A small watercolor dated 1876 depicts billowing white cumulus clouds towering above the Sawatch Range peaks. Wooded hills descend in stair-step fashion to the broad valley floor below. The only element out of place in this somewhat common view of a Colorado mountain landscape is the tiny covered wagon in the lower right-hand corner. That wagon belonged to the family of Ella M. Burt, Colorado pioneers whose travels took them from St. Louis, Missouri, to Black Hawk, Colorado, then on to Oregon and California, and back to Oregon again.

In 1869, the family returned to Denver, but Ella’s memoirs, written in 1937, indicate that life was no more settled for the Burt family in Colorado than it had been elsewhere. They lived in Breckenridge, Cañon City, and—for a few years—a log house located some two-and-a-half miles outside of Grant. Ella remembered saving "every scrap of everything: cloth, paper, string, a pin or needle, tacks, nails" because the nearest store was in Denver, fifty-eight miles distant. In the spring of 1876, the Burts moved to Colorado Springs where Ella attended school for the last time. By July 4, they had moved yet again and celebrated the nation’s centennial in a small San Luis Valley town called Milton.

Ella’s memoirs do not mention the man who painted the picture with tattered edges that her descendants so carefully framed, but it is signed H. O. Merris. Ella did leave a note saying that the picture was made somewhere near Poncha Pass and that the wagon belonged to her family. The tiny dot of a covered wagon in the corner of a huge landscape seems to describe better than words how adventuresome the early pioneer families were as they traveled into the Colorado mountains.

BY MOYA HANSEN, Curator, Decorative and Fine Arts