camps for a festive meal. One camp was planning and candles for a tree that had been cut in the foothills. This was the German couple and trees were a part of the home country festivities. The other party had a meal of buffalo, rabbit, wild turkey, rice pudding and peach and apple pie, listing just part of the menu.

USGS Topographic Mapping Field Camp

It is written that Christmas morning that year was 'soft and genial as a May day...'. Into this lovely mix "Uncle Dick" Wootton (sp) brought his gift, "Taos Lightening". Needless to say, the day was one to be remembered, if you hadn't taken in too much of the free gift Uncle Dick brought to the party. (I'll have to tell you more about Uncle Dick later)

One family on the Arkansas river, up close to the cut off to what is now Monarch pass, had been cut off from others and the towns due to heavy fall snow storms that year of 1863.  They had been working their claim, even in the heart of winter. When Christmas arrived, they had plenty of food, but not much variety. So the one daughter decided to bring out the good china brought from their home in Nebraska and serve up a feast. According to the story, they made mock turkey, from beef, beans, substitute coffee, made from browned bran. The parents were the guest of honor. Now that is a creative young lady, who set this up with the help of her siblings.

. Harding sandstone on gneiss and schists 1.5 miles northwest of Canyon [City]/USGS. “

In the early trapper days around 1842, the northeast corner of Colorado/Utah saw a holiday take shape with the help of the Indians in the area. Their Holiday meal consisted of appalost, a type of shish kabob with lean meat and fat roasted over a low fire, buffalo cider, a liquid found in the stomach of buffalo, supplemented with washena, marrow fat and pomme blanc from the Indians.

In Leadville in 1888, Dick Berryman's Saloon offered the following bill of fare: Possum, Turkey, Roast Pig, Sweet Potatoes and Corn Dodgers.

Leadville, Colorado, mining district, subject of an early mining-geology study, 1879.

As you can see, even back in the early days, people did what they could to celebrate. I will leave you with a lovely passage from Isabella Bird's book, "A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains". As Isabella traveled the Rocky Mountains, alone, she wrote letters back to her sister in England. This passage is from her time in the Estes Park area of Colorado in 1873 as she rode her horse Birdie through the fir covered area.  "...I think I never saw such a brilliant atmosphere.That curious phenomena called frost-fall was occurring in which, whatever moisture may exist in the air, somehow aggregates into feather and fern leaves, the loveliest of creations, only seen in rarefied air and intense cold. One breath and they vanish. The air was filled with diamond sparks quite intangible. They seemed just glitter and no more. It was still and cloudless, and the shapes of violet mountains were softened by a veil of the tenderest blue."

This area is known as Little Yellowstone in Rocky Mountain national Park (photo W. Lee, USGS, ...

To each and everyone, may you have the Christmas and Holiday that your heart desires.

snowfall - by the author

HOME FOR HIS HEART
http://www.amazon.com/Home-His-Heart-Angela-Raines-ebook/dp/B00LU3HZEK/
also available as an ebook on Barnes & Noble and Smashwords.


Doris Gardner-McCraw/Angela Raines
Author, Speaker, Historian-specializing in
Colorado and Women's History

https://www.amazon.com/author/angelaraines-dorismccraw
Photo and Poem: http://fivesevenfivepage.blogspot.com
Blog: http://renawomyn.blogspot.com/ 

“Film and Photography on the Front Range” (Regional History Series): Colorado Springs, CO. Pikes Peak Library District 2012

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