MARTHA, MARY, ROSE, AND MARIE: THEY MADE A DIFFERENCE

Post by Doris McCraw
writing as Angela Raines

Buffalo Peaks in Colorado
from Wikipedia

Sunday was International Women's Day, and March is National Women's History Month. As most of you know, I am fascinated and research a lot about the early women in this county, especially those who were part of the Westward expansion west of the Mississippi River. This is in no way a discount of those women who came to this country in the 1600 and 1700s. All women and men who had the courage to make something of their lives and create what we now have deserve to be remembered.

Here is a brief look at some of those early women in Colorado.

1. Martha Maxwell - Naturalist: Martha Ann Maxwell was born in Pennsylvania in 1831. She married widower James Maxwell, who had four children, in 1853. The couple moved to Colorado following the gold rush of 1859. It was while here that Martha began killing and stuffing her own animals. Her work was so lifelike and her practice of posing them in their natural habitat was unique. Prior to her death in 1881 she wrote the book: "On the Plains and Among the Peaks or How Mrs. Maxwell Made Her Natural History Collection".

Martha Maxwell
from Wikipedia

2. Mary Florence Lathrop - Newspaper Reporter, Lawyer: Born in Pennsylvania in 1865, she began her first career as a reporter in Philadelphia. She traveled the world as a reported and after contracting tuberculous she moved to Denver, Colorado. There she attended the University of Denver, studying law and graduating in 1896. Her scores for the bar exam remained the highest for the Colorado Bar until 1941. She argued cases in front of the Colorado and US supreme courts. She was one of the first two women to be admitted to the American Bar Association in 1917.

Mary Florence Lathrop
from Wikisource

3. Dr. Rose Kidd Beere - Physician: Dr. Beere was born in Indiana in 1859. Her father was a military man stationed in the West after the War Between the States. She married Edmund Burke Beere, an attorney in Las Cruces, NM, in 1883 and had three sons. After the death of her husband, Dr. Beere moved to Chicago where she studied medicine at Women's Medical College at Northwestern University in Chicago. She graduated in 1892 and moved to Durango, CO., where she practiced prior to moving to Denver. During the Spanish-American War, she went to Manilla with the Red Cross as a nurse, since they wouldn't let go as a doctor. She had told her father since he had no sons to serve in the military, she would go as the family representative in that conflict.

Dr. Rose Kidd Beere
from Find a Grave

4. Marie Guiraud - Rancher: Born in France in 1830 she moved to Colorado, via Louisanna, Ohio, and Kansas, in 1862. She and her husband homesteaded in Park County, Colorado in addition to Adolphe running a store in a nearby town. After Adolphe's death in 1875, Marie grew the 640 acres into one of the earliest ranches in Park County. In her obituary in the Fairplay Flume, on June 11, 1909, they wrote the following: "After her husband's death, with a large family of little children and heavy financial reverses she struggled on and not only kept their property together but prospered well, added to their possessions and accumulated and estate very nearly as great, if not equal, of the largest estate ever built up in Park County."

From Find A Grave

For those who would like to know  more see the links below:

Extra information on Martha Maxwell

Additional information on Mary Florence Lathrop

Obituary of Rose Kidd Beere & Dr. Rose Kidd Beere

Guiraud Fairplay Obituary & Historic Significance of the Ranch & Buffalo Peaks Ranch

And be sure to check out the novellas in the Agate Gulch stories where the town of Agate Gulch located in Park County, and Teller County, CO.

Doris Gardner-McCraw -

Author, Speaker, Historian-specializing in
Colorado and Women's History

Angela Raines - author: Where Love & History Meet

Books: Angela Raines Books