Colorado Explorer

Pleasant View Ridge

By Tom Taylor

In a covered wagon drawn by a team of oxen, my great-grandfather, Amos Millice, packed up his young family and trekked west from Ohio to homestead 320 acres of rich Colorado loam on Pleasant View Ridge. My grandmother told me all she could see when they arrived there was cactus, sagebrush, native grasses and plenty of rattlesnakes. She said the coyotes howled all night. I think those were the days when she created her lifelong habit of stepping out the kitchen door with a shovel in her hand as a weapon.

Though Grandpa Millice had been injured during the Civil War and walked with a cane, his back-breaking labor miraculously converted what seemed to be a barren piece of the high plains into a little Eden-multiple ponds lavishly lined with trees and productive gardens, and a lush lawn where there'd been no water at all.

He planted fruit trees so the women could put up fruit for winter: multiple types of apple trees, mulberries, plums, cherries, pears and peaches. Unlike some homesteaders, he was passionate about trees: willow, elm, spruce, locust, ash, silver maple and a large grove of walnuts. And as if the trees might not provide enough shade to keep his family cool on those hot Colorado summer days, he added to their two-room log home a big porch and "cool room" with thick walls for storing fresh garden vegetables and milk from the family cow.

Those ponds, magnificent shade trees and huge lawn became revered among pioneer farmers of the valley as the finest gathering place to enjoy one big day of festivities on each Fourth of July.

In the 1940s, when I was a kid, old-timers loved to tell me of the year (probably about 1917) when my father and his cohort, Frankie, up to their boyish pranks, sneaked out to poke firecrackers into a couple of the petunia tubs on July 3rd. Then, when the big day rolled around, they fired them off in the midst of all the other children who were playing dolls, or hoops, or on the rope swings, and the adult guests quietly discussing baking, canning, sewing, irrigating, digging wells or raising hogs.

The unprepared old folks became so frenzied by the blasts, they swore out loud that they would never return. But there were reports among the children that the old folks had crossed their fingers behind their backs.

Your Turn

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