Julia Archibald Holmes Rides . . .
Julia Archibald Holmes will tell you that although Zebulon Pike said
the mountain named after him could never be climbed, in 1858 she made
it to the top--after walking the Santa Fe Trail. "Do you not think,"
Ann Birney as Holmes asks, "that Julia Anna Archibald Holmes Peak would
be a much more fitting name for that mountain?"
I wore a calico dress, reaching a little below the
knee, pants of the same, Indian moccasins on my feet, and on my head a
hat. However much it lacked in taste, I found it to be beyond value in
comfort and convenience, as it gave me freedom to roam at pleasure in
search of flowers and other curiosities, while the cattle continued
their slow and measured pace.
Julia Archibald Holmes travelled the Santa Fe trail on foot in
bloomer costume in 1858 from the family farm on the Neosho river in
Kansas to New Mexico, becoming on the way the first white woman to
climb Pike's Peak. Ann Birney of Ride into History brings Julia Holmes
alive with a dramatic first-person narrative based on Julia Holmes's
letters. Julia tells stories of life on the trail--leaving the last
letters at Council Grove, receiving advice from the only other lady
with the wagon train--"a woman unable to appreciate freedom or
reform"--adopting an orphaned buffalo calf, and picking and eating lice.
