Pueblo

The second week of our stay in Aurora was as busy as the first. There are more interesting sites in the area than one can take in. The scenery is terrific and the air clear and thin. We took a trip into Denver to the Museum of Natural History. The museum itself is interesting, but we were there to see the artifacts of the Titanic and the
IMAX showing of the discovery and retrieval of the many items shown. A most interesting movie. If you get a chance, you should see the exhibit if it travels to your city.

On entry, one is handed a boarding pass with the name, age, class of passage and personal data of one of the passengers. The guys got men and the gals got women. I guess that’s fair. Anyway, during the course of the exhibit one finds out the fate of their passenger, saved or not. Of the more than 2200 passengers, over 1500 died, as did the passenger on my boarding pass. The women, well they made it out alive, but I was in 1st Class and they were in 2nd. I don’t know what that tells you. A first class ticket cost $4,500 at the time, which is equal to more than $78,000 in today’s money.

Of course, one is not permitted to take photos so you will get no pictures of the exhibit. I do have a picture of the Denver skyline, which you see above, taken from in front of the Museum . An interesting bit of information was the legend on a 60 pound lump of coal. The ship carried 6,000 pounds of coal onboard. Sixty pounds of coal moved the ship forward 60 feet in the water for about 1.5 seconds. Imagine that! And we think gas prices are bad! Would you like a “coal” car?

Some of the time was spent doing odd jobs for my sister. You know how it is, I’m a sucker for anyone offering food. So, I replaced bathroom faucets and lights and hung chandeliers in the foyer and dinning area. Then, of all things, she bought a new laptop computer. You know what that leads to, don’t you? A little computer work and training. Anyway, I was glad to do it. After all, it’s family!

On Thursday, September 20 we left Aurora and headed to Pueblo, Colorado, some 120 miles south. The scenery changed again, from the close mountain views of the “mile-high-city” to the broad prairie grasslands with distant purple mountains. You see a picture here of the scene outside our trailer at the campground. The sunsets here are spectacular. The campground is nothing fancy, but will serve our needs as we explore the area.

One reason for stopping in Pueblo is because it is where my grandmother (Granny, the one who raised me) lived for a while as a young girl, age 10-12. The family lived here while my great-grandfather worked in Pueblo and in Denver doing cement contracting work, and then while he worked his claim in the gold rush of 1890 in Cripple Creek, CO. No, he didn’t strike it rich. He ran out of money and sold his claim in 1891, and the family moved on to Kirksville, MO in 1892 after some three years in the area. Do you notice any family traits here?

My grandmother told of how frightened she was when Indians came to the door looking for food. We tried to find some record of my family’s time here at the genealogical section of the local library, but all the records of the 1890 census had been destroyed and the local directories of the period showed no record of them. Pity! It would have been nice to have seen the street where they lived, if indeed they lived in the city proper.

You see a view here of the city of Pueblo which lies along the Arkansas River, in the foreground of the picture. It also shows the old and new structures in the city. We first crossed the Arkansas River as we made our way to Leadville, which we related last week. At that point, some 10,000 feet up, the river was only about three feet wide as it first made it down the mountain on its way through Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas growing all the while, until it empties into the Mississippi River some 1500 miles away. Or did you already know that the Arkansas River began in Colorado? I’ll bet you remember that from your geography class. You did take geography, didn’t you?

We will be looking for more adventures here in the area and in Colorado Springs. I’ll tell you about those next week. Ciao!