Pueblo County, Colorado
Pioneer Cemetery Article
The Pueblo Chieftain - September 23, 2001 -
Cemetery Ghosts Tell Stories
of
Pueblo's Past By James Amos
George Gilbert has been dead a long time,
but he
came back "above the grass" Saturday for "A Walk Through History" at the
Pueblo Pioneer Cemetery. Saturday marked the fourth year of the living
history
event, sponsored by the Pueblo Parks and Recreation Department and the
Pueblo
Pioneer Cemetery Committee.
Gilbert, Portrayed by local volunteer Phillip
Redinger, was one of several cemetery denizens to talk about their lives
in early
Pueblo. Gilbert said he had two grave markers, one placed by his second
wife, but
he doesn't know where the other stone came from. After all it's a little
hard
to get reliable information from the early 1900s, informative ghost or
not.
Gilbert was born in New York in 1836 and came to Pueblo after trying to
prospect for gold in the Colorado mountains with little success. He moved
to a spot
east of Boone and married, but his first wife died at 35. His two sons
later
died from diphtheria and after he remarried he and his second wife lost a
young
daughter too. He sold his herd of 1,500 cattle and moved into town in
1879.
Gilbert worked around the Pueblo and helped lay out the city, according to
Redinger. He died at the age of 75 in 1911.
Redinger said this is his
third year
portraying one of the cemetery's residents. The first year he performed a
small
skit in addition to his talk.
Further down the cemetery trail, Tom Cummings portrayed one-time Pony
Express
rider J.J. Thomas. Thomas was born in 1837 and worked as a teamster in the
Army in southern Kansas before he moved to Colorado to help built a stage
stop.
When the Oak Creek stage stop east of Denver was finished, Thomas and his
friend were hired to be Pony Express riders and were the first in the
area. But
Thomas, too, caught gold fever and spent a cold and hungry time in the
mountains
before joining a Colorado unit going to the Civil War. Thomas thought he
would be shipped east to fight, but instead stayed in the West and was
part of the
battle at Glorietta Pass in New Mexico.
Area historian Eleanor Fry said,
the
battle sprang from a plan by the South to take over the Southern part of
the
Western states, including some of Colorado's gold fields.
Thomas's Union
Army
unit "headed them off at the pass" Fry said. Thomas also was part of a
unit
sent to recover materials stolen by Indians in a raid near Santa Fe,
Cummings
said. The unit trailed the Indians nearly; to Amarillo, Texas, and there
recovered 94 mules without a fight.
Thomas' fortunes took a turn upward
when he
returned to Pueblo and, with, partners, built a toll bridge across the
Arkansas
River, ran a hotel and sold vegetables he grew where the current Midtown
Shopping
Center stands.
With his economic success, the former horse-feed hauler
hung
around with one of the Thatcher banking brothers, became postmaster,
county
treasurer and even represented the area in Colorado's second state
assembly.
Thomas died in 1911 and had five children, although two died when they
were young,
Cummings said. Fry did the research on each of the history walk's 13
characters. She is a member of the Pueblo County Historical Society and
the Committee
for the Restoration of the Pueblo Pioneers Cemetery. "I've been working
on
this for about 20 years," Fry said. She found her information in old
archives of
The Pueblo Chieftain, including long reminiscences written by Thomas
himself
Fry said there's a wealth of information about the town's rich and
powerful in
the old newspaper articles. "Some of these early pioneers, every time they
crossed the street it was reported in the paper," she said.
