The Foster Ranch: An Early Colorado Springs Homestead

By Steven Wade Veatch   

            Marcus Aurelius Foster (1834-1923) made his way from New Ipswich, New Hampshire, to the Colorado Territory in its early days of settlement. He arrived in Colorado City, the first permanent town in the Pikes Peak region, in the spring of 1860 (Foster, 1964). Colorado Springs did not yet exist, and El Paso County would not be organized by the citizenry until 1861—one year after Foster’s arrival.

            The Pikes Peak region was a harsh and wild environment when Foster arrived. It was an expanse of shortgrass plains that ended where Pikes Peak and Cheyenne Mountain rose to the south and west. Dramatic red rock formations—the Garden of the Gods—in their skyward reach marked the transition of the plains to the mountains. At that time, the Utes traveled back and forth between their mountain hunting grounds to the west and the foothills to the east. In the winter, the Utes camped at lower elevations, sometimes near the Garden of the Gods or Manitou Springs.

Figure 1. A postcard showing the Garden of the Gods in the foreground and Pikes Peak in the background. From the S.W. Veatch collection.

            Foster’s arrival in the area marked him as one of the early El Paso County pioneers. He came along with other men who were determined to settle there. Few stores and fewer comforts were to be found. There were no railroads, and the only way to travel was on roads that were mostly tracks through grass-covered ground.

            Soon after Foster arrived in 1860, he rode up the Ute Pass trail to look around. He went as far as cone-shaped Mount Pisgah on the other side of Pikes Peak (gold would be discovered near there at Cripple Creek 30 years later). It was there that Foster met Ute Chief Ouray, who was watching a buffalo hunt from the top of Mount Pisgah. The men talked for a few minutes before Ouray raced down Pisgah’s steep slope to help his fellow hunters stop the buffalo from running away (Foster, 1964). After his encounter with Ouray, Foster rode back down Ute Pass to Colorado City.

            In 1861, Foster and J. B. Riggs left Colorado City for Buckskin Joe, a gold camp west of Fairplay. Foster and Riggs looked for gold as they shoveled gravel into a sluice box on Buckskin Creek (Foster, 1961). The record of Foster’s activities dims until four years later.

            Foster recognized the open, grass-covered landscape east of Ute Pass as an opportunity to claim and own land. He filed a homestead on 160 acres in South Cheyenne Cañon on December 1, 1865. The Civil War had ended eight months earlier, and Andrew Johnson was President. Few white people were in the area when Foster filed his homestead papers with the land office. Five years later, the census of 1870 recorded only 81 residents in Colorado City and 987 white people in all of El Paso County. General Palmer would not establish Colorado Springs until in 1871.

            Marcus Foster built a large ranching operation on his homestead that eventually included another 160 acres, for a total of 320 acres (Foster, 1967). His land and ranch house, right behind what is today the Broadmoor Hotel, was a busy place. He kept 35 “stands” of honeybees, had pigs and cattle, maintained large fields of hay and corn, kept a vegetable garden, and had a dairy operation (Foster, 1967).

Figure 2. Cheyenne Mountain looking south from the Foster ranch. Marcus A. Foster, and his son, stand by the wooden cellar ventilator. Modified from a cyanotype. Photographer and date unknown. Photo courtesy of the Cripple Creek District Museum. 

            Foster lived on his ranch with his wife Elizabeth and raised six children: Minnie, Helen, Marcus, Edith, Dora, and Lucy. Dora was born on the family homestead and became a well-known columnist for the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph. She was also the paper’s society and church editor. Besides her work at the Gazette, she wrote three books on Colorado history: Colorado Yesterdays, 1961; Then . . . The Best of Colorado Yesterdays, 1964; and My Childhood Days in Colorado Sunshine, 1967. She based her writing on her experiences and stories from residents of the early days of the region. Dora lived to be 94.

Figure 3. View of the Foster Ranch cattle pen. Mount Rosa and Stove Mountain are in the background. Modified from a cyanotype. Photographer and date unknown. Photo courtesy of the Cripple Creek District Museum. 

            In the spring of 1867, Chief Nevava, with his band of 500 Utes, left their winter encampment on the Arkansas River and set up a camp just below Foster’s ranch house. The Utes camped there for a brief period while they waited for the grass to green up and grow high enough for their ponies to eat before they continued on their travels.

            One day, the chief’s son, Nevava John, came to Foster’s house. Foster gave him coffee and other items. During the visit, Foster showed Nevava John a picture of William Henry Harrison’s Battle of Tippecanoe (1811) which included Indian warriors in an old Mitchell’s School Geography book in Foster’s library (Foster, 1964). This page, with the picture of the battle, interested Nevava John so much that he brought others from the camp to see it.

            Foster continued to maintain good relations with the local Indians. Old Chief Nevava, when he passed by Foster’s ranch, would occasionally stop and talk to Foster (Foster, 1964). Relations with the Indians were not always good, however. Dora wrote that one day in April 1867, a band of Ute Indians “were encamped on the banks of the Fountain, a short mile from my parents’ cabin. The Indians . . . were not known to be especially friendly toward the ranchers and were planning to drive them out of their prize hunting grounds here along the front range of the mountains “ (Foster, 1961).

            According to Dora Foster, the situation with the Indians deteriorated, and in 1868, the Indians struck at the settlers. She wrote, “People for miles around came and brought their families for protection from them, and we were forted up in the old Anway house located at 2812 W. Pikes Peak” (Foster, 1961). While the women and children stayed at the Anway house, the men, with rifles, stood guard on a nearby hill. Dora Foster continued writing about the attack:

We were living here when the three boys were killed by the Indians near where the Antlers Hotel now stands. They were herding cattle when they were attacked by the Indians from the hills. The oldest of the boys was young Everhart. He was 21 years old. The Robbins boys were younger. They were brought here and laid out in the old log building which was the first state house. It was located on the north side of Colorado Avenue, between 26^th and 27^th streets. I can just remember going with my sister to see the bodies, as everyone was flocking there so horrified and grieved over it. They were a terrible sight, scalped and speared, and they had placed their guns to their eyes and blew them out, and faces and necks all powder burnt. The Indians also stampeded stock (Foster, 1961).

            At Foster’s ranch, the days were long and the work hard. Cattle needed tending, the hay cut, and other crops cared for. Winters were cold and summers hot. Besides Indian troubles, grasshoppers infested the land periodically. In 1873, the area experienced a plague of grasshoppers. In response, Foster made a wooden frame with a long handle. At the opposite end of the handle he tacked a cloth sack on the wooden frame. Foster would then walk into his fields and swing the contraption back and forth at the horde of hoppers until he captured so many that the bag was full of grasshoppers. He would then take the buzzing bag near the pigpen, dump the insects into a pot of boiling water, and then feed the scalded hoppers to his pigs (Colorado Springs Free Press, 1951).

            In the summer of 1872, Marcus Foster, Daniel Kinsman, and Carter Harlan, all of whom had children of school age, organized a school board. Marcus Foster continued as a member of the school board for 32 years (Foster, 1964). Foster, a skilled carpenter, built the first schoolhouse with logs he hauled down from the east side of Cheyenne Mountain (Foster, 1961). The rustic school, built on Broadmoor Hill, had one room—about 12 by 14 feet—a door that faced east and four windows, two on each side of the school (Foster, 1961).

            In the fall, the school opened with Miss Mary Harlan as the first teacher (Foster, 1961). She was the twenty-one-year-old daughter of C.S. Harlan, the school board’s treasurer. There were eight pupils. Light came in from the windows and settled on the faces of the students as they sat at their desks. Each day, the older boys hauled a bucket of drinking water up from the creek and placed it on a wooden bench. A white metal dipper hung near the bucket.

            The school day was long, from 9 am to 4 pm with two fifteen-minute recess periods and an hour lunch. During recess and lunch, there were ball games and other activities outside (Foster, 1964). A huge pine tree grew in the schoolyard, and someone had attached a swing on a lower limb (Foster, 1964). The laughter of children filled the schoolyard during those recess periods. In the winter, there were indoor games. A round potbelly stove that burned coal heated the little log school.

            One day, a group of Indians rode into the schoolyard while the children were playing. The Indians were interested in the long hair of 10-year-old Anna Reihard and offered to trade some ponies for her. A scared Anna ran into the schoolhouse and shut the door. Fortunately, the trade was not made, and the Indians rode away (Foster, 1964).

            Sometimes during the noon recess, Frank Lewis, who lived just a short distance west of the schoolhouse, walked out on his porch, sat down on a wooden chair, and played his banjo. Hearing the music, the children walked a short distance with their lunch pails to his log cabin, where they listened to him play. When Lewis was not entertaining the students, he was building a mill on a nearby hill for Bert Myers, who had a 720-acre corn and wheat farm. After Myers finished the mill, he used the corn to make brooms that he sold in Colorado City. Meyer’s property later became part of the Broadmoor Hotel’s grounds.

            In 1881, Foster was elected to the Colorado legislature as a member of the House for two years. He served with Horace A. W. Tabor, who was a state senator and Lieutenant Governor. Frederic Pitkin was Governor.

            The Foster children entertained themselves in endless yet simple ways. In the spring, the scent of budding flowers and the smell of newly turned earth from Foster’s fields drifted in the air. This signaled it was time for the Foster children to pick wildflowers for their mother. To get to the wildflowers, they went behind the stables and crawled under a barbwire fence, and then walked down a path. To keep their dresses from tearing on the barbs, Foster wrapped the barbs with little pieces of cloth (Foster, 1961).

            There were many opportunities for fun. The Foster children put flat stones on the top of a big red anthill in the neighbor’s pasture, returning the next day to see if the ants had moved the stones. The ants always moved the stones several inches from the top of the anthill. They looked for wild bird nests and caught frogs along a water ditch. A special treat was a family trip to the Garden of the Gods for the day, and picnics among the towering red sedimentary rocks.

            On summer evenings, after supper was eaten and the dishes were cleared away, Foster and his wife sat on the front steps of the ranch house and watched their children play and gambol on the soft green grass. According to Dora Foster, the long winter evenings were the best part of each day, when the parents and children sat in the parlor room, lighted by a single kerosene lamp (Foster, 1961). It was in this room that the children read or worked on their homework. Sometimes Foster read stories to his children from the Toledo Blade that came once each week (Foster, 1961). He must have, on many occasions, pulled a book from the bookshelves to read to the children. His stiff fingers carefully turned the pages while the lamplight flickered against the uneven shadows.

            On winter evenings, after supper, Mrs. Foster brought a button box out and dumped its contents on the table. Dora wrote, it was “a box full of magic for my sisters and me when we were small” (Foster, 1967, p. 1). The Foster children, sitting around the table, played with the buttons, imagining the buttons were individual members of local families, and acting out endless stories.

Figure 4. A typical button box. Farmers and ranchers saved buttons for later use. Photo date 2021 by S. W. Veatch.

            The Foster ranch existed long ago, a place where a family experienced the pioneer days of Colorado Springs. In a newspaper article, Dora Forster wrote, “The soft mellow yellow light from the lamp, and the pleasant heat from the coal-burning stove seemed to me to be all that we wanted” (Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph, 1972). Marcus Foster and his family lived in a timeless place of their own making. These historic photos resurrect those earlier days. Today, the frantic pace of modern life has replaced the much longer and simpler days experienced by the Fosters and other pioneer families.

 

Acknowledgments

            I thank Eric Swab and Dr. Bob Carnein for their valuable comments and help in improving this paper.

 

References and Further Reading

Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph, 1972, Dora Foster Wrote about Pioneer Family: Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph, March 23, 1972, p. 17BB.

Colorado Springs Free Press, 1951, Dorothy Smith Relates Stories of Early Days: Colorado Springs Free Press, October 17, 1951, p. 5.

Foster, Dora, 1961, Colorado Yesterdays: Colorado Springs, Dentan Printing Company.

Foster, Dora, 1964, Then . . . The Best of Pikes Peak Region Yesterdays: Colorado Springs, Dentan Printing Company.

Foster, Dora, 1967, My Childhood Days in Colorado Sunshine: Colorado Springs, Dentan-Berkeland Printing Company.