Extraordinary Women of the Rocky Mountain West

Extraordinary Women

of the

Rocky Mountain West

Edited by

Tim Blevins, Dennis Daily, Chris Nicholl,

Calvin P. Otto & Katherine Scott Sturdevant

Published by

Pikes Peak Library District

with the

Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame

Extraordinary Women of the Rocky Mountain West

Copyright 2010 Pikes Peak Library District.

All rights reserved. Smashwords edition.

This publication was made possible by private funds. Interpretation of events and conclusions are those of the authors, and do not necessarily represent the opinions of Pikes Peak Library District (PPLD), PPLD Board of Trustees, or PPLD employees.

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Extraordinary women of the Rocky Mountain West / edited by Tim Blevins, Dennis Daily, Chris Nicholl, Calvin P. Otto & Katherine Scott Sturdevant.-1st ed.

p. cm. (Regional history series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

LCCN 2009938643

Smashwords ISBN 978-1-56735-332-7

paperback ISBN 978-1-56735-255-9

1. Women -- West (U.S.) -- Biography. 2. Women -- Rocky Mountains -- Biography. 3. Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History. 4. Women’s rights -- United States -- History. 5. Civil rights movements -- United States -- History -- 20th century. I. Blevins, Tim II. Daily, Dennis III. Nicholl, Chris IV. Series.

F591 .E98 2009

920.720978 -dc22

Regional History Series

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Acknowledgments

Thank you to the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame (CWHF) for enthusiastically partnering with the Pikes Peak Library District (PPLD) for this special publication. Recognizing that many of the women whose stories are told in these pages are also inductees into the Hall of Fame, it became clear that this was a natural partnership.

Lindy Conter, co-chair of the CWHF Board, served as liaison, adviser, and reviewer for this publication. We are appreciative of her leadership in facilitating a great relationship with the CWHF, of her patient participation in our publishing process, and of her feedback resulting in a quality book.

Colorado Humanities (CH) consistently provides support for our annual Regional History Symposia and the resulting books. We are grateful to the CH Board of Directors, Executive Director Margaret (Maggie) A. Coval, Director of Programs and Center for the Book Josephine Jones, and the entire CH staff for their collaboration and encouragement.

Katherine Scott Sturdevant deserves double thanks for pulling duty as a contributor to the book and for providing professional expertise and editing. Kathy is included among the most admired regional historians and favorite college history professors—we are fortunate to have her assistance and appreciate her superior efforts.

We offer our thanks to the authors of these chapters who spent months, and even years, in pursuing the research and writing about their women. Our appreciation to the Tutt family for allowing us to reprint the 1956 speech made by Vesta W. Tutt about Alice Bemis Taylor, and to Fran Kiester, Sandra Dowda, Paul Draper and Brad Draper, for authorizing the reprinting of their mothers’ work. Additionally, we are grateful to the Special Collections and PPLD staff members, who eagerly undertake a greater workload to accomplish the symposia and the publishing of these books, and we thank Mary Ellen White for her assistance in preparing this book for e-book formats.

Regretfully, we must report that co-editor Calvin P. Otto passed away during November 2009, shortly before this book was ready for publication. Cal was the principle consultant for the Regional History Series books, a motivating force for the annual history symposia, and a good friend to the library district and staff. We recognize that Cal’s contributions to our library and the community were encouraged and supported by his wife Patricia Otto and that she, too, deserves abundant thanks for her contributions and her support of Cal, and of our efforts.

The Editorial Committee

Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Acknowledgements

About Pikes Peak Library District

The Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame • Honorees by Year of Induction

Introduction

Marie Guiraud: A Remarkable Character

Laura Bell McDaniel: Queen of the Colorado City Tenderloin

From Breeding Persian Cats to Wrapping Candy: Working Women of Colorado Springs in the 1920s

Virginia Donaghe McClurg: Mesa Verde Crusader

Vida Ellison and The Manitou Cliff Dwellings

Alice Bemis Taylor

Alice Stewart Hill, Colorado Springs’ First Wild Flower Artist: Her Family and Her Friends

In Her Garden

Helen of Colorado: Helen Hunt Jackson, Colorado Springs, and the Making of an Indian Activist

Helen Hunt Jackson and the Rhetoric of Humanization: Creating a Rhetorical Space Between Traditional Feminine and Masculine Spheres in the Late 19th Century

They Came To Educate: The Sisters of Loretto in the Rocky Mountain West, 1852—Present

Gretchen McRae: Civil Rights and Political Activist of Colorado Springs and the United States, 1924—1966

Maggie Smith Hathaway: Montana’s Unsung Progressive Era Reformist

Dr. Caroline Spencer and Colorado Springs’ Radicals for Reform

Someday the women are going to run this government, Lillian Kerr, A Colorado Springs Legend

Alimony for Men New Cry

How Colorado Laws Discriminate Against Women

The Corset Conflagration, or Women’s Liberation, 1923

Selected Bibliography

Archives Collections by or About Women

FOREWORD

The tales of the American West are often told through the larger than life exploits of males: intrepid explorers, rugged trappers and miners, relentless rail and town developers, and the heroic cowboy. Likewise, females appear in stylized motifs, frequently in ancillary roles as men’s helpmates. There were cultivated, literary females who civilized the rough mining camps and prairie towns. There were stalwart pioneer wives, maintaining hearth and home in primitive conditions while toiling on the land and giving birth to a new generation of sturdy farmers and ranchers. Although working women plied their skills in manifold businesses, a prominent image is of the notorious females of the demimonde—simultaneously reviled for their occupational choice and revered for their hearts of gold.

In this book, Extraordinary Women of the Rocky Mountain West, largely assembled from papers presented at the 2007 Pikes Peak Regional History Symposium, you will encounter women whose biographies, at first glance, suggest that they were the archetypical western females. Literary icon, Helen Hunt Jackson migrated west and fell in love with a man and his nascent city, then published sentimental essays extolling Colorado’s splendors. Marie Guiraud is the embodiment of the hardy pioneering wife and mother. The quintessential bad girl-businesswoman, Old Colorado City’s Laura Bell McDaniel, completes the trinity of stylized western women.

We invite scholars and recreational readers to take up this book, believing you will find stories to challenge your assumptions and knowledge of historical women’s activities and be enticed to explore the rich primary sources and images documenting western women’s history that are housed at the Pikes Peak Library District’s Special Collections. Although neatly fitting simplistic stereotypes, the three women above were powerfully actualized ladies. Jackson turned her literary talent into a groundbreaking analysis of the U.S. government’s mistreatment of Native Americans; Guiraud, a young, widowed mother of ten, with a shrewd business and legal mind, built her ranch into one of the most prosperous in Colorado’s Park County; McDaniel was dutiful daughter, doting mother, and friend to many.

The stories of each woman whose life graces this book are equally complex and compelling. You will meet intrepid, industrious females, whose lives of unexpected achievement and, at times, exceptional adversity, ushered in feminist opportunities hardly recalled or comprehended in today’s world. They were teachers, writers, artists, a physician, ranchers, business and working women. Some wore many hats, like the widowed Maggie Smith Hathaway, an educator, rancher, child-welfare advocate, suffragist and legislator. Some, like poet and journalist Virginia Donaghe McClurg, later dedicated their lives to preserving the region’s environmental, cultural and material heritage.

You will meet civil rights activists, including Berthe Arnold and Gretchen McRae, 1917 graduates of the Colorado Springs High School. Both spent time in Washington, D.C., where radical suffragist Arnold was imprisoned for demanding women’s votes, and civil servant McRae challenged workplace racial injustice. The two were beautiful, bold females, but whereas Arnold’s yearbook portrait appears in alphabetical order, McRae’s, as you will learn in her story, appears on a separate page reserved for African Americans.

Additionally, we are pleased to reprint several historical documents, including The Corset Conflagration, by local historians Inez Hunt and Wanetta Draper. It is a commentary on the Equal Rights Convention, staged in 1923 at the Garden of the Gods. Likely written near the end of the 1960s or early 1970s, an era in which women aggressively revived their push for legal and economic equality, the satirical essay stands in stark contrast to a second document, a 1924 treatise on How Colorado Laws Discriminate Against Women.

The women’s unique biographies, composed by talented professional and avocational historians, illuminate the multifaceted lives that the women led and the numerous paths they blazed as they, no less than men, settled, civilized, and built the Rocky Mountain West.

Paula J. Miller, Executive Director, PPLD

Chris Nicholl, Regional History Symposium Committee Co-Chair

About Pikes Peak Library District

Pikes Peak Library District (PPLD) is a nationally recognized system of public libraries serving a population of more than 547,000 in El Paso County, Colorado. With twelve facilities, online resources, and mobile library service, PPLD responds to the unique needs of individual neighborhoods and the community at large. PPLD has an employee base of 432 full- and part-time staff, and utilizes roughly 1,500 volunteers. It strives to reach all members of the community, providing free and equitable access to information and an avenue for personal and community enrichment. PPLD is recognized for its commitment to diversity and community collaboration, its quality programming, and its excellent customer service.

Board of Trustees 2010

Lynne Telford, President

Jill Gaebler,Vice President

John Wilson, Secretary/Treasurer

Robert Hilbert

Kathleen Owings

Katherine Spicer

Executive Director

Paula J. Miller

Regional History Series

Editorial Committee

Tim Blevins

Dennis Daily

Chris Nicholl

Calvin P. Otto

Principal Series Consultant

Calvin P. Otto

Cover Design

Katie Rudolph

Extraordinary Women of the Rocky Mountain West spotlights only a few of the mothers, daughters, sisters and wives whose courage and passion shaped and softened this region. Every one of us can list dozens or more women who are known to have made a better Rocky Mountain West—even more remain unknown and unrecognized, but not unappreciated. We are grateful to all of these women, to whom we dedicate this book.

The Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame Mission

Back to Contents

To inspire by celebrating and sharing the lifetime contributions of Colorado’s extraordinary women.

The Hall strives to educate the people of Colorado about the stories of the women who shaped our state and the nation’s history with courage, leadership, intelligence, compassion, and creativity. Their talents, skills, struggles, and contributions form a legacy that the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame is dedicated to protecting.

Women of diverse backgrounds, from pioneers to politicians, educators to entrepreneurs, are inducted into the Hall of Fame during a gala event held in every even-numbered year. The women inducted into the Hall of Fame have made a major impact on the lives of others and helped to elevate the status of women in our state, our nation, and, some, around the world.

Who We Are

The daily operations of the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame are carried out by an all-volunteer Board of Directors. The organizational structure also includes an Honorary Board comprising notable citizens from across the state who support the mission and goals of the Hall. A Volunteer Cadre helps with the many projects, programs, and events planned by the Board of Directors. All share the same goal of educating society about the contributions of Colorado’s remarkable women and ensuring their legacy for future generations.

Inducting New Members into the Hall of Fame

The Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame depends on members of the public to nominate extraordinary women for induction. Nominations are accepted from organizations or individuals throughout the state. A diverse group of Colorado citizens is recruited to act as a Selection Committee. The Selection Committee reviews all nominations, performs additional research if necessary, and selects nominees for induction into the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame.

In even-numbered years, up to ten new inductees are admitted into the Hall of Fame at an event attended and sponsored by people and organizations from across Colorado.

The Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame Celebrating 25 Years

The Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame is dedicated to recognizing and preserving the history of the accomplishments of past and present Colorado women. Both historical and contemporary women have shared foresight, vision, and the power of accomplishment but lacked a forum for recognition. The Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame ensures that their splendid achievements will not be forgotten.

The Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame inducts women, both historical and contemporary, who have significant ties to Colorado and who:

Made significant and enduring contributions to their fields of endeavor

Elevated the status of women

Helped open new frontiers for women and for society

Inspired others by their example

Honorees by Year of Induction

2010

Madeleine Albright, First Female Secretary of State

Elinor Greenberg, Community Activist

Maria Guajardo, Educator

Philippa Marrack, Medical Researcher

Ramona Martinez, Politician

Hattie McDaniel, Actress

Susan O’Brien, Journalist

Bartley Marie Scott, Rancher

Alice Bemis Taylor, Philanthropist

Jill Tietjen, Engineer, Author

2008

Sue Anschutz-Rodgers, Rancher, Conservationist, Philanthropist

Sister Alicia Valladolid-Cuarón, Business & Civic Leader, Human Rights Activist

Evie Dennis, School Superintendent, U.S. Olympic Committee Member

Jean Dubofsky, Colorado Supreme Court Justice

Katherine Keating, U.S. Navy Captain, Pharmacist

Mary Lou Makepeace, Politician, Equal Rights Advocate

Lily Nie, Adoption Agency Founder

Anna C. Petteys, Education Advocate, U.N. Proponent

Eliza Routt, First First Lady of Colorado

Rhea Woltman, Mercury 13 Astronaut, Parliamentarian

Mildred Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Sportswoman

2006

Stephanie Allen, Business & Civic Leader

Judy Collins, Entertainer, Author, Social Activist

Marion Downs, Audiologist

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Psychoanalyst, Author, Candatora

Arlene Hirschfeld, Philanthropist, Community Leader

Jean Jones, Community Leader

Fannie Lorber, Community Organizer & Leader

Susan Solomon, Research Scientist

Caroline Spencer, Physician, Women’s Suffrage Leader

Vivien Spitz, Official Reporter of Debates & Chief Reporter in the U.S. House of Representatives

2004

Anna Lee Aldred, Jockey, Rodeo Rider

Louie Croft Boyd, Nurse

Merle Chambers, Business Leader, Philanthropist

Patricia Gabow, Medical Director, Physician, Healthcare Advocate

Carlotta LaNier, Activist

Portia Mansfield, Dancer

Carol Mutter, U.S. Marine Corps General

Charlotte Perry, Dancer

Antoinette Perry-Frueauff, Actress

Arie Parks Taylor, Politician, Activist

2002

Linda Martinez Alvarado, Business Leader

Virginia Hart Fraser, Long-term Care Ombudsman

Gudrun Timmerhaus Gaskill, Trail Builder, Mountaineer

Jo Ann Cram Joselyn, Space Scientist

Mary Miller, Founder of Lafayette, Colorado

Sue Miller, Women’s Health Advocate

Gloria Travis Tanner, Politician

Emily Howell Warner, Aviation Pioneer

2000

Polly Baca, Latina Trailblazer

Joy Burns, Philanthropist

Josie Heath, Community Leader

J. Virginia Lincoln, Physicist

Pauline Short Robinson, Librarian

Martha M. Urioste, Educator

Zita L. Weinshienk, Judge

1997

Susan Anderson, Physician, Coroner

Eppie Archuleta, Master Weaver

Ceal Barry, College & Olympic Basketball Coach

Juana Bordas, Hispanic Women’s Leader

Swanee Hunt, Philanthropist, U.S. Ambassador

Reynelda Muse, Television Journalist

Sister Mary Luke Tobin, Peace Activist

1996

Marilyn Van Derbur Atler, Children’s Rights Activist

Joan Birkland, Athlete

Elise Boulding, Nobel Peace Prize Nominee

Dana Hudkins Crawford, Historic Preservationist

Margaret Curry, First Woman Parole Officer

Terri H. Finkel, Medical Researcher

Elnora M. Gilfoyle, Occupational Physician & Therapist

Mary Hauck Elitch Long, Co-creator of Elitch Gardens

Frances McConnell-Mills, Forensic Medicine Pioneer

Rachel Bassette Noel, Civil Rights Pioneer

Mildred Pitts Walter, Author of Children’s Books

1991

Helen Marie Black, Civic & Cultural Leader

Genevieve Fiore, Peace Activist

Augusta Pierce Tabor, Philanthropist

Wilma Webb, Politician

1990

Caroline Bancroft, Author, Historian

Hendrika Cantwell, Pediatrician, Children’s Advocate

Sarah Platt Decker, Volunteer

Jane Silverstein Ries, Landscape Architect

1989

Clara Brown, Pioneer

Edwina Hume Fallis, Teacher

Sumiko Hennessy, Social Worker

Cleo Parker Robinson, Dance Company Director

1988

Caroline Churchill, Publisher

Oleta Crain, U.S. Government Official

LaRae Orullian, Bank President

Elizabeth Hickok Robbins Stone, Pioneer

1987

Miriam Goldberg, Publisher

Frances Wisebart Jacobs, Charity Founder

Mary Florence Lathrop, Attorney

Lenore E. Walker, Psychologist

1986

Antonia Brico, Conductor

Helen Louise White Peterson, Native American Advocate

Josephine Roche, Labor Advocate

Eudochia Bell Smith, Politician

1985

Lena Archuleta, Educator, Community Activist

Isabella Bird, Author

Helen Bonfils, Philanthropist

Margaret Molly Brown, Titanic Heroine

Mary Coyle Chase, Playwright

Chipeta, Native American Negotiator

Mamie Eisenhower, Humanitarian

Justina Ford, Physician

Emily Griffith, Educator

Helen Hunt Jackson, Author

Dottie Lamm, Feminist, Author

Martha Maxwell, Taxidermist

Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel

Owl Woman, Native American Negotiator

Mary Rippon, Educator

Florence Sabin, Physician

Hazel Schmoll, Botanist

Pat Schroeder, Politician

May Bonfils Stanton, Philanthropist

Anne Steinbeck, National Women’s Leader

Ruth Stockton, Politician

Elizabeth Bonduel McCourt Baby Doe Tabor, Folk Heroine

Marie Wormington-Volk, Anthropologist, Archaeologist

Jean Yancey, Entrepreneur

http://www.cogreatwomen.org

Back to Contents

Passengers riding the Mount Manitou Scenic Incline, prior to 1908. The ride on the Incline claimed to be the longest and highest railway of its kind on the globe. . . . In sixteen minutes after leaving Manitou you are in the wilds and vastness of the great Rocky Mountains. Like riding the Incline, women in the West took the front seat on the bumpy ride to equality—a ride that is not yet over. Today many women and men hike the Incline as a physical feat. From Special Collections, Pikes Peak Library District, (001-305).

An Introduction to the Extraordinary Women

Lynn A. Gilfillan-Morton

What makes a woman extraordinary? We have all known extraordinary women during our lives. No single book could list them all, nor does this small volume attempt to identify more than a few. Although there are no chapters about some extraordinary women, like Chipeta, Lily Chin, or Teresita Sandoval, you will get to learn a bit about them in this introduction. Your favorite women of history may not be enumerated here, though their spirit and strength are common threads in the fabric of the Extraordinary Women of the Rocky Mountain West.

Fictional stories about women of the West often are composite characters, possessing uncommon grit and independent fortitude. Yet others are portrayed as delicate and unburdened citizens of a new civilization. One thing they all have in common is their adventurous lives.

Araminta’s Paint Box is a fictional account of a little girl’s hand-crafted and beautifully decorated paint box that fell out of the back of her family’s covered wagon as they traveled westward during the migration of the 1840s.

The box was found and, through facility and futility, made its way across the continent, passing momentarily through the drama of a number of lives along the way. Finally, in a story with a happy ending, Araminta once again had the opportunity to have her cherished paint box in her new home in California.

The little girl’s story was created through the imagination of contemporary author Karen Ackerman and illustrator Betsy Lewin, who together presented one small piece of one phase of one female’s life in the West. At the end of the little book, however, we are reminded that, even though Araminta’s story of loss ended happily, the box was a metaphor for the many successful gains and tragic losses that may have occurred in women’s stories of travel, home, career, beliefs and communities across the West.

Tallgrass, by Denver-based author Sandra Dallas, is set in the 1940s. Also fiction, the book addresses the fateful events that were created between and within two diverse communities in the West, a post-Pearl Harbor, Japanese-American internment camp in Colorado (Camp Amache) and the small, rural town near the camp (Granada). Written by Dallas as a mystery surrounding the death of a young female, the story is told through the character of a teen-age girl who witnesses the gains and losses experienced by the two communities.

The imaginative stories of the paint box and the Colorado communities are based on factual research. The Quilt That Walked to Golden is another of Sandra Dallas’s works based on journals, photographs, oral histories, and interviews. However, this book conveyed the actual nonfiction accounts of women’s lives in the West that were centered around quilts from the 1840s to the end of one prominent quilt maker’s life in 2003.

Women have begun to research and write about women; however there is still an all-too-sparse collection of women’s history in the West. Why have so many valuable and inspiring life stories of Western women gone untold? Elizabeth Jameson explained the dilemma that created much of the women’s anonymity. She wrote in the afterword for Andrea Kalinowski’s Untold Stories: Jewish Pioneer Women, 1850-1910, Women’s daily labors were omitted from textbook histories, those national memories of battles, dates and elections. Their words rarely survived to preserve a common legacy.

Dallas found that the separate pieces of one woman’s or family’s life, when combined with the pieces of other lives, did tell of a common legacy. Shared between and among women, families, organizations and communities, those experiences, with quilts as the common thread, defined investments and influence in economic, cultural, political and social networks, from the mid-19th century to the early 21st century, a span of more than 160 years.

Perhaps then, from a shared compilation of roles within women’s collective history, we can better understand and celebrate the heretofore understated roles and contributions of one sparkling star, of one extraordinary woman or one group of women, who have previously gone unrecognized.

Continuing in the afterword, Jameson honored Kalinowski’s thorough historical research and her hand-designed and computer-generated quilt art saying, Patchwork becomes a precise metaphor for the scraps of documents, letters, memoirs, and artifacts from which historians now piece together the larger patterns of the women’s lives.¹

To bring the extraordinary women to life today, the contributors to this book have used the same patchwork methodology, to tell the story of each individual or group.

This introduction will use a similar patchwork approach but will focus on some of the similarities that exist between and among the women, including a few of the gains made through their careers and work, as well as some of their notable, mutually-tragic losses, which also help to define them as extraordinary.

Shared Acquaintances

Because the featured women’s lives cover most of seventeen consecutive decades, it is not only a surprise that three of the women’s life spans overlapped, but it is also surprising that they lived in the same community and actually were acquainted with each other. Ed and Nancy Bathke have documented through their research that Helen Hunt Jackson, Virginia Donaghe McClurg, and Alice Stewart Hill, were acquaintances in Colorado Springs. In this volume, Vesta W. Tutt reminds us that Helen Hunt Jackson was a close neighbor of Alice Bemis’s family.

Additional information may expand the Bathkes’ discovery. In Helen Hunt Jackson, An Enigma, a 1970 paper written by Lorene Englert, which can be found in the Pikes Peak Library District’s archives, in Special Collections, the author indicated that Virginia McClurg had at one time written about Helen Hunt Jackson’s initial place of residence in Colorado Springs. McClurg identified the connected cottages between Cascade and Tejon Streets where Helen lived and where she initially met and became an acquaintance of William S. Jackson.

Englert wrote, too, that McClurg had at another time described Jackson as a man’s woman, perhaps an impression that McClurg drew from either a business or a social interaction with Jackson.

Businesswoman

In addition to sharing the power of a personal presence, these three women, Hill, McClurg and Jackson, shared another similarity. Each was a businesswoman in her own right. Setting the bar, Helen Hunt Jackson told her publishers, I shall be undisguisedly mercenary and write for the highest bidder.²

Once the entrepreneurial productivity of each of these three is acknowledged, the same credit can be extended to more of the extraordinary women.

In addition to her literary contributions, Virginia McClurg’s insightful development of The Cliff Dwellings in the canyon north of Manitou Springs introduced Vida Gregory Ellison as a businesswoman in the expanding tourism business in Colorado Springs shortly after the turn of the 20th century. Those are the same cliff dwellings that can be visited today.

Josephine Aspinwall Roche and Ruth Banning Lewis conducted business in the coal and fuels industry. Lewis assumed the leadership of and expanded her father’s smaller coal and ice warehouse business in Colorado Springs after he died, and Roche relied in part on coal fields north of Denver to fuel the steel industry corporation that she inherited.

The diversity of the women’s chosen fields of business continues with Alice Stewart Hill as an artist, teaching and also producing her hand-painted sketches and other artworks for sale.

Maggie Smith Hathaway was not only a rancher but served as a county and as a state agency administrator in Montana. Helen Hunt Jackson was a federal agency administrator for a short time, and Marie Guiraud, as well as Banning Lewis, conducted business as a ranch owner.

Laura Bell McDaniel operated as a stubborn Westside, Colorado City madame, and Teresita Sandoval was an Arkansas River Valley and a Mora, New Mexico, retailer. Lily Chin was recognized for her successful role in her family’s Chinese American business enterprises, especially after her father and husband died, as well as for her role in the community as an ambassador in Denver, Colorado, through regional business, education, and social communities.

At a time when male physicians did not wholly accept women physicians as their professional peers, Caroline Spencer earned her living as a medical doctor. As a practitioner, she not only had to maintain her license to practice through a male-dominated state regulatory and professional membership system, but she also had to maintain a credible image within the local medical community.

The Sisters of Loretto was a religious community that actively practiced its business model. While its community mission over time typically has been student and community education, it was one of several women’s religious communities in the Rocky Mountain West to demonstrate that its members were astute and accountable business leaders.

Artist

PPLD’s Special Collections contains one copy of Alice Stewart Hill’s original wildflower drawings for Helen Hunt Jackson’s The Procession of Flowers in Colorado. Also available for viewing are the sketches that Hill and Thomas Parrish produced for the poem, Her Garden: A Poem by Susan Coolidge.

The identification of the Sisters of Loretto as fine artists is certainly supported by the breadth of classes that they offered and taught for young girls, as they opened their first academy in Colorado Springs in 1884. The course of study will embrace all the branches of a thorough education, instrumental and vocal music, drawing, painting, and the various kinds of fancy work will be taught.³

Chipeta, a tiny woman, less than five feet tall, wore traditional Native American clothing throughout her life. Certainly an artist, she produced the fine, tanned leather garments, including moccasins for herself and Chief Ouray, their adopted children and their extended Ute family. She took pride in her original decorated apparel with the traditional fringe and the intricate, colorful beadwork.

Later in her life she made and gave away items as gifts and thank-yous, for kind deeds that had been extended to her and to other Utes. Many of these, returned to the Utes by the original recipients, can be seen in the Ute Museum on Chipeta Road in Montrose, Colorado.

Homesteader & Rancher

Marie Guiraud, who originally came with her husband from France, moved with her growing family across the United States, finally to homestead in the Rocky Mountain Mineral Belt within South Park. They arrived 15 years before Colorado was granted statehood. As the matriarch of the family, she earned a living for her family as a rancher in the mid- to late 1880s.

Marie shares that role with two other extraordinary women. Ruth Banning Lewis, born in the late 1890s, was recognized nationally and internationally for the award-winning cattle and horse breeding enterprises on her ranch. The other extraordinary woman rancher was Maggie Smith Hathaway in Montana.

Author

Within the literary field, the title of author appears to connect several of the extraordinary women across ethnic networks. The published work of one woman, Helen Hunt Jackson, set the stage for consciousness-raising and a deeper understanding of Native Americans.

Jackson’s investigation of Native Americans, and her publications A Century of Dishonor and Ramona, have provided, from the late 19th into the early 21st centuries, insights that refresh our efforts to understand the needs of and to advocate for the lives of maligned and under-represented individuals and groups. It is interesting to speculate what the dialog might have been if Teresita Sandoval, Helen Hunt Jackson, Chipeta, Lily Chin and Gretchen McRae could have shared an afternoon together.

The other identified author among the women in this introduction is Virginia Donaghe McClurg, whose initial assignment to write about Mesa Verde led to a passion that consumed many years of her life. During her active campaign for the creation of a national park, she wrote many speeches and articles.

During those years she also penned a poem for a President, Theodore Roosevelt, to honor his visit to the Mesa Verde site as part of her campaign to have the area designated as a national park:

Long ere the Genoese traversed

the sea,

On arid plateaux dwelt

a peaceful race

Whose castled cliffs arose from the

canon’s base

To unscaled heights of sunrise

mystery.⁴

After withdrawing from the park pursuit, McClurg continued to advocate for Mesa Verde, but she also continued to produce and publish articles and poems and to speak on other topics.

As authors, these extraordinary women created their own business relationships and supported themselves, aggressively negotiating with editors and publishers for the publication of their regular, original articles and poetry. Gretchen McRae wore a number of hats as author-editor-publisher of A Free Republic.

Town-founder

Two of the women share the title of town-founder. Maria Teresa Sandoval was among a group of multiple-family businesspersons who founded and lived within the trading post, El Pueblo, the early establishment of today’s city of Pueblo, Colorado. Located where Fountain Creek flows into the Arkansas River, El Pueblo was a significant location in the 1840s for traders, trappers and travelers who represented a