We just returned home from our annual trip to Colorado Springs to visit my dad. One of our favorite things to do while we're there is to take a trip through the Garden of the Gods. This place has a special meaning to me, because as a young girl, my grandmother camped out here en route from Boise, Idaho, back to Marysville, Kansas. Seems her father was always looking for some place better than the flat lands of Kansas, and one of the first places he tried was Boise, Idaho. I am not sure of the time frame for the travel, but one of her younger sisters was born in Boise in 1889. She was named "Idaho Rose," although she always went by "Rose." So somewhere between 1889 and 1994, when the next child was born, the family returned to Kansas. My grandmother told us that they stopped to visit relatives in Colorado Springs, camping out in the Garden of the Gods while her father worked to earn more money to make the trip home. In researching the family, I find that my great grandmother had a sister Julia, who settled in Colorado Springs about 1888 with husband and children. By process of elimination, the Watson's are the ones who my grandmother's family visited on the way home.
My great grandfather also tried the Oklahoma Gold Rush, some place in Canada, and Arkansas as a new home for his family. Finding nothing to suit him in any of these places, he always went back to Marysville. I've been to Marysville, and if he was looking for a prettier place, I'd say Colorado Springs wins it, hands down. I've seen pictures of Oklahoma, and I've been to Boise, so there's not much difference (IMHO) between these locations. I don't know where in Canada he went so can't compare, but I'm thinking that most of Canada is MUCH prettier than Kansas. Maybe he thought it was too cold, I don't know. I do know that if he had gone further west to, say, La Grande or on to Portland, my whole history and personality could have been changed by that one decision. But as he always returned to Kansas, it allowed my grandparents to meet and marry and produce my mother. Who knows who I'd be, or where I'd be--otherwise.
Somewhere in the mid-1930's, after my great grandfather's death, my grandparents brought their family west to Oregon to join two of their married children who had already settled there. We traveled over the same roads 70-some years later, culminating in a stop in that very place where my grandmother spent some time as a young child.
