The First We Can Remember: Colorado Pioneer Women Tell Their Stories

Chapter 4: The Northeast: Weld, Morgan, and Logan Counties

In 1885 I had the western fever more than ever. I was anxious now to get some land in Colorado and start a fortune for myself as I had such wonderful pictures in my mind of what this country would look like and be like in the near future. Lizzie Gordon Buchanan One of the inducements for European American settlement in eastern Colorado was the Federal Homestead Act of 1862, which enabled a homesteader to acquire 160 acres of “unoccupied” land by preempting (that is, by living on it or “squatting” in a sense) for five years and making improvements (such as building a house, digging a well, cultivating or plowing at least ten acres, and fencing a portion). The Homestead Act was especially noteworthy in that it made no distinction based on sex. By this act, a woman head of household had just as much legal right as a man to settle on and own land, and as some of the following narratives suggest, many women were ready to take full advantage of their right. An 1873 revision of the law allowed one to purchase the land for $1.25 an acre after living on it for six months. By the Timber Culture Act (1873) a settler could claim an additional 160 acres by planting one-quarter of it in trees. This act enabled pioneers like Lizzie Buchanan to claim up to 160 acres, plant one-quarter in Chapter 4: The Northeast Weld, Morgan, and Logan Counties Sterling Boulder Denver Estes Park Littleton Wray Greeley Brush Lucern Fort Morgan Holyoke Eaton La Salle Haxtun Haigler Niwot Milliken Sidney Loveland Johnstown Julesburg Fort Collins Cheyenne Evans Cope U NION PACIFIC RR P A C I F I C R R U N I O N South Fork Republican Riv e r Big Thompson River St. Vrain Creek South Platte Ri v e r S o u t h P l a t t e R i v e r KANSAS NEBRASKA WYOMING COLORADO WELD COUNTY LOGAN COUNTY MORGAN COUNTY ADAMS COUNTY WASHINGTON COUNTY PHILLIPS COUNTY SEDGWICK COUNTY YUMA COUNTY BOULDER COUNTY LARIMER COUNTY N 50 mi 0 25 6. The northeast the northeast 105 trees, and after making proof, buy the land at $1.25 an acre. To make proof, a person needed merely to demonstrate that one had in good faith complied with the provisions of the law, give evidence that one was a bona fide resident of the state or territory, and advertise in the closest newspaper one’s intentions of buying the claim.1 Another enticement for settlers was the Union Colony in Weld County, which Nathan Meeker (who in 1878 would become Indian agent at the White River Agency) established in 1869.2 After his first visit to Colorado, he returned to New York and immediately proposed a settlement colony to Horace Greeley, his boss at the New York Tribune. With the entrepreneur’s approval and backing, Meeker planned the Union Colony, and by the spring of 1870 settlement began. Settlers were lured by newspaper advertisements such as the following: The scenery is grand beyond description, and the land in the immediate vicinity is unsurpassed for agricultural purposes. To the south and east, as far as the eye can reach, the magnificent landscape seems to rise and fall like the waves of the sea. From the base of the mountains the plain gradually slopes to the eastward, which accounts in part for the mild winters of this region. Thousands of feet above this garden spot the sky is filled with rocky cliffs and snowy peaks, yet the prairie itself is three thousand feet above the level of the sea. The climate is said to be peculiarly favorable for persons troubled with weak lungs.3 Union Colony is one of the few such communal enterprises that actually thrived. But despite its success, the colony was essentially absorbed into the city when the township of Greeley was incorporated in 1871. A characteristic of pioneering in Colorado that becomes especially evident as one reads these narratives is that the women who came from the East brought with them the attitudes toward nature that are at least as old as the Puritan pilgrims’ visions of the empty and howling wilderness that was to become Massachusetts. As has been typical of Western civilization in general, the land that supports and 106 the northeast brings forth life and which provides...