Fort Morgan, Colorado: Women's Perspective

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Life on the Trail

The diaries written by the female travelers along the South Platte River Road in the 1860s show a different perspective on both the Indians and life on the trail. Helen E. Clark and seven others left Plano, Illinois in April following her father and brother who had made the trip to Denver a year earlier taking the Santa Fé or Southern route. Helen mentions passing O Follers [O’Fallen] Bluffs on June 2nd and Fremont’s Orchard on June 14th. The following excerpt from her diary begins between these two landmarks likely around the area of Sterling:

Historic Overview

From my youth I brought with me only a vague impression of the history of the small town in which I was raised. Fort Morgan, Colorado, built on the site of a short-lived military fort in the heart of the great American desert; a fort that had never been attacked, never seen a battle. On little more than a whim I went in search of the fort’s operational dates (1864-1868), expecting this information would come readily to hand and that would end my curiosity - the fort once again fading into the midst of vague memory. To my surprise, I instead found a door opening to the history of the west.

The history of Fort Morgan will never rival that of Denver or glisten with the same gold dust of the mountain mining towns, but this little town on the plains of Colorado was central to the story of the Romantic west; it's story connecting with the major events of the age. Everyone has a history and every place is central to a story. What follows is the story from the land - of the land - on which Fort Morgan would rise.