Colorado Women: A History

2. Pioneering Women

17 In 1858 prospectors panned out small pockets of gold from the banks of Little Dry Creek, a few miles up the South Platte from its confluence with Cherry Creek. News of the find spread quickly. By early September, would-be miners from Lawrence, Kansas, who had spent the previous two months unsuccessfully mining the streams of South Park and the San Luis Valley, arrived at Clear Creek. One of the original members of this group was Julia Archibald Holmes, who had walked from the eastern part of the Kansas Territory (which included portions of present-day Colorado) to the western part to build up her endurance. She was determined to climb Pikes Peak, which she did in the summer of 1858, clad in the “American costume” (a calico dress over calico bloomers named after Amelia Bloomer who, like Holmes, was an advocate of women’s rights). From the top of the peak she wrote a letter to her mother in which she described her feelings: “I have accomplished the task which I marked out for myself, and now I feel T w o Pioneering Women (1859–1877) DOI: 10.5876/9781607322078.c02 18 P i o n e e r i n g W o m e n amply repaid for all my toil and fatigue. Nearly everyone tried to discourage me from attempting it, but I believed that I should succeed; and now, here I am, and I feel that I would not have missed this glorious sight.”1 Years later another American woman, Katherine Lee Bates, who was teaching at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, was so moved by the vista that she wrote the poem “America the Beautiful.” No one knows if Holmes was indeed the first woman to have stood on the summit of Pikes Peak, although she was probably correct in assuming that she was the first white woman to do so. Perhaps a Native American woman—or many of them—had sat on one of the summit’s rocks and gazed out over the land of their ancestors. It would soon be a land native women would have difficulty recognizing as thousands of Americans followed the Holmes party into the Rocky Mountains. Life on the Overland Trail While Holmes and her husband went on to New Mexico, the rest of the party stayed in Colorado to search for gold. The discovery in Little Dry Creek and Clear Creek set off a gold rush similar to California’s a decade earlier . In towns along the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, the news of gold was electrifying. In November 1858, William Larimer’s party set up along the right bank of the South Platte opposite the town of Auraria on the left bank. During the winter the rush to the goldfields was a mere trickle compared to the onslaught that began in the spring of 1859. Of those spring arrivals, one couple would make their mark on the new city of Denver, a consolidation of Auraria and Larimer’s Denver City. William N. and Elizabeth Byers settled in the fledging town. On April 23, 1859, he published the first newspaper in the Pikes Peak region. While Byers used the Rocky Mountain News to extol the region’s potential riches and healthy climate, his wife busied herself with taking care of their young children and providing aid to wives and children abandoned or left behind in Denver while their men traipsed up to the goldfields with dreams of becoming rich. Between 1858 and 1870, thousands of Americans journeyed from the States to the western territories. Many were single men or husbands who left their families behind in hopes of striking it rich in the area’s goldfields. Some also traveled as families. Others emigrated for farming and ranching opportunities—“to mine the miners”—or to improve their health. For both men and women the decision to journey west was a momentous one. Dangers lay along the trail, and uncertainty awaited them at trail’s end. Some 19 P i o n e e r i n g W o m e n couples made this decision jointly; for others, the decision was made by the husband. Some women eagerly embraced the opportunity; others dreaded it and found leaving family and friends heart-wrenching. For all, it usually meant a permanent break from those loved ones. Emigrants who started far east of the Mississippi and Missouri...