Beckwourth Living History: Reunited

On Sunday, March 22 Jane Taylor convened a meeting of the Beckwourth Club Re-enactors. The meeting was held at the Stiles African American Heritage Center. Special thanks to Grace Stiles for hosting and providing the wonderful eats....

Start Getting Ready:
Pull out your costumes, try them on. See if changes to it are needed, contact Marcia if so. Pull out your character’s info and review that. Pull out Denver’s history and review that also. Practice speaking in first person. At this point, we will have to treat our re-enactment as our hobby. Clothing, materials, and props are on our own. But, we can certainly have fun getting ready together. If I have some things from Beckwourth that can help you get ready, I certainly will offer them as loans.

Note:

If we are truly going to re-organize to tell “the story,” we will need many other people and characters. Consider taking on a second, or third character as well as bringing in other people to be Mr. Kuntz, the banker, Mr. Byers, the newspaper man, to Beckwourth himself. We can’t be scraping around to see who is willing for one event – we need to be ready to offer what we have not what we hope to pull together. So let’s truly have characters ready to offer to the world.

Let the Re-enactors Ride Again!

Jane Taylor

Grace Stiles

Spruce Mountain and Mile High Bison

On Saturday, March 20 a group of us car pooled from the Monaco and Hampden RTD Park & Ride down I-25 South to the Greenland Exit 167 (just south of Larkspur) to hike Spruce Mountain. Spruce Mountain is a large, tree-covered mesa that is visible from Interstate I-25, Spruce Mountain Road, County Line Road, and Highway 105. It is part of an important wildlife corridor, allowing travel between the Pike National Forest and Greenland Open Space and Greenland Ranch managed by Douglas County.

The five mile loop trail with an elevation gain of 500 feet contains scrub oak, ponderosa pine forest, wet meadows, and rocky cliffs which provide spectacular views of the high plains to the east and snow covered Pikes Peak to the south. Use of layered clothing made the mostly sunny late morning and early afternoon hike extremely comfortable as the sun played it’s occasional game of ‘peek-a-boo’ with accompanying drops and rises in temperature. Sharing the trail with occasional horse back riders and mountain bikers, provided an added dimension of pleasant trail social interaction as well as providing suggestions for future activities.

If you go, you want to make sure and visit the newly opened Mile High Bison Ranch Store which is just across the railroad tracks and adjacent to the access road to the Spruce Mountain Trailhead. Numerous bison products are for sale, including meats and hides. But even more interesting is to speak with Todd Gale, co-owner of the business, and listen to him give a history of the Greenland Ranch and Open Space, while also talking about his full blown commercial bison ranch operation located at that location…

See you next time…. along the trail!

A convenient way to share our interest for furthering the legacy of James P Beckwourth is by talking, preferably for many of us, along the trail. However, as we all can’t hit the trail together, along comes a new blogging site devoted to the faithful who enjoy all things Beckwourth, especially telling a good story and spending time in the outdoors.
For those familiar with the story of the legendary African American fur trapper and entrepreneur this site allows you to give voice to concerns and suggest solutions for revitalizing programs and activities built around the Beckwourth legacy.

While appealing to the better angels of our nature lets renew the conversation and determine the best practices for securing Winks Lodge, expanding the living history program, establishing viable youth and adult membership programs, while at the same time remaining open to new opportunities that will inevitably present themselves.
Lets once again, “Entice the Lightning…. Embrace the Thunder….. We are Beckwourth”! See you  along the trail….