A vivacious brunette with a delightful wit and forthright manner, 18-year-old Mollie Dorsey left more than one besotted suitor in the dust when she headed west in 1857. She began keeping a diary as her family emigrated from Indiana to Nebraska Territory during the country’s greatest westward expansion, documenting the adventure and challenges of frontier life. Written with humor and insight, her diary provides a fascinating personal account of frontier life.
In 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska Act had opened up a vast area for settlement, giving every new settler the opportunity to purchase 160 acres from public domain at $1.25 per acre. Mollie and her family settled in Nebraska City, where her admirers included Cornell, an old family acquaintance.
“I have heard he has recently broken an engagement with Miss Pamela Bouleware, who is slowly dying with consumption,” she wrote disdainfully. “I am not very well impressed with him.”
After befriending Pamela, she liked him even less. Knowing he suffered from painful corns, she discouraged his attentions by dropping her prayer book on his foot during church services. She rebuffed another young man more gently during a fishing trip, when she “accidentally” hooked his hat and tossed it into the water while he was trying to propose.
Early photo of Mollie Sanford
“I don’t know if I will ever love a man well enough to marry him,” she wrote despondently. “I so soon tire of gentlemen if they get too sentimental.”
Mollie would continue to receive proposals before settling down with a handsome young blacksmith from Albion, N.Y., named Byron N. Sanford. She would spend the next few decades complaining affectionately about his reserved manner.
Originally a blacksmith and wagon maker, 31-year-old Byron Sanford moved to Nebraska City after a fire destroyed his business in Indiana. Mollie called him “the yaller mule driver,” because he drove a pair of flesh colored mules, but privately she thought him “the cutest fellow I have ever met.” She married him in the family kitchen on Valentine’s Day 1860 and two months later, they caught the second wave of the Pikes Peak gold rush.
Byron Sanford
The new Mrs. Sanford recorded their 700-mile trek with diminishing zeal. Averaging 20 miles a day, they found little respite from the burning sun, merciless rainstorms and monotonous scenery. About 200 miles out of Denver they encountered disillusioned gold-seekers heading back east.
“On one covered wagon I see Pikes Peak or Bust and on one returning, I see Pikes Peak or busted,” she mused.
Upon reaching Denver, Mollie found her sister and brother-in-law camping on the banks of Cherry Creek.
“There are no houses to be had and hundreds of families are living in wagons, tents and shelters made of carpets and bedding,” she observed, estimating that 5,000 people were settled around Denver. “It seems so near the mountains that I thought I could walk easily over there, but Dora says they are 12 miles away. The atmosphere is so dry and clear it brings distant objects nearer.”
Mollie and her sister, Nan
Since Denver already had an abundance of blacksmiths, Byron went to work for Judge Holly, an old acquaintance from Nebraska City who was building a stamp mill near Boulder. When Byron went out of town on an errand, Mollie took in sewing to keep busy.
“The currency here is gold dust or small nuggets…carried around in small bottles or buckskin bags and weighed out in small scales,” she noted. “People don’t seem to value money…I get fabulous prices for sewing.”
Appalled by Denver’s lawlessness, she felt relieved when Byron took her to Gold Hill, the site of Boulder County’s first gold boom. There, Byron learned metallurgy and later discovered the first tellurium in the county. While Byron went prospecting, Mollie cooked for the crew over a primitive open fire, a grueling task that left her exhausted. The possibility of an Indian raid kept the settlement in a state of anxiety.
“The news was brought in that the Indians were on the warpath and would probably attack the town,” she wrote with a shaky hand in February 1861. “We had arranged that if worse came to worse we [the women] would get in buckets and be let down the mining shafts. I said, ‘No, let me die the death of the brave!’ I knew that if the women were stored in the bowels of the earth and all the men killed, who would rescue us? I would as soon be scalped as buried alive! After a night of suspense, we were informed it was a hoax. The perpetrator of this joke could not be found, or I think there would have been some hair lost, and not by scalping.”
The couple returned to Denver that summer, where Mollie gave birth to a boy who lived only a few days. With the Civil War looming, Byron accepted an appointment as a second lieutenant of Company H in the Colorado Volunteer Infantry. His unit was called to action in early March 1862, after the Fourth Texas Confederate Cavalry Regiment invaded New Mexico. Tearfully, Mollie bade her husband goodbye and returned to Camp Weld near Denver.
“I felt that I could hardly stand it to be left alone, worse than sick in a strange land, so far away from home, with a swollen face and breaking heart,” she wrote.
Lt. Sanford distinguished himself at the Battle of Pigeon’s Pass, when he and a comrade destroyed an enemy canon and artillery, nearly losing their lives. Led by Colonel John Chivington, the Colorado Volunteers defeated the Confederates on March 28, 1862, at the Battle of Glorietta Pass, sometimes called “The Gettysburg of the West.” After Byron returned to Fort Weld, Mollie gave birth to another boy, who they named Albert Byron Sanford. Until shortly after their daughter’s birth in 1866, Mollie continued to chronicle Denver’s triumphs and disasters, including the great Cherry Creek flood of 1863 and the Indian scares in 1864.
“It seems there is one excitement after another, and I wonder that I am not white-headed,” she wrote.
After leaving the military, Byron worked for the United States Mint until 1888 and served on the commission that chose the site for the University of Colorado. The Sanfords moved back and forth from Denver to their 160-acre ranch located north of present-day Belleview Avenue and west of Santa Fe Boulevard. The years and hardships never diminished Mollie’s sense of humor, her fondness for writing poetry or her affection for Byron. He died on Thanksgiving Day 1914, and Mollie followed less than three months later on Feb. 6, 1915.
To learn more about the Dorseys, see Rosemary Fetter’s ‘Colorado’s Legendary Lovers’ (Fulcrum Publishing, 2004) or ‘Mollie: The Journal of Mollie Dorsey Sanford in Nebraska and Colorado Territories, 1857-1866’ (Pioneer Heritage).
Denver prospectors, circa 1859
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Dear Ms. Fetter: Thank you so much for pulling together the history of my wife Jane’s great-great-grandmother and grandfather, Mollie Dorsey Sanford and Byron North Sanford. I thought you might like to know that in addition to the fascinating stories passed along by Mollie and others about this early Colorado couple, Byron had additional adventures later in his life, and his son Albert B. Sanford was a quirky, interesting Coloradan in his own right. In particular, there is an angle to the Sanford story that takes place very close to the Colorado Gambler’s offices.
First of all, late in his life Byron – having earned fame by helping destroy a cannon in the Battle of Glorieta Pass – was nearly killed by another cannon when he stepped in front of an artillery piece just as it was being shot off during a Fourth of July celebration. I don’t have the exact date on me right now, but I have a photocopy of the banner headline in the Rocky Mountain News about this exciting event which occurred in the early 1900s. Fortunately the cannon was loaded with a blank and Sanford was merely injured.
Sanford went on to operate the “Sanford Ranch,” well over 100 acres of prime land on the west bank of the South Platte River, which Sanford traded in for a sturdy stone house in downtown Littleton in the early 1900s. That house is still standing, and is also depicted on the mural of houses that graces the Downtown Littleton light rail station.
But perhaps most interesting to you might be the story of the long-lost “Sanford Monument,” carved into a giant boulder west of Central City by Albert B. Sanford sometime before 1920. “Bert” was a man of many talents: a gold assayer as well as the assistant curator of the Colorado History Museum. Bert had bought a nearly played-out mine in the area, the North Star Mine, and the mine was next to a huge deposit of quartz. When his parents Mollie and Byron passed away, Bert decided to honor them by carving the dates of their lives and the words “Mother” and “Father” into a huge boulder.
We had a few photos in our family scrapbooks that were taken in the 1920s and 1930s of this boulder, and in 1942 a professional photographer found it and took a fine photo of it that is still in the Denver Library archives. However, by the time the professional photographer took the photo, the origin of the monument was lost to time, and the photographer called his image simply “Unknown Monument.”
My wife and I researched and researched, and hiked around futilely, to try to find the monument but we thought we’d never again locate it. Then I got involved in “geocaching,” and last year decided, on a whim, to type the words “Mother” and “Father” into the online geocaching database, focusing on the Central City region where there are literally hundreds of geocaches. Well, lo and behold, someone had discovered the monument and had decided to place a geocache there, and named the cache “Mother & Father”! So now we had the exact coordinates for the monument, and the carving appeared to still be in good shape.
Last year my wife and I, with our two young sons and our dog, drove to the area, nearly stranding our SUV a few times in the process, and after a final 2-mile hike reached the monument. It is still standing there, in perfect shape (minus the original quartz pile on top of it), with the chiseled words now heavily covered in lichen. We never, ever would have located it – and the North Star Mine right next to it – without geocaching helping pinpoint its location. You can see photos of the monument today at this geocaching.com web page: http://coord.info/GC2AHYD. I also have a lot more photos and videos of us discovering the monument.
Anyway, seeing that you are a writer for the Colorado Gambler I thought you might enjoy this local addition to the story of Mollie and Byron Sanford! – Rolf
Dear Rolf,
Thank you so much for your letter about the subsequent adventures of the Sanford family! Among all the couples I researched for Colorado’s Legendary Lovers, the Sanfords are my favorite. They exemplify all that was good about the Colorado pioneers – their courage, determination, humor and willingness to leave friends and family behind and risk it all for a better life.
Mollie was a wonderful writer ( in fact, I think she missed her calling) and archives of the Littleton History Museum contain two diaries in addition to the one that’s been published. I did read part of the second diary, which took place after they moved to the Littleton ranch, when they were in their 50s. I hope that some day her memoirs will be transcribed and published, since they provide a fascinating account of early Littleton, complete with drawings and poetry. Meanwhile, I’m delighted to learn that their son documented their devotion in stone – what a tribute!