Family reunion celebrates 166 Years of Colorado pioneers

On a wall in Cherry Moore's house hang 14 certificates. Each celebrates a Colorado pioneer who has been in the state for at least 100 years, many even longer. Some arrived before Colorado became a state. All of them are related to Moore, like her great-grandfather Harvey Moore, who helped build the railroad from Kansas to Denver, and just stayed in Colorado once it got here.

There's also her 3rd great-granduncle, Jonas Barber.

"He didn't want to be around for the Civil War," she recalls, "so he got together a wagon train in 1860 and came out."

Barber traveled from Davenport, Iowa, and settled in what would--with his help--become Golden, Colorado. He partnered with William Loveland, and the burgeoning town soon began to boom. That trip in 1860 was the first of 19 trips Barber would make across the western plains. Each time, he brought more friends and family out with him.

"Next thing you know," says Cherry Moore, "word got back to Iowa and Illinois, 'Hey guys, come out here.'"

One of those trips included Charlie and Jennie Pruden, along with Charlie's Pruden's mother, Amelia. They homesteaded in Eldorado Springs.

"Jennie Pruden, our great-grandmother, kept a diary all her life," says Cherry Moore.

Those diaries survived through the years. Transcribing the over two dozen volumes became Cherry Moore's pastime once she retired. The diaries and the transcriptions are now in the collection of the Carnegie Library in Boulder. The diaries provide great details on what life was like in those pioneering days.

"She would get up, she would feed the chickens and gather the eggs and water the horses and livestock, churn the butter, make the bread, load up the wagon and go to town. She would trade all these things, barter for flour, sugar, coffee, then come back," said Cherry Moore.

She says the diary entries also describe social life, highlighting community dances and other gatherings, as well as detail the work she and Charlie Pruden did for the county of Boulder, David Moffatt, and others.

In 1902, Pruden's mother Amelia established a 160-acre ranch across South Boulder Creek. There was already a small cabin on the property when she moved in. The land stayed in the family and the cabin remained standing.

In the 1970s, the family sold that parcel to Boulder County for its open space. Boulder County stabilized and boarded up the cabin, and it has become something of a monument to the family history for Cherry Moore and others in her family. When the plans for a family reunion this past August were set in motion, a pilgrimage to the cabin sat high on the agenda.

The cabin sits about 2 miles from the South Mesa trailhead, and on a sunny August day, 13 family members, including Cherry, her brother, and sister, hiked to the cabin for reflection and photographs. An emotional Greg Moore found himself at a loss for words.

"To understand the effort and energy and what they risked and went through for this to be here, and that we're the inheritors of that legacy is just almost incomprehensible, and it's beautiful," Cherry Moore said, agreeing. "I wonder if I would have the courage to get in a wagon train and leave everything I knew and come to some place I had no idea what it was going to be like, build a home, create a life."

She says it takes a special kind of person to do that.

"It just staggers the imagination to think of the physicality of these people. They had to be strong," she said.

Cherry wonders if we truly grasp it today: "We whine about having to schlep groceries from the car to the house."