Colorado Experience: KEOTA

you people overtime who came to Colorado had great dreams and aspirations that they build enduring communities and they shape the landscape while the landscape was shaping them in return the eastern plains signifies something that all Coloradans can be proud of and that is this real American spirit the folks that came and settled this place came as 19 and 20 year old married couples that didn't speak English they didn't have any money and they built any life for themselves and they really dug in and they worked so hard and Keota is about the dreams it's about the landscape it's about the community that existed here that even survived the lifespan of the town although Keota has Donna sit down today that the people who live there still think of this as their home Colorado experience is a co-production of Rocky Mountain PBS and history Colorado history Colorado brings history to life for audiences of all ages through exhibits collections and historic preservation programs throughout the state history Colorado connects people to the stories places and heritage of Colorado's past that provide perspectives on today and inspire our choices for tomorrow find out more at www.premierlawgroup.com these fine organizations and from viewers like you thank you first of all I'll show you the homestead house that my father built and I was born right there in the bedroom right there my sister was born there too it was sort of like survival from one day to the next you survived but we were happy because everybody was the same you didn't know any different you didn't know luxury so you're you were happy one of the really fascinating aspects of a place like Keota is the way that people came out here in 1862 Congress passed the Homestead Act which essentially able way government land to families who wanted to own a piece of America a piece of land er something they could call their own in 1887 a year that Kyoto was founded much of the Interior West was still unsettled there were still people coming out farmers and and even city dwellers who are looking to start a new life in on the plains of Colorado or Nebraska or Kansas or Oklahoma kiotas story really begins with the railroads slices through the eastern plains and it makes this sort of triangle in the state between Nebraska and Cheyenne and the railroad plots these little towns about ten miles apart from each other the government comes in and it surveys the land and divides it into these neat rectangles or boxes that we associate with Eastern Plains or with the Great Plains in general together the government and the railroad promote settlements the eastern plains so there are these two big monolithic forces that are really trying to pull people to the plains and to get them settled so that's how our little tiny town becomes Keota it wasn't extraordinary there were five six seven other towns plotted by the Chicago Burlington Quincy railroad line that comes through so it's just it's just this little speck on the Prairie it was a pretty remote arid you can argue desolate place but also a place of great beauty and Wonder and just an overpowering sense of nature propping up the corner of the house cuz there's no support on this corner and I don't want the whole career to Foley I want the whole house tonight lasted at least as long as I do people come to this place which is a dry and desolate place we don't get more than 12 inches of precipitation a year on the eastern plains but they come from all over the world some of them come from the East Coast looking to start a new life some of them come from Russia they're there ethnically German but they come from Russia a lot of people come from Scandinavian countries but they're pulled to this place a lot of them stepping off the train for the first time not knowing what it's going to look like not seeing an environment that reminds them of their homeland and I can only imagine what kinds of emotions must have been going through their mind when they see this place where you just you don't have a tree in sight it's a subtle beauty that I think a lot of people don't necessarily associate with Colorado it's not that rugged mountains it's not trees it's not bubbling streams or Brooks it's it's a it's a beauty you have to really look for the weather is something terrible out here in the wintertime wind usually blows 40 mile an hour on a light day and probably who knows how much the Eastern Plains is a land of extremes it is extremely hot blistering Sun in the summer and frigid cold ceaseless winds and when it snows out there there is a real fear blizzards it's not the amount of snow that comes it's the fact that once it snows and the snows on the ground the winds pick it up and keep it keep it going yeah I've seen at 20 below here and you know when the wind a-blowing you could stand 20 below really easy you know but when the winds blow and you get that chill factor like it's cold there were two young boys who the parents had left to to go to and joining homestead and the boys wandered outside in a blizzard and died you know they were found feet just a few feet away from their house but they couldn't see and so it wasn't uncommon to have some sort of a piece of string or yarn that was connected from your house to your barn to your outhouse because you you know if you get disoriented and lose sight because of that sweeping winds and that blowing snow it can be fatal and it was a lesson that the townspeople never forgot it hit them really hard because it was such a small community and they took it seriously the people who came to places like Kyoto were mostly interested in agriculture they were they were ranching but primarily they were dryland farming growing crops like pinto beans or potatoes but mostly dryland wheat winter wheat was the major crop that farmers around Kyoto grew in the 19-teens in the early 1920s in the dry land for one year of good crops and rainfall you'd have seven years of drought it just sort of seemed to be a cycle and if it wasn't the drought there was the planks we had grasshopper plagues one year where they ate all the crops we had little green worms plague one year where you couldn't step outside without stepping in words and then one year we'd have locusts plague and those were horrible because what a screeching noise they made so you had all these elements to contend with the women in these families cooked and cleaned and tended to two kitchen gardens which was often the difference between success or failure or hunger and not and they raised chickens and collected eggs and they kept cows and it was a ceaseless work but yet they were really invested in this place and in the community one of the phenomenons we see with the Homestead Act is that families will create home sets next to each other so they'll file on adjoining claims and they'll create these little centers of you know four boxes coming together and all the families have their homes right around each other because there's nothing for miles there's no neighbors for miles so there's a big family kinship network that pulls folks here what we always had our presence we always had our grandmother and my uncle John the three brothers were a mile apart and we'd always have somebody to visit and you mentor um the news newspaper guy hotel spin Tommy though they come out one Sunday palmitate invited him for fried chicken dinner so they came out and no tell me Thompson with his name and he was so mad because he forgot his teeth gum that chicken is so mad at himself one family in particular really late deep roots down in Kyoto a young man named Clyde Stanley moved to Keota in the early nineteen teens he was a newspaper editor he also ran the the general store and in time was also the land commissioner who registered the homestead claims of new arrivals in Kyoto he was really a town booster and kind of becomes the center of town and and runs a general store there that also is the post office and and has a lending library he traveled around to the adjacent communities on an Indian motorcycle and he traveled around with a little typewriter and he would go and collect people's news this is happening in a time before we really have ways of communicating with each other when you're on your homestead you could go days without talking to somebody that you weren't related to wasn't in your family and so people were really desperate for that interchange of news for a place to come together community centers they didn't really exist and so the general store became that place it was the place in the community where people came to just chat to exchange news of the day telephones were beginning to come online and Keota had its own local telephone exchange but a lot of business and communication with the outside world still took place on railroads and on the telegraph what's fascinating about this is that the railroad and the telegraph really linked Keota for better or for worse to a global economy you could go to clyde stanley store and make an order in sears and roebuck or Montgomery Ward pick out anything from long underwear to farm equipment to - a pig oiler you could get a lot of stuff you could even get live animals livestock chickens we'd order chickens from coke Montgomery Ward when time of my father even bought a little dog little little rat terrier and we were scared of it we'd run jump on the chair I can still remember that you could buy an entire house in Chicago and have it delivered to you by the train to set up in hyoga he gave farmers in remote places like Keota access to a global market and that was both a good thing and a bad thing it made them acceptable to the the whims of the marketplace so goods might be expensive but you can't sell your wheat for prices that are comparable and those wheat prices are set in Chicago so all the good things come from Chicago but a lot of bad things come from Chicago too this is a town that never has more than 140 people but at the same time it has hotels and it has ice-cream shops it has a pool hall it has a barber it has a doctor that lives in town also travels to outlying towns but it has a general store it has a literary society it has a cornet band it has multiple churches has a school which is really a social center for the town any function at school all parents participated in I mean they came to all the basketball games all the athletic events we had patient socials where every elder ladies would bring a pie and they would option it off and the men would bid on it we compete with other schools in the singing contests and math we'd have math contests with the other schools we'd have penmanship contests I remember my sister was very good at penmanship I don't think they teach penmanship today this was really a an educated group of people that were invested in this place and it was it was hopping on Saturdays folks from the adjoining homesteads would bring their goods into Clyde Stanley store because they would trade for groceries it was also really a social time we have accounts of buggies being lined up along their Main Street which was Roanoke Avenue and our Model T's and other cars in town as well but it was a social center and I think people craved that human interaction just like they do today but it was it was harder to find and so you had to actively seek it out but Saturdays in town it was a big deal we all hid there and none of us thought we were poor which we didn't because we had the love of family and I think that's what draws a lot of families to yes it's the love that they showed for each other rose ball is another person from Keota both of her grandparents had homestead so she was that little girl and if anything is similar to the lives we lead today she was that little girl that had two grandparents farms just down the road my dad I remember worked late hours getting people's cars fixed I know he was a good mechanic in people really trusted him and he'd go out even though it was snow on the ground and lay under the car to fix it so they could get going again this is a time when Americans are starting to have some increased mobility because we now have automobiles and so once you have automobiles you need gas stations and you need repair shops so she's living in town she's not living on a homestead she's not living on a farm she has led a very hard life a lot of tragic things have happened we know her sister who was her soul mate and playmate died of leukemia and her dad got MS and couldn't support the family and you know these were these are everyday challenges that that we all face but this wasn't a time without medical assistance I mean there was really nothing that they could do it was just sort of fate taking over this this town of Keota was not built by rich and famous people it was built by everyday people living extraordinary lives and working so hard every day of their life and they think nothing extraordinary of what it was that they did and Andros is one of those examples the really good things in Keota came unfortunately during a time of global conflict because of the first world war farmers in America were really feeding people in Europe and wheat prices as a result were incredibly high it happens to be raining in the years prior to order one so times are good farmers are putting more land into cultivation they are going into debt buying new equipment to farm the land so there's this real boom cycle as a farmer you could go into the West if you get a lot of free land and you could grow wheat and for a while anyway the cash rolled in cutting edge of that was is once the war ended that the need for what kyouda farmers could produce just evaporated the end of the war really changed conditions in places like Kyoto with the end of the war crop prices really began to collapse and it became harder and harder for farmers in places like Keota to stay ahead many of them had gone into debt during the war buying tractors to increase the amount of land that they could place under cultivation and when the prices of wheat dropped at the end of the war many farmers found themselves underwater base they simply couldn't make enough on their crops to pay the debts that they had incurred during the good times at the same time World War one takes a tremendous toll on this little town there are a large number of veterans of young boys that go off to fight when your town is 140 people and you lose 15 to war that is a big amount of your population at the same time the Spanish flu epidemic hits Keota like so many other towns in Colorado and it hits it hard the Spanish flu began during World War one with the troops it was brought from Europe back to the United States by the troops started in Kansas and from there it spread like wildfire and it hits young mothers and healthy people this isn't this is a strain of flu that doesn't take the the youngest and the oldest like others do but it's hitting this kind of core population that same population that's really being affected by servicemen going off to fight Silverton actually has the highest mortality rate per capita of any community in the United States because it's an isolated community the flu gets in its nose the mountain passes are jammed up for the winter and it doesn't get out other towns like Gunnison take an opposite point if you can't get us in as quarantine you can't enter Gunnison during this time you know it is scary there's a lot of products that you see in catalogs like Montgomery Ward and Sears and Roebuck that are a direct result of this so all sorts of cleaning supplies and disinfectants but people were scared if you wander through kiotas graveyard or any graveyard from this time the the amount of raves that you see that are marked 1918-1919 it's it's sad and it's heartbreaking and there were entire families that were wiped out in this town people couldn't make a living farming because of the drought situation so many people who left my father didn't leave and someone asked me why he didn't leave and he said he had no money to start up any place else the Great Depression began in the 1930s but for farmers depression really began in the 1920s as crop prices began to fall at the end of the war farmers began to expand and go into deeper debt in order to stay ahead and that just drove overproduction which further lowered the prices of crops and farmers found themselves in a spiral of debt that just kept getting deeper and deeper even ten years before the stock market crash times are hard in this town for everyone and the women and all understand how hard it is that they work the men are all trying to support their families on these homesteads that are very small and when the weathers incorporate it doesn't cooperate one of the real tragedies of this great agricultural boom of the 19-teens is that it set the stage for a massive environmental collapse in the 1930s because of this cycle of mechanization and overproduction and debt and further overproduction farmers plowed more and more land and they took away the topsoil of the Prairie which anchored the soil in place and by the the conditions of intense drought in the 1930s that sort of simply blew away farmers in Colorado which okay had to go to Texas to farm because that's where their farm had landed you prayed for rain if you heard brain because I was your life kyouda effectively was finished as a as an agricultural town by the mid 1920s and and in many ways the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl simply represented the last nails in the coffin if you went to Kyoto today you would have no idea the extent to which this was a vibrant and thriving community mostly what you see are remains of buildings the general store still standing but just barely the remains of the Methodist Church which are boarded up the steps of the school just kind of rising out of the Prairie there's also fireplugs in the middle of the Prairie there are street signs just look like they're growing out of the of the grassland the water tower is still there it's painted Keota many of the images we have the aerial images were taken from that Clyde Stanley loved to climb the water tower and take photos of the town he was really a glue that held this town together he was a town booster he believed in this place and and really invested his life in it he was there for the boom days when the town did have 140 people and he was one of the last residents he was there when the town had six people so when I think about the arc of his life and what what he saw I'm so conflicted thinking that you know he saw this place and everything that he envisioned it would be and successful and booming and this this really just surprising story on the eastern plains and to help create such a rich community life and he also saw when times weren't good and when it stopped raining and people started to move away it's part of our historical life we grew up here and you can't erase whatever you think it's because the stories have kept going from one generation to the next and they just want to each other the Kyoto reunion was started about 25 years ago by descendants of the speaker in the heart families and these were two families that had adjoining homesteads next to each other and each family had very very large families the reunion is now run by nieces who never lived in Turkey Oda never lived in this place one lives in the st. Louis one lives in New Mexico people come from California they're not from Keota and they convention a sense but yet they identify with this place and this story and they come back every year and it is going home for them it is the family homestead just the camaraderie of those of us who are left is why we get together and it's just a fun thing to do I just don't think it going to Colorado I'm not going out through the Quixote Yetta represents the dreams that we all have when we come to a place like Colorado this place is a magnet for our dreams of who we want to be you could say that the town was a failure it wasn't it was it was an enduring community that has stayed with people and people identify this place in a way that a lot of Americans don't today a place like Kyoto provided opportunities to start a new life to own a piece of land to grow in to prosper and to settle down but it also reminds us that it's not always easy to live here that it takes great courage and persistence and it takes communities like here to depend on each other in order to succeed in this beautiful but challenging place you Colorado experience is a co-production of Rocky Mountain PBS and history Colorado history Colorado brings history to life for audiences of all ages through exhibits collections and historic preservation programs throughout the state history Colorado connects people to the stories places and heritage of Colorado's past that provide perspectives on today and to inspire our choices for tomorrow find out more at WWDC re colorado org additional funding provided by elbow Mar Foundation and the Boettcher foundation celebrating 75 years of philanthropy in Colorado with additional funding and support from these fine organizations and from viewers like you thank you this episode is available on blu-ray visit our website to order there's more Colorado experience online @rm pbs.org / Colorado experience Facebook and Twitter

Channel: Rocky Mountain PBS

Views: 18,530

Rating: 4.8400002 out of 5

Keywords: Keota, Homesteading, Old Prairie Dog Express, Colorado, Colorado Experience, History Colorado, Rocky Mountain PBS, RMPBS, Clyde Stanley, Rose Ball, Bill Convery, William J. Convery, Eastern Colorado

Id: B46WOV2Gzck

Length: 27min 10sec (1630 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 22 2013