Shoofly Pie: Amish Homesteaders in Colorado, Part II

Grandma Miller in her kitchen in Nappanee,
Indiana in the late 1950s. Being Amish, 
she is not pleased that her son is taking her
picture. I don't know what to make of the
overhead light and the curtains on the window,
as they seem un-Amish to me.

My paternal grandparents, Phineas and Elizabeth ("Bettie") Anderson Miller and their two children were part of a group of Amish families that homesteaded in Cheyenne County, in eastern Colorado, not far from the town of Kit Carson. (I believe it might have been closest to the unincorporated town of Wild Horse.) My grandparents left Indiana for Colorado in the fall of 1909 but came back to Indiana permanently in 1911, as the possibilities for farming were not what they had been led to believe by the land developers.

I only remember my Grandma Miller visiting us once when we lived at Millwood (near Gap, PA), and that was in 1957. Grandpa Phineas had passed away in 1953, so of course he wasn't along. My dad managed to get Grandma to sit down with him and his tape recorder and he interviewed her about their experiences homesteading in Colorado. I transcribed that interview a few years back and here it is.

Dad, the interviewer, is identified as "D" and Grandma Miller is "G." Items in [brackets] are my attempts at editorial clarification.

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D: "Ammon and Emma [Dad's two oldest siblings] were the children that went on the train out there. Now there was nothing out there when you moved there, was there? Now that won’t record there..."

G: "We went out there in December when Ammon was two months old. And there was nothing there. But Dad and Iry [Ira] Chupp went on ahead of us and had our house built by the time we got there. Irys moved in with us and....the children caught the measles on the train and...all had the measles and was very sick. Then we lived out there that summer and in the fall, we came back again and then in the next spring we went out again."

D: "You mean, you moved out in December and how long did you stay out there then?"

G: "Until that fall."

D: "And what year was that?"

G: "1909?"

D: "You went out in 1908...."

G: "No, we went out in 1909, when Ammon was little."

D: "When Ammon was little, and then you stayed from December until how long?"

G: "That next fall."

D: "That next fall was the fall of 1910."

G: "Nineteen...Yeah."

D: "And then you came home [to Indiana] over winter..."

G: "And stayed till spring again and then we went out again."

D: "That was in the spring of 1911."

G: "Yeah."

D: "And then how long did you stay?"

G: "Well...Dad [Phineas]...We stayed there and had crops put out, but we didn’t put ‘em out. But he went to Kansas to work and I was alone all summer with the two children [Emma and Ammon]. And we had to haul our water. And I had a little sled with barrels on with [a box?] on the back for the children. And I had a stick to kill the rattlesnakes. And that sled would slide just as easy over the buffalo grass as it would on snow. And whenever we run out of fuel, Mrs. Iry [Katie] Chupp and her mother and I took the wagon..another wagon box and went out on the prairie and gathered the cow chips wherever the cattle would roost overnight. They were dry just like grass...like hay...and we would take them in and burn ‘em. [Laughs] Of course, that took a lot of carrying of ashes and stuff."

D: "Well now, was Ira Chupp there, too, or did he go...?"

G: "No, he went to Kansas, too, to work."

D: "To harvest."

G: "Yeah, to the harvest."

D: "And then they came back in the fall. Did you stay there over winter?"

G: "We moved back then."

D: "In the fall of 1911?"

G: "Ammon was two years old."

D: "Ammon was two years old and I wasn’t born until 1913."

G: "Back in Newton County."

D: "I didn’t know. I used to think that you stayed out longer. Then you were just there two summers. No winters at all."

G: "Really, two summers. That’s all."

D: "You just went out for summer vacations then..."

G: "No ..."[she giggles on tape] "I worked hard when I was out there."

D: "Well now what happened to your buildings out there. Did you sell ‘em?"

G: "Yeah, we sold ‘em to Ira Nissley. He moved ‘em all."

D: "What’d he do with them?"

G: "I don’t know. That was after we were gone."

Uncle Marvin [Dad's youngest brother]: "But did he stay out there?"

G: "About a year or so after that, he stayed out there. And they all moved to Wisconsin or someplace."

D: "Now what part was that?"

G: "Wild Horse, Colorado."

D: "Wild Horse..now which..."

G: "Cheyenne County."

D: "Cheyenne County. Which way from Denver? Did you go to Denver when you went out?"

G: "No, we never was that far. Even to Pike’s Peak."

D: "Well, you were north of Pike’s Peak."

G: "We could see Pike’s..."

D: "...and east. You were east of Pike’s Peak..northeast."

G: "We weren’t very far from the Kansas line. Salina, Kansas? Oh it was quite a distance, too."

D: "When you went out by train, did you go to Salina?"

G: "Yes."

D: "And then across to Kit Carson."

G: "Yes. And then when we got out there and got off the train and started home, there was a prairie fire on. And we come on home, and it was all burnt around. The Big Plains were all just burnt off. And the fire came clear up to Iry Chupp’s barn. And just right behind the barn there was a bundle of shingles. And they had started to burn, but they went out by themselves, so they didn’t burn the barn down. And, oh, the rattlesnakes and everything was so thick out there..."

D: "What do you mean, “thick”? Many of them, or great big around?"

G: "Well, both..."[she laughs on tape]

D: "That would be a good place for Esther [my mother]. She just likes snakes..."

G: "I tell you, I shot ‘em. Whenever I got a chance."

D: "Shot ‘em?! What’d you use? .22?"

G: "Sixteen gauge."

D: [asking one of Uncle Marvin’s daughters, who is nearby]: "Could you be a pioneer?"

[Much giggling]

G: "Well, I don’t know what...."

D: "One year you had turkeys, didn’t you, and the coyotes got into ‘em?"

G: "Killed seven that time. We just went to town and came back, and they just had ‘em done. So we butchered ‘em. Took and cut their heads off and did we ever have turkey meat. We had to get [unintelligible—“all creation”?] together to help eat it on Sunday."

D: "Well now, how many families went out there to homestead out there?"

G: "Twenty-eight families."

D: "How many proved up...they had to stay there for four years..."

G: "Three."

D: "Three years and they had to make so many hundred dollars worth of improvements on it. And you got a hundred and sixty acres for nothing, isn’t that right?"

G: "Yeah."

D: "How many families proved there?"

G: "Oh, I don’t know. Not many I guess. We relinquished ours back to the government again."

D: "And one big drawback was water, wasn’t it? No water."

G: "Water and hail. One Sunday evening, it hailed and the hail was so deep...I had one-buckle overshoes on and it was as high as that buckle."

D: "1910, 1911. That’s been 46 years ago." [obviously, the tape was made in 1957] "I’m 44..."

G: "Well, it was just the same time as Ammon was little..."

D: "He was born in 1909. And you and your two children and Ira Katie [Mrs. Ira Chupp] went out on the train together. How many children did she have?"

G: "We had four altogether."

D: "Four children and you two women. And you went from northern Indiana out to Colorado by yourself..."

G: "Yeah..."

D:  "...forty-some years ago on the train. How many days were you on the road?"

G: "Oh I don’t remember that. We stopped at Anderson County, Kansas."

D: "To rest up?"

G: "Yeah, and to visit there....But coming home, it was Mose Chupp’s wife, and her two children on the train. We got on at, I forgot..." [unintelligible–sounds like “Saranta”?]

D: "Saranta[?], Kansas or Colorado?"

G: "Maybe it wasn’t Saranta[?]. We got out there and we went on to Chicago and parted there. She went to Michigan and I come to Morocco [Indiana]."

D: "Oh, Ira and Katie didn’t come back with you?"

G: "No, they went to Michigan. They was out there about a year after we left, and they moved to Michigan. Midland, Michigan."

D: "Great experience, wasn’t it...but you wouldn’t want to go through it again..."

G: "No sir. I would never do it again if I *was* young. You betcha..."

D: [small talk with others about whether they would want to be a pioneer like Grandma Miller.]

G: "That time it hailed so awful, the cow was on the side of the house, and I had the calf tied to the corner of the house. And it hailed so, she got up onto the porch...broke that...we had a banister so that the kids couldn’t get out on account of the rattlesnakes. Then she got up on that and broke that down, and I pulled the calf up on the porch side of her. And oh, it was hailing. It just peppered it down. Then Iry Chupp came down after the storm and wanted to know whether I was all right or not, and I was out and had gathered up a barrel full of hail so I wouldn’t have to haul no water. And I had a bucket there and had it filled with milk and was making ice cream..shaking it in there.. the hail, you know. Ah me. We had some times...I wouldn’t want to do it over again."


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Luthy says (pp.58-59) that Amish correspondents were reporting as early as 1910 and 1911 that conditions were "very dry." And indeed, Cheyenne County's geographic placement in the "rain shadow" of the Rockies meant that conditions there were perennially dry—much drier than in Phineas and Bettie's home town of Mt. Ayr. Farmers around Mt. Ayr, IN, were accustomed to getting approximately 37.5 inches of precipitation per year spread pretty evenly throughout the year. But when these Amish farmers moved to Cheyenne County, CO, they had moved to a landscape that received just a smidgen over 16 inches per year with creeks that typically dried up during the summer. It must have been like moving to the moon, except it was a moon with hailstorms, prairie fires, coyotes, and rattlesnakes.

As Grandma Miller notes, she and Phineas packed it in after two summers in Cheyenne County. According to Luthy, the last of the Amish homesteaders had moved away from this Cheyenne County settlement by 1914, making it one of the shortest-lived settlements of his book.

Source: David Luthy, The Amish in America: Settlements that Failed, 1840 - 1960. (Pathway Publishers: 1991).