The Angel of the Rockies
I’m currently reading The Small and the Mighty, by Sharon McMahon. The book tells the stories of twelve Americans who were vital to our nation and changed the course of history. And yet, their names are largely lost to us. It is fascinating to hear about these unsung heroes who simply by living their convictions paved the way for us today.
One such figure is Clara Brown. Clara was a slave in Kentucky in the 1830s. When her owner died, the family sold Clara, her husband, and their children, all to different buyers in order to settle their estate. Over the next 20 years, Clara lived with the Brown family and raised their three daughters. She never learned to read or write, but the family helped her find out what happened to her kin. It turned out that her daughter, son, and husband had not lived, but the youngest daughter, Eliza, who was sold to a slaver in Kentucky was rumored to have headed west in 1852. Upon George Brown’s passing the family set Clara free as was stipulated in his will and they even helped Clara find a job in St. Louis cooking for German immigrants. When the Brunner family moved to Kansas she agreed to go along, all the while asking everyone she could if they had heard of Eliza.
In the spring of 1859, the Colorado gold rush was in full swing, and Clara wondered if perhaps her daughter had headed that way with the pioneers. She began a laundry business to raise money of her own to go further west in search of Eliza. She joined up with a thirty-wagon caravan! She cooked for twenty-five men three meals a day and in turn they hauled her laundry equipment. She walked the entire 700 miles alongside the wagon train.
Clara settled in Central City and was likely the first black woman to cross into the territory. Can you imagine? It was no more than a shanty town when Clara sat up shop cooking and washing clothes for the townspeople, most of whom were young men. Clara was quick to feed these fortune seekers and give them a place to sleep until they could find employment. She even began prayer meetings and the Union Sunday School with two Methodist ministers. By the end of the Civil War, she had made quite a name for herself and amassed $10,000 ($250,000)!
As more people moved to Colorado, they quickly heard of Clara who was always ready with a meal, a bandage, or a place to lay one’s head. They called her, “The Angel of the Rockies.” The governor even caught wind of her charity and determination and sent her back to Kansas to try to convince more people to move to Colorado. She visited church communities and schools telling Black people of all the opportunities she had found in Colorado. She even paid double the going rate to have some of her kinfolk moved to Colorado. Amazingly, she invested her money in rental properties, vacant lots, and mining claims she hoped would bear fruit. Sadly by 1873 she had lost much of her property to flood and fire, most of her savings were embezzled by a scoundrel lawyer who had promised to help her because she was illiterate. When the state of Colorado declared that they would give a pension to any “pioneer” who entered the state before 1865, Clara applied for the program but was denied. People who loved Clara campaigned on her behalf and Clara was soon included, the first woman to receive the designation as “pioneer.”
Finally, finally-- at the age of 82 someone she spoke with said they might know her daughter Eliza, and she was living in Iowa. Her beloved community raised funds for her train ticket. Sure enough, in 1882 Clara found her daughter Eliza and had three years with her and her grandchildren before she passed. A stained-glass portrait of Clara Brown hangs in the Old Supreme Court Chambers in Denver and she is memorialized at the Smithsonian. She was a ‘self-made’ American in every sense of the word. As McMahon writes, “when people were at their most vulnerable—sick, poor, about to give birth, desperately lonely—Clara Brown could be trusted. A woman with hands and feet that embodied what it meant to be just, peaceful, good, and free.”[1]
Isn’t that just what we’d hope people would say of you and me?
[1] Sharon McMahon, The Small and the Mighty (USA: Penguin Random House, 2024) p.42