Clara Brown was living in Missouri and Kansas while the bejowled Roger Taney said she and everyone who looked like her wasn’t a citizen. Her missing daughter, Eliza, was still the first thought in her mind each morning and the last before bed. Hope, that thing with feathers, perched in her peripheral vision, just out of reach, as she cooked and cleaned, singing quietly to herself, as Bleeding Kansas exploded around her.
The talk of the town where Clara was living was of the West, of Colorado, where gold was rumored to have been discovered. Clara wondered if Eliza Jane might have joined the gold-seeking pioneers, and the more she thought about it, the better a change of scenery sounded to her. She was free to do as she pleased, so Clara decided she would head west, start a laundry business, and use her earnings to fuel her search for Eliza.
By the spring of 1859, the Colorado gold rush was in full swing. Mere rumors of the precious metal were enough to drive the ’59ers, following the shimmering mirage of a prosperous future they glimpsed on the horizon. Clara, caught up in this tide of hope, joined forces with a respected wagon master, Colonel Benjamin Wadsworth.[1] His thirty-wagon caravan was headed west, and Clara, with her tenacity and unique features—her towering height, her deep complexion, her high cheekbones, and her piercing brown eyes—convinced him to let her be their cook.
She’d cook for twenty-five men in the caravan, fixing the Appalachian and German dishes she’d perfected over fifty years, walking beside the wagon train. In return, the Colonel would transport her laundry equipment.
For eight weeks, nearly sixty-year-old Clara walked, sometimes shushing through prairie grasses as tall as her cheeks, sometimes ascending steep, rocky hills with the vigor of a woman half her age. Not only did she walk the entire seven hundred miles to Colorado, she also prepared three full meals a day in between walks for two dozen ravenous people.
One woman, Margaret Frink, wrote in her memoir that she saw “A Negro woman…tramping along through the heat and carrying a cast iron bake stove on her head, with her provisions and a blanket on top, bravely pushing on.”[2] Historians like Lawrence de Graaf believe Frink’s description might match that of Clara Brown.
One Tennessee newspaper, reflecting in 1886 on the opening of the West thirty years earlier, described Clara as being the first woman to cross the “Great American desert,” a term widely used in the nineteenth century for what we now commonly call the High Plains. The Savannah Courier said that the wagon train encountered “some 800 Indians along the way,” but that Clara wasn’t afraid of Indians, because she had Indian blood in her veins and “her grandparents [had] been savages.”[3] There is no corroborating evidence for this statement, so it’s likely that it was inserted for dramatic effect—how exactly would the public fact-check this in the nineteenth century?
On May 6, 1859, the Colorado gold fever escalated. A prospector named John Gregory struck gold near Central City, Colorado, fueling the hopes of those en route, though some remained skeptical of what they might find.[4] By summer’s end, disillusionment led about fifty thousand Colorado settlers to turn back east in frustration, selling their equipment and supplies to westward travelers like Clara, who held on to their dreams.
When her wagon train finally arrived in Colorado, Clara was likely the first Black woman to cross into the territory, the first to breathe in the sunshine and the dry air of the mountains. Fortune seekers threw together barely habitable shacks in towns that sprang from the ground like weeds. Clara eventually settled in Central City and started a business cooking and washing for townspeople. Miners, often men with few legitimate job prospects back home, didn’t know if they would strike it rich, so they generally arrived alone. If they were married, their wives stayed behind until they got word that there was somewhere worth coming to.
As Clara saw the abject poverty of many of the miners and laborers, her heart went out to them. She was much older than most, and her motherly instincts longed for someone to dote on. She tried to bring a semblance of civilization to what many regarded as the truly wild west, hosting prayer meetings and helping to start the Union Sunday School with two Methodist ministers she befriended.
Wherever she went, Clara became known for her kindness and her tenacity. If someone arrived in Colorado Territory, scrawny from hunger and with not a penny to their name, Clara would give him a place to sleep and food to eat until he could find employment. In exchange, she earned their loyalty. When the laborer could finally afford to send out his laundry, there was no question he would return to Clara.
Clara’s laundry business thrived. A miner’s shirt, be it blue or red flannel, could be laundered for fifty cents or two pinches of gold dust.[5] Clara worked tirelessly from her two-room cabin, boiling water for washing, gathering and chopping wood for fuel to boil the water, scrubbing clothes on her washboard, hanging them to dry in the sunshine, and ironing them into submission. Laundering was backbreaking work, but it proved to be a gold mine in its own right. By the end of the Civil War, Clara had amassed more than $10,000,[6] which is the modern equivalent of nearly $250,000.
We should just go ahead and put Clara’s picture in the dictionary next to the term “self-made.” Everything Clara had, she earned from her own hands, from the sweat of her brow and the steel in her resolve.
As the mining towns of Colorado grew, so too did the community’s needs. Crowded conditions meant contagious illnesses spread at a rapid clip, one man’s coughing in a mine shaft quickly infecting everyone around him. The arrival of womenfolk meant babies were born. More people and families meant a greater need for institutions like schools and churches to serve them. Clara opened her home to the sick as needed, nursing them to the best of her ability. She acted as midwife for laboring women, and said that her dwelling was a “hospital, a home, a general refuge for those who were sick or in poverty.”[7] She gave generously to help fund the first Protestant and Catholic churches in town.
Clara developed a reputation that stretched far beyond the confines of her town and into the entirety of the American West. As new people arrived in Colorado, they soon heard tell of a woman who was always quick with a meal or a bandage, a cot for a nap, or a place to rent for the month. They called her the Angel of the Rockies.[8]
She became well-known to the governor of Colorado, who sent her on a mission back to Kansas to convince more people to move to Colorado.[9] She visited churches and schools, telling Black people that they had real opportunities in her adopted home state.
For the first time, Clara had a problem many prospectors would have given anything for: what to do with all her money? Real estate seemed like a sound choice, so Clara invested in properties—homes to rent out or sell, vacant lots to build on, mining claims she hoped would prove fruitful. Her mounting earnings gave her the margin she needed to breathe a little easier. Still, she never stopped thinking about Eliza. How she would have given up everything she had to feel the smoothness of her baby girl’s cheek in her hand, to drink in her scent, to feel the rise and fall of her chest as she held her close.
When the Civil War ended, her friends told her about how Kentucky was now free, and a longing stirred inside her—somebody had to know something about Eliza. Although Clara was strong, she had grown old and she knew that if she was ever going to make the trip back south to look for news of Eliza, now was the time.
When she arrived in Kentucky, weeks of searching helped her find distant relations, but not her daughter. She told everyone she met about how much better life was in the West—how the sun was brighter and the mountains never left you without a view to gaze upon. How you could get along with all kinds of people in the brand-new little towns, and live wherever you liked, without apologizing to anybody. She told them about how she had become friends with the governor. She assured them that work would be plentiful once they got there, but her relatives couldn’t afford to start the long journey.
So Clara paid for many of them to relocate—accounts range from sixteen to thirty relatives and friends—and she helped them get on their feet when they arrived. For the wagon train that was required to move her loved ones to Colorado, Clara was quoted double the price that a white man would have been expected to pay. She reached into the pouch that enclosed her money, feeling the weight of it in her hand, knowing that she might not have the chance to earn more. She closed her eyes and pictured what Eliza might look like as a grown woman of twenty, or of thirty or forty. Maybe someone had helped her daughter leave behind the weight of the past for something better. She gave the wagon master the sum he asked for, willing the tears not to fall.[10]
You might think that you’re one step ahead of me, and that this is a story about how Clara becomes a millionaire, a mine owner tapping the veins of one of her claims in the Colorado mountains. I wish that were true, but it’s not, unfortunately. By 1873, Clara lost most of her properties to flood and fire, and most of her savings had been embezzled by an unscrupulous attorney who had promised to help illiterate Clara manage her financial matters. After all her self-initiated success, all that she had done for others in her community, she was now a poor, elderly woman who was left with no choice but to move in with a friend at a lower altitude.
Colorado enacted a program that designated anyone who had arrived in the territory before 1865 an “official pioneer,” bestowing upon them a pension and a nod to their indomitable spirit.[11] Clara was now in the position of needing the money, and believing herself eligible, applied for the pension program. She was denied.
Was it because she was a woman, or because she was Black? Perhaps both. But her friends were outraged on her behalf. People who knew and loved Clara mounted a letter-writing and speech-giving campaign to lobby for Clara’s inclusion as an official pioneer. Their efforts worked, and Clara became the first woman to receive the designation. She had pioneered Colorado every bit as much as the miners and the speculators whose laundry she had done. She had helped shape the state in ways no one else could.
Still, hope perched just out of her now-failing sight. Clara never stopped asking everyone she met if they had ever heard of her daughter Eliza Jane. She offered anyone who might have a clue as to her whereabouts a $1,000 reward.[12] And then, when Clara was eighty-two years old, her heart leapt out of her chest when someone finally said: “I think I might know who you’re talking about.”
A letter was dashed off, and when the reply came back, Clara could barely breathe with anticipation. “Yes.” A telegram came back. “I think we’re talking about the same person. She lives in Council Bluffs, Iowa.”[13] Clara was now subsisting on nothing but her pioneer pension, but within days, her beloved community raised sufficient funds to buy her a ticket for the multiday train trip to Iowa.
I like to imagine Clara at the train depot, surrounded by her chosen Colorado family. She hoists her tall frame up the train steps, and at the top, turns around to look at the assemblage of people who know and love her.
“Goodbye now,” I hear her saying.
“Goodbye, Clara! Good luck!” the crowd calls back. Women dab at the corners of their eyes with handkerchiefs. Men hoist children onto their shoulders, their little hands waving wildly, as slowly, the train begins to chug away from the station. Clara waves her handkerchief out the window.
“Goodbye now!” her voice echoes, long after the train was out of view.
A newspaper reporter got wind of the possible connection that had been made between Clara and a woman named Mrs. Brewer. The Leavenworth Times reported on Clara’s 1882 journey into the heart of Iowa:
Yesterday morning on the Denver Short Line train, Mrs. Brown arrived in Council Bluffs. She came up on the streetcar and when at the corner of Broadway and 8th Street, her long-lost child was pointed out to her, standing on the crossing. With a scream, she jumped from her seat, rushed out of the car, and in an ecstasy of joy, mother and child were clasped in each other’s arms.
Unheeding the lookers on, unheeding the mud in the streets…they sat down. The sight was at once amusing and touching. In that embrace, the joys and sorrows of a lifetime were forgotten, and only the present thought of.[14]
For the first time in many decades, Clara felt a truly unmitigated joy. All the toil, all the nights of seemingly unanswered prayers, all the moments of quiet desperation that she pushed aside to continue reaching for hope, all of it was forgotten in the moment that she finally held Eliza Jane in her arms. She studied her face for glimpses of herself and her husband, Richard. “My baby,” I hear her whispering. “You’re here. You’re here.”
“Mama!” Eliza cried out as the dam in her heart broke open. Decades of compartmentalizing who she had been before she was sold from who she had become afterward crumbled. Her mother had not forgotten her. She had never stopped looking. Eliza had been haunted by the sight of Paulina’s face sinking farther from view beneath the surface of the water, until she too felt like she was being pulled under by the weight of it.
But in this moment, Eliza saw her mother, not in the aquatic pools of her distant memory, but here in the flesh, warm and wonderful. Too tangible to be angelic. She was smaller than Eliza remembered, but not diminished.
Clara was described in the newspaper as above average height, strong and vigorous of frame, hair thickly sprinkled with gray, and a kindly face. The Times said, “She has found consolation for many a sad and lonely hour, her solace in affliction, and has said to the troubled soul, ‘Peace, be still.’ It has been the bright and guiding star of her hope that she should again see her child.”
Despite her near blindness, hope now filled Clara’s field of vision, glorious in its colors, basking in the warm sun of peace, and of contentment, and of joy.
Eliza was herself a widow, but before she lost her husband she had made Clara a grandmother several times over. Clara returned to beloved Colorado with Eliza and one of her granddaughters—perhaps the most beautiful creature she’d ever laid eyes on—in tow.[15]
If the phrase “I can die happy now” applied to anyone, it was Clara Brown. She passed away on October 26, 1885, surrounded by her daughter, her granddaughter, and a host of people who enveloped her in the kind of warmth and kindness Clara had freely given to others.[16] When asked if she bore any resentment toward those who wronged her, those who had enslaved her and stolen her money, she simply replied: “My little sufferings was nothing, honey, and the Lord, He gave me strength to bear up under them. I can’t complain.”[17]
Crowds packed her funeral, with both the mayor and the governor seated prominently in the front church pew. Her burial plot was donated by the Colorado Pioneer Association. A stained-glass portrait of Clara now hangs in the Old Supreme Court Chambers in Denver. She is memorialized at the Smithsonian. Dr. George Junne, a professor at the University of Northern Colorado, said of her, “People like Clara Brown are rare. She saw her role in the world not as ‘I’ or ‘me’ against ‘them,’ but as ‘us’ and ‘we.’ It was the way that she lived her life that garnered her the amount of respect that she received.”[18]
