Adobe Castles on the South Platte River

Fort Lupton
Replica of the 1840s
trade center north of Denver

Museum docents get some astute questions from school kids.  “Where’s the giant T-Rex?” one young visitor asked in the entryway at our local museum.  In answering, I was careful not to squash his enthusiasm.  We have no fossils there, or at least I’ve not seen any. 

In the gallery I focused the class’ attention on the subject at hand: the history of our area, the St. Vrain Valley.  I explained that the name of our valley, the river that flows through it, and the local school district all hark back to buffalo robe trader Ceran St. Vrain.  He, along with William and Charles Bent, operated the most successful trading company on the plains in the 1830s and ‘40s.  In 1833 they built Bent’s Fort, on the Santa Fe Trail, and in 1837 Ceran St. Vrain supervised the construction of a second “adobe castle,” this one on the South Platte River, not far from our museum. 

It’s a good sign when kids catch the contemporary tie-ins to history so I was glad to see the group make the connection with Mr. St. Vrain.  Then a hand went up.  It belonged to the young man so earnestly searching for a dinosaur earlier.  “You mean...” he started hesitantly, “they named him after a river?”

Powder horns and leather
haversacks in the trade room
at Fort Lupton

Well, not exactly, but his question put me into research mode looking for details about the four trading forts that once attracted mountain men and Native Americans alike to the banks of the South Platte River. They've gotten far less press than Bent's Fort, the original business model of success on the prairie.

What I found was the spirit of American cutthroat competition.  Two years after Bent's Fort was built on the Arkansas River, entrepreneurs Louis Vasquez and Andrew Sublette went north, in 1835, to the Platte and began their own adobe trading fort near present-day Platteville.  They called it Fort Vasquez.  Today the Fort Vasquez historical site and a small museum are managed by the Colorado Historical Society.

In 1837 a man named Lancaster P. Lupton erected his own adobe trading fort...just seven miles south of Vasquez's namesake!   Fort Lupton is now being replicated near its original site by the South Platte Valley Historical Society.  Though SPVHS volunteers are not employing the 19th Century construction techniques used by the National Park Service to reconstruct Bent's Fort, their final product will be a fine evocation of Colorado's early history.


Traps at Fort Lupton


Business must have been brisk on the South Platte in 1837.  That same year a third trading fort - this one probably a wooden stockade - was built by Peter A. Sarpy and Henry Fraeb.  Called Fort Jackson, it was half way between forts Vasquez and Lupton.  Location, location, location!!!

The three new forts represented a challenge the Bent brothers and Ceran St. Vrain evidently could not ignore, and, not to be outdone, they joined the building frenzy of 1837.  St. Vrain himself supervised construction of a fourth Platte River castle, a few miles north of the upstart contenders.  The name of Ceran's trading post evolved for a few years but soon became known widely as Fort St. Vrain.

Ceran left his youngest brother, Marcellin, in charge, and the Bent-St. Vrain brand whomped on its competitors.  Within a year the Bent & St. Vrain Company bought - and burned - Fort Jackson.  Fort Vasquez changed hands once and then was abandoned.  In 1844 Fort Lupton was shuttered by its financial backers.  (I joke that Bent's Fort was the WalMart of its day.  The analogy seems complete to me now, since that merchandising giant too is often the death knell for local businesses.)

By 1845 the entire buffalo robe trade was drying up.  The era of good feelings between whites and Native Americans was dying.  Fort St. Vrain slipped into a state of neglect.  When Francis Parkman saw it in 1846, the building was already "miserably dilapidated."  But according to Halaas and Masich in Halfbreed, their great biography of George Bent, in 1849 William Bent was still able to make the fort liveable, compelled as he was to flee with his family to the crumbling Fort St. Vrain to escape the cholera epidemic wiping out half of the Cheyenne Indians on the southern plains.

I'd you love to time travel back to the 1840s.  Comparison shopping in the adobe castles along the South Platte River would have been quite an adventure.

Here are some book titles and links for further reading:

Bent's Fort: Crossroads of Cultures on the Santa Fe Trail by Melvin Bacon and Daniel Blegen


Bent's Fort by David Lavender
Halfbreed: The Remarkable True Story of George Bent by David Fridtjof Halaas & Andrew E. Masich
The Oregon Trail by Francis Parkman
Links: Fort Vasquez    Fort Lupton    National Park Service

A Vote for Women and Colorado

Reading Tom Noel’s recent column in the Denver Post, I thought I had caught good Dr. Colorado, the foremost expert on our history, in an embarrassing mistake.  "Name the first state," Noel challenged, "where men voted to give women the vote."  His answer: Colorado.

No, I thought, that’s not the way I heard it.  It was Wyoming that first gave women the vote.  Wyoming, that hot-bed of liberalism to our north.  (Feel free to use the “Comment” section below.)  What a coup I had accomplished.  I was ready to overthrow the Good Doctor and accept his crown. 

Then I did some double-checking, always a prudent thing to do before starting The Revolution.   I started with the source of all knowledge: Wikipedia.  Yes, Wiki said, Wyoming’s women have been free to vote since December 10, 1869, when Wyoming was still a U.S. territory.  Here’s visual proof courtesy of the Library of Congress:

An Act to Grant Women of
Wyoming Territory
the Right of Suffrage
and to Hold Office

As you can see - if you zoom in on the page - in the territorial constitution is Chapter 31, “An Act to Grant to the Women of Wyoming Territory the Right of Suffrage and to Hold Office.”  It falls immediately after guidelines for dealing with lunatics and drunkards, just before the apportionment of the territorial House of Representatives.  (Again, the “Comment” section is below.)

In 1890 the Equality State was founded, and women's suffrage came along for the ride.

 

So what about Noel's claim that Colorado was first in women's suffrage?  Puzzled, I reread his challenge: "Name the first state where men voted to give women the vote."  Colorado joined the Union in 1876.  Colorado men voted suffrage for Colorado women in 1893, just as Dr. Colorado claimed.  A trick question if ever there was one. 

Anyone determined to keep Colorado history alive should read Dr. Noel’s column.  “Some of us think Colorado is a special place,” he writes.  “We need to educate our youngsters on why Colorado is special and how to keep it that way.” 

Bravo!

Unfortunately, Dr. Noel’s comments are a reaction to what he sees as a sad situation.  Colorado history - and the social studies in general - have been deemphasized in our public schools in recent years.  The reason?  Vital topics like history, geography, civics, and economics are not tested on the almighty CSAPs.  So, we teach to the test and forget the rest.  Well, not completely, but he makes a valid point. 

Teachers, you know what I mean.  You push your kids to improve - to excel - in reading, writing, math and, later, science.  Those are the subjects the kids are tested on each spring.  Those are the areas we emphasize.  Of course, they're fundamental, though fundamentals are empty without content and context, people and place and time - history, in other words.  But enough preaching to the choir.  Read Tom Noel's column for yourself.  It actually contains some good news on the history front. http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_16820725

If you've forgotten the details of your own civics class, here's another pertinent fact: The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed in 1920, well after women were already voting in Wyoming and Colorado.  The 19th states simply "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex."

P.S.  The Wikipedia article on women's suffrage is quit fascinating.  Check it out,too.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_suffrage-in-the-United_States

Who Are These People?

Let's be honest.  Most of us are curious about the lives of others.  Okay, some of us - writers in particular - are downright nosy.
 
I know that young readers share that curiosity, and it's part of what makes writing biographies for them so rewarding.  But I'll admit a bias: A biography written for young readers should not only educate but also inspire.  (I won't be writing about Charles Manson anytime soon.)  I choose my subjects carefully, for that inspirational angle.

Right now I'm researching the lives of four native-born Coloradans, all of whom have achieved admirable accomplishments, here in Colorado, in Washington, D.C., and all the way into outer space.

A second bias pushes me to look for elements that shape a person's life story into a graceful arc, the old beginning-middle-end of the fiction writer.  Of course, not everyone's life fits that mold and the arc of a biography shouldn't be forced, but I'm always looking for connections that will wrap a young reader's understanding of a subject into a neat package.

One element is contrast, especially the difference between childhood circumstances and adult accomplishments.  Ken Salazar grew up on a ranch in Colorado's San Luis Valley.  The family home had no electricity, no telephone.  (And he's younger than I am!)  Today Salazar is U.S. Secretary of the Interior.

Coincidence is another intriguing element.  I remember being enthralled by all those chance meetings between characters in Charles Dickens' novels.  Two of the Colorado-born NASA astronauts I'm researching, Vance Brand and Jack Swigert, were born the same year, 1931, Brand in Longmont; Swigert in Denver.  During high school they both played football and may have been opponents in one important game.  During Brand's senior year, according to his school's yearbook, Longmont was trounced 34-0 by a "big bunch of boys" from Denver East, Swigert's school.  Both went on to make history exploring the outer reaches.

Scott Carpenter, born in Boulder, spent his childhood living in his maternal grandparents' house at the corner of Aurora Avenue and 7th Street.  He named his 1962 space capsule Aurora 7.  (According to Carpenter, that was pure coincidence, not intentional.  He says, however, that people in Boulder still like to believe their local intersection is memorialized in NASA history.)

So now, it's back to fitting the pieces of those arcs together into inspirational - and true - stories.

Lessons in an Ear of Corn

It’s corn season.

At my neighborhood grocery store, boxes of sweet corn are stacked nearly as high as the stalks they grew on here in Colorado. I like buying local produce. It makes me feel good to support the area economy; it keeps the impression of my carbon footprint a bit lighter; and it puts the sweetest corn on my plate just a few days after harvesting.

In each ear of corn – from Sakata Farms near Brighton – lives the sweet story of America’s promise and the generosity of its people. In light of today’s brutal economy, cynics may say the American Dream is all but dead. They may claim that success stories are old-fashioned and, frankly, a bit corny. (Sorry, I could not resist.)

But Bob Sakata’s success and his generosity grew from similarly bitter soil in one of the nastiest national climates in our history. The U.S. had limped through a crippling economic depression. Immigrants and the children of immigrants who looked “different,” including sixteen-year-old Bob, were perceived as threats and “the enemy,” even though he had been a citizen since birth and wanted only to finish his high school education and launch a career. Sound familiar?

There are lessons waiting to be pulled from an ear of Sakata Farms corn by a thoughtful parent or teacher. There are lessons about the hopes of two centuries of immigrants to our country. Lessons about personal tragedies and the exhausting effort needed to overcome them. Lessons about goals and heart and intelligence and, most difficult perhaps, forgiveness and generosity in the face of discrimination and hatred. And, did I mention, lessons about success.

Bob Sakata

At 84, Bob Sakata still loves to share those lessons with young people. In fact, Bob admitted to me that the one reason he agreed to sit for interviews was that my book would be written for young readers. Specifically, I believe, he wanted to help preserve the story of the 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry who held their heads high and obeyed our government’s order to assemble for internment – imprisonment really – after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.

Bob Sakata’s story is about so much more than corn, but whether you are at the dinner table or in the classroom, I invite you to dig in!

My biography of Bob Sakata for ages 10 and up is available from http://www.filterpressbooks.com/.

Bent's Fort Celebrates an Anniversary

Bent's Fort as it might have looked in 1846

Bent's Fort celebrated an anniversary of sorts the weekend of June 5th.  The fort marked its 50th year as an official National Historic Site, part of the National Park Service.  And what a weekend!  Costumed "interpreters" - including barefooted kids - brought the year 1846 to life.  Fiddles screeched, cooking fires burned, and horses whinnied.  It reminded me of my first visit to the fort in the summer of 1993, when I caught the Western history "bug" and bad - but that's a good thing.

The fort's bookstore manager, Elaine Leadabrand, had invited me and I was happy to join the anniversary festivities.  In my writing I try to demonstrate for young readers how similar their lives are to those of folks from the past, but on the morning of June 5th I was reminded of one noticeable difference: the pace of life.  On the way to the fort I managed to get myself positioned right behind a dozen or more mountain men on horseback who were also headed to the fort's rendezvous.  For the record, mountain men on horseback travel five miles per hour tops, even when accompanied by the county sheriff.

My years of teaching high school ingrained my neurological system with a keen sense of timing.  I'm never tardy for a class...or an appointment.  But I'd never been behind a band of 1846 mountain men on the way to class, either.   At nine o'clock, the hour I'd promised to be at the fort, I saw a road sign that read "Bent's Fort 10 miles."  Doing the math, I knew I would be quite late, but after about 20 minutes of the 1846 pace, during which I literally stopped to smell the sage brush, the mountain men found an open field and rested their horses.  I was back to 2010 and 55 miles per hour. 

My late arrival was no problem, but I sure got a good dose of perspective that morning about time and distance in the 1800s.  It's a lesson I will definitely incorporate in my writing from now on.  As remote as Bent's Fort is, there was already a parking lot full of visitors there that morning, including a former student of mine and his parents.  Wow, you never know who you'll run into in 1846.  In fact, I talked with many families who share an interest in Colorado's history and the Santa Fe Trail; and I enjoyed making my small contribution, playing and singing "the greatest hits of the 1840s."  It was the first time I had actually sung those songs on the Santa Fe Trail!  I hope it won't be the last.

 

Read the history in Bent's Fort: Crossroads of Cultures on the Santa Fe Trail http://www.amazon.com/Bents-Fort-Crossroads-Cultures-Santa/dp/0865410623/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1312643600&sr=1-1