Moving to Colorado

After a number of years Uncle Joe and his family and our family were the only ones left in Brown County.

One winter Father went west to Oregon to visit his brother Daniel and family and came back by way of Colorado to visit a settlement of Amish northeast of Wild Horse, in eastern Colorado near Kit Carson, Colorado where the Union Pacific railroad goes through the two towns. [Wild Horse is almost exactly 100 miles directly east of Colorado Springs.]

While Father was there he had a notion he wanted to settle there, too. He got in touch with a land agent and traded his Indiana land for 320 acres of barren prairie land: no trees, shrubbery, nothing like that. Just barren buffalo grass and loco weed.

Loco weed comes up in the spring. Sometimes, because there is no grass around, stock (especially cattle and young calves eating away from their mother) start nibbling that and go crazy. They'll quit eating anything else because they just want that. Like a drunk. They get thin and finally die.

After Father came home from trading the land he told us we were going to move, that we'd have a sale in the fall. (This was in the spring of the year.)

The next spring Father chartered a boxcar to take our furniture and a couple of heifer calves from Edinburg (12 miles north of we lived) to Colorado. The children all came home for that. When the boxcar was loaded, they fixed a place to eat in the boxcar, on either side of the doors. On one side were the stock and a few hens, and on the other was the furniture and the living area they had fixed.

Amasa and Annan went in the car and took the dog with them. It was a wonderful, wonderful cow dog. He was a dog we could send out in the evening to get the cows in the woods or pasture. He was so good we wanted him in Colorado.

Sometimes they'd stop the car and get out to get water for the stock while the steam engine stopped
for water of its own.

They wanted to take the opportunity for the dog to have a little run and do his dirty work while the train was stopped. Usually there was no trouble getting the dog back on, but one time the train started more quickly than expected.

Amasa and Annan called and called for the dog but couldn't get him. They didn't want to be left, so they stayed in the boxcar. The dog never did show up.

If anybody ever missed a dog, I missed that dog in Colorado. He saved me from having to go after the cattle. It would have been easier in Colorado for him, with no woods or hills.

The rest of the family went by passenger train to Colorado while the boxcar took four or five days.

Father made arrangements with some of the Amish men who were already living there to go with their boxwagons to Kit Carson to get the furniture, heifers, and Amasa and Annan.

We were standing there when the train came in. The colored porter and the conductor were standing there on the platform. One of them said to the other, seeing us in Amish clothes, "see them barn doors," referring to the Amish pants we wore with buttons on both sides in front. I didn't know what they were referring to, but my brother did.

We rented a little house in Colorado about three miles from the half section (320 acres) of land. Father had a chance to get a tree claim. I don't know why they called it a tree claim - there were no trees on it! You'd have to live on it a certain length of time and it would be yours. It was a good piece of land, with a pond on it when it rained. Sometimes it'd get so warm and lacking in rain in the summer that the pond would go dry. In the spring of the year, after the snow melted, it'd be a pretty good sized pond. Enough for the cattle to drink, and sometimes there'd be enough water that the ducks traveling north or south would stop. There were no fish in it, because it'd dry up in the summer time.

[Note: A tree claim granted 160 acres with the agreement that at least 2700 trees per acre would be planted on ten acres of the claim within four years of filing the claim, and that at least 675 of those trees per acre would be thriving after eight years.]