[music playing] As a community Boggsville
doesn't even exist anymore, but it had a profound impact
on the early settlement of Colorado. You may think, oh, it's just
two houses, it's not that much. But really so much
has happened here. Boggsville is a
window into the past. It lets people
see what was here, the importance of it
to the Arkansas Valley. Places like Boggsville are
going to get set up, up and down the river here. We had the Anglo-Saxon,
the Spanish, and Indians all living right at Boggsville Part of what makes Boggsville
so important to Colorado, but I also believe so
important to our nation, is that it does represent
this early first generation settlement. It represents the cultures that
exist in the state today that were living together there. That's part of Boggsville
is the meeting of cultures, but also the
passing of cultures. This was the headquarters of
a gigantic cattle industry and the headquarters
of a massive sheep industry and a trading post that
traded with American Indians on the Santa Fe Trail. It brought together some of
the leading mercantile families of early Colorado
into this one place. The property ownership of
Rumalda Luna and Amache Prowers and Josefa Carson
provides the land base for the fortunes
that were made here. This program was funded by
the History Colorado State Historical Fund. Supporting projects
throughout the state to preserve, protect,
and interpret Colorado's architectural and
archaeological treasures. History Colorado State
Historical Fund-- create the future,
honor the past. With support from the Denver
Public Library and History Colorado. With additional funding and
support from these fine organizations and
viewers like you. Thank you. [music playing] When I sometimes volunteer
with the museum in town and people come in
I always say, "You got to go out
to Boggsville." And they say,
"What's Boggsville?" Boggsville is located in
the southeastern corner of the State of Colorado. The Arkansas River is
approximately two miles north of Boggsville and the Purgatory
River is approximately half a mile east. There were people living
here thousands of years ago if you think of the
Native American populations and then the Spanish
people who were living in the area since the 1600s. Everything this side
of the Arkansas River was Mexico, everything
on the other side was US. The Santa Fe Trail
ran on the north side of the Arkansas River-- --and came right here
through the property. I always call it the
I-70 or I-25 of Colorado because that's
basically what they did. They ran trade goods from
back East to Santa Fe and on down into Mexico. As predecessors
to this place you had Bent's Old Fort,
Bent's New Fort. A lot of the early
forts in Colorado were not military forts,
they were trading forts. Bent's Fort was probably
one of the best known. It was established by the
Bent brothers, William and Charles Bent. Boggsville was the first
Anglo non-fortified settlement in this area. You could serve
the military, you could serve the traders coming
along the Santa Fe Trail, and most importantly,
at least initially, you could serve the Cheyennes
and Arapahos who claimed southern Colorado
as part of their homeland in the 1840s and 1850s. When it was first started here
it was known as Bogg's Ranch. Many of the people
that were here had been associated with
Bent St. Vrain and Company. When that company
dissolves, guys have to find another
way to make a living. The place was significant as
a farm for many, many years. Farming and ranching
was the answer to that. As it became more a village
with lots and lots of people, it was no longer
just a ranch, then it became a ville, or
Boggsville, a village. Built by relatives
of the Bents, it became the trading hub
of southeastern Colorado. There was stores, county seat,
blacksmith's shop, stage stops, all kinds of enterprises. For its size, Boggsville was
an extremely economically influential community. It was the headquarters
of a massive sheep operation and an even
larger cattle operation. It was a hub of trade for
Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians. It was a hub of trade for
traders on the Santa Fe Trail. This community, Boggsville,
was the heir to Bent's Old Fort of the 1840s. Thomas Boggs, his story
really begins in Missouri. He was the son of
Lilburn Boggs, who was the governor of Missouri,
and he was the great grandson of Daniel Boone. His mother was Panthea Boone. From an early age Thomas
Boggs was very inquisitive and was very
interested in the west, and early on went west and
was able to become employed by his uncles at Bent's Fort. And as a result of
that relationship, he found himself
spending a lot of time in Taos because, of course,
they were trading back and forth between Bent's Fort
in Taos and Santa Fe and that's where, of
course, he met Rumalda Luna. Rumalda Luna Boggs
was the daughter of very prominent New
Mexico trading family. She was related to
the Jaramillos who were all that in New Mexico
during the era of the fur trade and the Santa Fe Trail. She was from one of the most
prominent trading families. You could accurately
describe Rumalda Boggs and her aunt, Josefa Carson,
as the belles of Santa Fe. They were the
beautiful daughters of the most powerful
trading families in the most scintillating
part of New Mexico. Rumalda was the
stepdaughter of Charles Bent and Thomas Boggs was
Charles Bent's nephew. Inevitably, he was going
to meet Rumalda Luna and Rumalda Luna
was quite a catch. Her future was assured. So for Thomas Boggs,
you could really argue that by marrying
Rumalda Luna, he married up. They were married in 1846 and
that was a significant year in the history of the Southwest
because that was the start of the Mexican-American War. So shortly after
they were married-- and of course, at that time
they're living together in Mexico-- the
Mexican-American War broke out and Bent's Fort was
involved with that, Thomas Boggs was
involved with the war. The war, in fact,
was really the focus. In 1866 Colorado
was a territory. We were still 10 years away
from statehood and people like Thomas Boggs exerted a
lot of political and social authority in their communities. When Bent County was
founded, Boggsville was made the first county
seat and Thomas Boggs was elected as the first
county sheriff of Bent County. And that spoke everything to
his commercial connections, to his social prominence
in the community, to the social prominence
of his wife to be sure. These fur trading
familes-- families who had come out of the fur
trade of the 1830s and '40s and had settled down in Colorado
in the 1850s and established ranches-- were the first social
elite of southern Colorado. The reasons that Boggsville
were established, it was a farming
area and ranching. Thomas Oliver Boggs-- and I
think the Cheyennes called him White House-- they knew him,
and he became a sheep man, more or less. Rumalda Luna was not
only socially prominent, but she was also wealthy. And she was wealthy both
in money and in land. She was also connected to
Charles Bent's partner, Ceran St. Vrain, who awarded her
part of his massive land grant, the Vigil and St.
Vrain Land Grand or the Las Animas Grant
of southern Colorado. She had family rights
to be able to have a piece of the land grant,
I think about 2,000 acres. She owned the land
where Thomas Boggs was going to make his great
mercantile and sheep empire. Spanish land grants-- and
they exist today in Colorado, they are still very much
a legally recognized right and there's many land grants
that remain, primarily in the San Luis Valley. Thomas Boggs was one of
the largest sheep ranchers in Colorado, along
with the Bacca family and the Vijils in
southern Colorado. To develop what he did here
he had to be pretty stern, but giving. That house became the hub for
their mercantile and ranching empire. Thomas Boggs built a store to
serve traffic on the Santa Fe Trail and to trade with Indians
and he began ranching sheep and in time, his sheep herd
grew to more than 10,000 head of sheep. I always refer to the wool
business as a second fur trade because everything
was made out of wool. Thomas Boggs'
sheep supplied wool for the mining communities
of Denver and Central City. It supplied wool to
Taos and Santa Fe and it certainly supplied
wool to St. Louis, where it was ultimately
traded to the east coast to be made into blankets. And actually, the
sheep raising business didn't really disappear
from this part the country until about into the 1950s. We like to think about Thomas
Bogg as the first anything in the area. I mean this was, in our view,
the first permanent settlement along the Santa Fe Trail. So you had the end
of the war in 1848 and then you had a lot
of lack of certainty during this period. These were people
who up until then spoke Spanish in
combination with a lot of the native languages are
spoken, so now all of a sudden they're in an English speaking
world and now all of a sudden the capital is not
in Santa Fe anymore, it's in Washington, D.C. So it's
such a changing and troubling time with a lot of uncertainty. So to establish a
community there, I mean that's why I think
John Prowers decided to build his house in
Boggsville, because that was the town. John Wesley Prowers was
sort of an archetype of the Western character. He was a man of his word. He was a very gentle
man, but a firm man. He had sort of the will
that you needed in order to create a massive
cattle empire, but a man that everybody
felt treated them fairly. John Prowers had been
born in Missouri in 1838. Named after the founder of the
Methodist Church, John Wesley. Very strongly adhered to
the beliefs and principles of the Methodist denomination. As a young man he came out
into the Arkansas Valley as a clerk for the
Indian agent, a man by the name of Robert Miller. This is about 1856, 1857. So it was at that point
that John Prowers first learned of the Cheyenne. He worked as a trader
for a while, as well. He worked for William
Bent at Bent's Fort near what became Fort Lyon. And he learned to
speak Cheyenne, he learned to speak Spanish. He was Bent's liaison on
leading caravans to St. Louis and to Taos and Santa Fe. Up until the time he
died, I believe in 1884, his life would be intimately
and intricately bound to Cheyenne people. He also had good connections
with the native people, and in that regard met
and then married Amache. Amache Ochinee, the daughter
of a very prominent Cheyenne chief named Lone Bear, or as he
was known to Anglos as One Eye. She was raised in a hunting
and gathering society. She met John a very early age-- --and they married in 1861. She was young when
they got married. She was younger than Prowers,
outlived him by over 20 years. That was a pretty common
practice, by the way, for traders among American
Indians to fall in love with and to take Cheyenne
or Arapaho wives. It cemented their
trading relationship by creating a
kinship relationship with their customers. I don't know if she
was forced into that or felt coerced in some way. It's hard to say how consensual
the relationship between John Prowers and Amache was. Amache, the translated
word mean walking woman, and that was one of
her Cheyenne names. He called his wife Amy, and he
dressed her in American dress. He took her back to
Missouri to meet his family and they tried their best as
they could to Anglicize her. John Prowers was
very much trying to transplant his
American upbringing to the frontier in Colorado. Victorian style, is
learning English, is married to a whit man. Never did, thank goodness,
totally achieve it, which gave her her unique personality. John and Amache Prowers
moved to Boggsville in 1867, just a year after the
founding of the community by Thomas and Rumalda Boggs. To settle down in this kind of
permanent residence with all these strange people that
she hadn't grown up with, that weren't part
of her culture-- She must have been an
extraordinarily remarkable woman. She was a very, very
well-liked and admired person. I wonder if she was
under a lot of pressure to conform-- not only her,
but these other women. But it would have been
a lot harder for Amache because the Cheyenne world
was completely different. The people who knew
her and remembered her remembered her powerful
presence in Boggsville, that she was one of the
leaders of the community. She still did ride a
horse a lot and hunted. The thing that's really
remarkable about her in her photographs is the way
that she blends Cheyenne custom and culture with
Victorian-American custom and culture. I guess you'd see her riding
her bicycle around Boggsville. Look out the window and see
Amache dart by on a bike. And she'd go out
and pick berries. So you can even imagine
what Christmases must have been like and
other holidays at Boggsville, when you had Rumalda and
her Spanish traditions and Catholic traditions and the
two gentlemen they were married to, both of whom
came out of Missouri and what their
traditions were like and then in combination with
Amache's Cheyenne traditions. It must have been the
sights and the sounds and the smells and the cooking. Her children remember
how at Christmas time, her favorite Christmas
treat to make was dried Buffalo meat sprinkled
with cinnamon and sugar and rolled into loaves and
then sliced like candy. And Amache's daughter,
Mary Prowers, claimed that the children
preferred those little dried Buffalo treats
to the store bought treats that John Prowers
was able to provide them. She didn't marry just any white
man, she married John Prowers. In time they formed a pretty
formidable partnership. John Prowers certainly
did everything he could to provide favors to
Amache's Cheyenne relatives and together they
raised several children. Prowers, because of his
commercial connection to the Bent family,
was a welcome member of that community. Like all the men of
Boggsville, John Prowers was dependent on his wife and
her land for his greatness. Amache Prowers was the
daughter of Lone Bear and Lone Bear was one
of the Cheyenne chiefs who was killed during
the Sand Creek Massacre. One of the events
that took place in the aftermath of Sand
Creek was an Indian treaty, and one of the
articles of this treaty acknowledged I believe
it was 31 mixed blood and full-blooded wives of
traders to receive land in the aftermath of Sand Creek. Each received, I believe,
640 acres of land, and that was because Lone
Bear not only was killed at Sand Creek,
Amache's father, but he had lost five horses and
a mule during the attack to the Colorado troops. Like Thomas Boggs had done with
Rumalda Luna's land, used it as the base for his
cattle operations. And John Wesley Prowers
is remembered today as one of the great early
cattle kings of Colorado. He built an immense
cattle empire by taking advantage
of his wife's land to create his ranch
and his base and then spreading his cattle all
across the plains from Montana into Mexico and the
Texas panhandle. Prowers ran tens of thousands
of cattle on the open range and became one of
the great cattle tycoons of early Colorado. Because Thomas Boggs was
William Bent's nephew, they ultimately came
together and formed an informal partnership. The two were allied
commercially. They weren't strictly
partners, but they worked to support each
other's business interests. The heyday of Boggsville was
probably from 1868 to 1873. A stopping place, a
resupplying place. Being near the Arkansas
River and then, of course, on the Purgatory River provided
water for the settlement, but also allowed them to get
a lot of the business that was coming along
the Santa Fe Trail. There was probably 20 some
structures here at one time. Boggsville was a
busy, busy place. Boggsville was so important. It was the Bent County seat. It had the sheriff's office
and the Justice of the Peace. I had a blacksmith's
shop, they had the school. There was a big barn, which
was actually a trading post. Not far from that
was a general store. There were ranch
buildings and outbuildings to serve cattle and sheep. They had all kinds of other
enterprises going on here to back up and support the Boggs
Ranchers, as they were called. Like everything out here, it's a
multicultural-- most of the men are Anglo folks and most of the
ladies-- I mean quite frankly, there's not very many
Anglo ladies out here, so it's a mixture of Spanish,
Hispanic, Mexican ladies here. There's Amache and the
Indian ladies here. With various families living
in and around the area that helped support the
farming and the ranching. The Boggs household,
which would have reminded you for all the
world of a southern plantation with a wooded driveway
to a whitewashed house with a wraparound veranda. Just beyond that was
the Prowers household, with an open courtyard
that faced to the east. And very often the tepee
encampments of Amache Prowers' Cheyenne relatives nearby. It was the Allen
family, the Ritz family. There was quite a few
children running around from all the families
who lived here. There was even a
small house nearby that was the residence
of Kit and Josefa Carson. Kit Carson was, everybody
knows, a famous frontiersman. Kit Carson is a significant
person in our history because of the role he
played in developing the west. An incredible career as a
trapper and a mountain man and a guide and a
military commander. Kit Carson is so famous
and he's probably the most known frontiersman. Kit was in and out
of this country all the time coming up and
down the Santa Fe Trail. His relationship with
the Native Americans, his relationship with the
New Mexican community, his relationship to Bent's Fort. Thomas Boggs and Kit Carson
had been friends for as long as they had been in
the west together. They have a very
close friendship, and at the end of Kit Carson's
life he was looking for a place to settle down. He gets over here late December
of '67, early January '68. Kit and his wife, Josefa,
move to Boggsville. Kit Carson would have been
58 when he moved over here. Like the Boggs family,
like the Prowers family, the land that Kit
Carson occupied was owned by his
wife, Josefa Carson. As a niece of
Cornelia Vigil, Josefa had claim to part of this
land grant of 2,040 acres. Another Jaramillo who had
very strong connections to the trading families
of Taos and Santa Fe. Boggsville sits on what was
the Vigil St. Vrain Land Grant or the Las Animas Land Grant. And Kit had purchased
two parcels of land. Josefa Carson was a beauty
in her own right, as well. And again, Kit Carson
really married above himself to marry a woman like
Josefa Jaramillo. His wife was giving birth
to their seventh child. Kit Carson encountered tragedy. His wife died in childbirth. The loss of her combined
with his war wounds and hard lifestyle
really caused him-- I think he was already
ill at the time and I think the loss of her was
just more than he could bear. The day before Kit died
the kids, of course, were over here at
Boggsville and Kit asked the folks
at Fort Lyon to bring two of the boys, Kit II
and Charles, my grandpa, over to see him. And they went and
visited and so forth, and Kit sent over
to the settler shop. They bought straw hats and
as the kids were coming back across the river, my grandpa's
hat flew down the river and floated away. May 14 they took Kit
over to Fort Lyon. They put a little
palette in the corner. It was the next
day they came over and told him his dad
wasn't here anymore. They buried them, both
of them, in the garden so those six younger kids
were raised in this house. People out here-- you
help each other out, you take care of each other. Without the women this place
would have never existed. These were women who were
from very prominent families and Amache, her father
was a chief of his tribe. So these were women who were
born in leadership positions and very prominent
in their cultures and their civilizations. The property ownership of
Rumalda Luna and Amache Prowers and Josefa Carson
provides the land base for the fortunes
that were made here. This story, this place,
shows and demonstrates the important role of women. They decided to make
Boggsville the county seat and I think that was because
of the presence of women. Women were always the civilizing
presence on the frontier. Boggsville only lasted
approximately 10 years. As railroads often did,
they picked the winners and the losers in some of
these earlier settlements and they established the
present day town of Las Animas. Taking away the commerce
of the Santa Fe Trail. When that happened
the county seat that was out here in
Boggsville was moved to Las Animas and everything
moved to Las Animas. And Boggsville slowly declined. Congress had to
approve all these land grants that the Mexican
and Spanish governments had given out. Tom Boggs, his claim
doesn't get approved. That's when he's
going to move off and Vigil St. Vrain Land grant,
the Las Animas Land Grant, they didn't allow most of it. And that pretty much was
the end of Boggsville. Old adobe buildings
and somebody's got to be here to
take care of them. Boggsville has approximately
109 acres of land. Visitors, when they become
initially, they see two houses. One is the Boggs house and the
other is the Prowers house. If the walls could talk,
if those trees out there could talk, they'd have some
great stories, I imagine. It's constantly maintenanced to
keep the adobe from cracking. Somebody's got to take care
of them as best they can. The Bent County Historical
Society, they felt the need to restore this
area out here so they purchased the land. Property of Boggsville,
the houses and stuff, is now just recently
got on the National Treasure for Historical Sites. The culture and the diversity
and what happened here with the history and
all of the people, it's just-- I just
find it fascinating. Boggsville to me represents the
unknown, the unanswered. Love, Hate-- you know, all the things
that make us human beings. Just a small little area,
a nutshell, of humanity. Part of what makes Boggsville
so important to Colorado, but I also believe so
important to our nation, is that it does represent
this early first generation settlement. It represents the cultures that
exist in the state today that were living together there. Colorado in the 1860s was not
always a place of inclusion. It was just as often,
maybe more often, a place of exclusion of
Hispanos, of American Indians. But at Boggsville,
the Boggs family, the Prowers family,
the Carson family, made inclusion work for them. And the buildings
they left behind represent the kind of community
that they aspired for. There's so much
about America today and so it was part of
our fiber all along and I think it's just
something that that's the story we need to
continue to tell people because we've always lived
in a multicultural place. And in today's
world and with some of the things that have
been going on in some of our cities and
our communities, I think it's so important
to remind ourselves that we are a multicultural
country and we always have been and we always will be. [music playing]
