Colorado Women: A History

4. Settling In

65 As communities developed and residents settled in, opportunities opened for single women. Female teachers in particular knew their services would be welcome. One such woman was Phoebe Fidelia Skinner. Skinner was born in Ohio in 1841, making her of marrying age about the time the nation was torn asunder by the Civil War. As young men joined regiments and marched off to war, Skinner and thousands of other women supported the Union war effort. Following the surrender of General Robert E. Lee in April 1865, the men returned, but they were not the vibrant youth of five years past. War had taken its toll on their bodies and minds. Skinner found no eligible bachelors among the veterans. Restless, she left the Midwest and traveled by train to Boulder. In 1875 she was hired to teach in Crisman, a prosperous mining area at the junction of Sunshine Gulch and Four Mile Creek.1 Her students were the sons and daughters of miners, merchants, farmers, and ranchers. As a single woman in her early thirties, Skinner was a bit of an anomaly because F o u r Settling In (1878–1900) DOI: 10.5876/9781607322078.c04 66 S e t t l i n g I n most schoolteachers were ten years younger than she. She boarded with the Simon Davidson family in town. An impudent student once asked if she had come west to teach or to find a husband. Although there is no record of her response, whatever her original motive, she had proven successful in acquiring both a teaching job and a husband.2 Two years after arriving in Colorado she married James Andrew Walker, a Civil War veteran from Virginia who had moved to Missouri after the war. Within a few years he was in poor health, suffering from consumption . His life in danger, Walker followed his doctor’s orders and moved west. Finding the mountain air restorative, he worked as a farmhand in Left Hand Canyon. He first rented before buying land near Boulder on which to farm and ranch. After spending several summers in the mountains, he bought a homestead relinquishment.3 JamesWalkerknewSimonDavidsonfromhispostwaryearsinMissouri. Although he was seven years younger than Skinner, Walker began courting her. They were married on January 6, 1876. The couple lived in the mountains during the summer and in Boulder during the winter. Walker steadily increased his landholdings on Flagstaff Mountain until he had over 6,000 acres on which he grazed Galloway cattle, imported from Scotland because of their ability to withstand the severe mountain weather.4 The Walkers grew corn as feed for the cattle and raised pigs for family meals. Phoebe tended to the milk cows and numerous chickens. Boulder’s growing population provided a ready market for her eggs and butter. Colorado Growth In addition to the Walkers, other ranching and farming families benefited from Colorado’s growing population after the 1870s. Booster efforts by Denver’s leaders and the building of railroads into the region encouraged this growth. William N. Byers, John Evans, and David H. Moffat constantly publicized the advantages of the Colorado region.5 At their urging, the state legislature created and funded the Board of Immigration, whose mission was to encourage migration to Colorado. A railroad line from Denver to Cheyenne, Wyoming, which connected Colorado to the transcontinental line, was joined by other rail lines into and out of Denver. By the early 1880s Denver had been transformed from a collection of makeshift shacks into the hub of a rapidly growing region. Rail lines provided transportation to Colorado for westward-bound women as well as job opportunities for women already in the state. For ten 67 S e t t l i n g I n years, Mrs. Nancy Wickham and her three daughters ran the Wickham House. Originally built in Granada in 1873, it was moved by flat car and became the first wood-framed house in La Junta. The Wickham women ran it as a boardinghouse for railroad workers until 1886, when the Fred Harvey House was built at the train station.6 In 1876 Fred Harvey, an English immigrant , opened his first Harvey House Restaurant in the Santa Fe Depot Station in Topeka, Kansas. He had noticed that, although railroad traffic was slicing across the country, trains typically had few dining cars. Trains usually stopped every 100 miles, but stations often lacked eating establishments or the eating establishments...