Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Colorado: Angel of the Rockies with Jessica Malaty Rivera

Episode Date: August 2, 2021

 In this episode, Sharon tells the heartfelt story of Clara Brown, the “Angel of the Rockies” to Jessica Malaty Rivera.  Jessica is a friend and brilliant epidemiologist who may or may not have cried when she heard the touching details of Clara’s story. Sharon takes listeners back to the year 1800 when Clara Brown was born into slavery in Kentucky. When she was 56, Clara was granted her freedom, but her husband and children were abruptly sold off as slaves. With nowhere else to go, Clara set West for Colorado, travelling 700 miles on foot. In Colorado, Clara became a successful entrepreneur and gave away nearly all of her wealth to her community. This is the story of determination and success as well as compassion, family reunion and ultimate generosity. Listen to find out exactly why Clara is named the “Angel of the Rockies” and why Sharon and Jessica shed a few tears while recording this episode. For more information on this episode including all resources and links discussed go to https://www.sharonmcmahon.com/podcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yay, you're here! Hello and welcome. I am chatting today with my friend Jessica Malati-Rivera. You've probably seen her all over the news networks. You have probably seen her all over the internet. She is an infectious disease epidemiologist. She has been a little bit busy. Perhaps you can guess why. But guess what? We are not talking about COVID today. No, friends, no. It's time to talk about something else with Jessica, who is an incredibly intelligent human and knows so many things about so many things. She's also very funny.

But this is a story called The Angel of the Rockies. And we had to take a break because some dust flew in our eyeballs and we found ourselves tearing up. I may, y'all put this on my resume. I made Jessica Malati Rivera cry. There you go. It's on my resume now.

I feel good about it. Enough chatting. Let's dive into this episode. I think you're going to find it inspirational. I'm Sharon McMahon and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. Yay. My friend, Jessica Malati Rivera is here. How are you, my friend? I'm doing well. Tell everybody what you do. So thank you for that kind intro. I am an infectious disease epidemiologist. I have my degree in emerging infectious diseases and studied pandemics for many, many years prior to COVID-19. So this is

a very surreal time for me. I also most recently worked as the science communication lead for the COVID tracking project, which was housed at the Atlantic. And we provided real-time data for states and jurisdictions, all 56 of them, for cases, tests, hospitalizations, and deaths throughout the pandemic. You have that like doubt. Like you know what you do. Like this is my elevator speech. I've said it before. I know how to describe my job. What a year for everybody. What a year for you. When you were studying emerging infectious diseases, did you ever think to yourself, someday there'll be a pandemic and I'll have to use this information? Or were you like, oh my gosh, I'm using this information.

It's a pandemic. Not only did I say it to myself, I said it to many people, which is why my phone was blowing up early in the pandemic. Cause they're like, you said this would happen. And the most shocking was, oh my God, how are we so unprepared? How did we get this far down the road of like devaluing and defunding public health? I want to change gears because I want to tell you a story. Have you ever heard of the angel of the Rockies? I have not. You know who that is? Nope, not a clue. Okay, well,

you will soon. I think this is a story that you will appreciate. It's about a person who is now referred to as the Angel of the Rockies, and her name is Clara Brown. She was born somewhere between 1800, 1803. She was born into slavery. Her parents were separated. They were sold. The records either indicate she moved from Missouri to Virginia or she was born in Virginia. One of those two things happened. And so she arrived or was born in Virginia right around the turn of the 19th century. And she was a house slave along with her mother. During her childhood, there were other times where she was sent somewhere else. She was eventually sent from Virginia to Kentucky. She fell in love and she

got married to her husband, Richard. She and her husband had four children together. They had Richard, named after her husband, Margaret, Paulina, and Eliza. Eliza was her youngest child. Her twin, Paulina, drowned when she was eight years old. Anytime you hear about a child dying as a parent, your heart immediately goes out to them. Right? Yeah. In 1835, when she was 35 years old, the man that owned her family, George Brown, died in his will. He freed his slaves.

When her owner freed them in his will, her family did not remain together. Eventually, her children were sold off. Records are not super clear about where her son Richard went. In fact, she was never able to figure out where he went. Eventually, she finds herself alone at age 56, not knowing where her husband or her children had gone. She's a free woman in Kentucky at this time. And Kentucky law was such that she was not allowed to stay in the

state as a free woman. Kentucky was not a free state in 1856. And so she left reluctantly knowing that she was leaving behind the chance to find any of her family again. She had heard that people in the West were more open to people of all races. So she moves eventually to Kansas. She gets some jobs in Missouri. And she eventually realizes, like, I really just want to go further West. I feel like I will be more free if I go further West. The problem was, as a black woman, it was illegal to purchase a stagecoach ticket. She finally in 1859 convinces the leader of a wagon train.

Why don't you let me come with you? This was a wagon train of men who were going to try to strike it rich in the Colorado gold rush. There were 26 men and she was like, I will cook for you. And so this wagon train finally says, okay, you can come with us. You can cook for the men of this wagon train. So they leave heading towards Colorado. She was as a woman, she was as a woman approximately 59 years old she was not allowed to ride in any of the wagons she was required to walk alongside the wagons while the miners rode in the wagons she was required to walk alongside them for 700 miles 700 miles took eight weeks walking alongside this covered wagon because she felt like she had a chance at a better life. They arrive in Colorado and she eventually settles in what is now known as Central City, Colorado. And she realizes like there are almost no women around here. And I could do some things that could earn me some money.

I could cook. A lot of these men have no idea how to cook. Obviously, culturally, it was not acceptable to cook as a man during that time frame. She'd make some money cooking. She eventually becomes very successful owning a laundry business where she takes in all of these miners' crusty clothes and washes them. And she has a great job. One of the things she was doing while she was running her laundry business was she was saving all of the gold dust from the pockets of the miners who were turning over their jeans, turning over their work clothes, any little amount of gold dust that was remaining in their pockets from the little gold nuggets that they had, she was saving it. She eventually accumulated over $10,000 in the bank, which was unheard of at the time. And in today's money, it's like $300,000.

She invested in a bunch of mining claims. She eventually owned seven houses, not houses to live in, investment houses, 16 different plots of land. She was an incredible entrepreneur. And this is a 60-year-old woman, a 60-year-old woman who just like, you know what I could do? I could do some laundry. I could cook some food. So she has her own house and she opens her home to anyone who needs it. And this is one of the things that I found the most moving about her story was how philanthropic she was that she gave away so much of the money that she literally had earned with

her blood, sweat, and tears. She gave money to build the first Methodist church. She gave money to build the first Catholic church. She had church services at her house. And anybody who needed help did not matter if they were a minor who was destitute, didn't matter if it was a pregnant woman who had nobody to deliver her baby. She became well-known as a midwife. Didn't matter if it was an unwed mother, anybody who needed help, she was willing to take them in to her home and help them. One of the things that was later said about her by one of her biographers was people like Clara Brown are rare. She saw her role in the world, not as an I or a me against them, but us and we, that all of us together are responsible for making a better world. And the biographer said it was the way that she lived

her life that garnered her the amount of respect that she received. So because she spends her life literally from age 60 to 70, 80 years old, serving other people, this earned her the nickname of Angel of the Rockies. She became so well-known of like, if you get into trouble, there's this woman. We call her the Angel of the Rockies. She will help you. She was beloved. She was very beloved. She's quoted in a newspaper article that her home is a hospital, a home, and a general refuge for those who are sick or in poverty. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve!

It's my girl in the studio! studio. Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests. And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Lady 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your

podcasts. That was so touching to me that she worked for her money and that she just so freely gave it away to others. Even though she had made a fantastic life for herself, even though she had, you know, many friends, as one can imagine, never knowing what happened to your children. You know, I have four children. You have a couple of kids, like just raising your children to adolescence and then never, ever seeing them again and wondering what, whatever happened to my baby girl, whatever happened to my son, she couldn't write. And she throughout the years had asked for the help of many people writing letters. Would you come over? Would you help me write a letter?

I want to try to find my children. For all of these years, she had been looking for children, writing letters to people saying, do you know what happened to Richard? Do you know what happened to Eliza? Or do you know what happened to Margaret? When she was in her late seventies, she decided I'm running out of time here. I need to do whatever I can do to try to find my family. And she sells off a lot of the properties that she had left. Some of the properties had been ruined in fires or floods or various natural disasters, but whatever she had left, she sold off a lot of it, took the money that she had in the bank, which again was a lot of money and heads back to Kentucky where she thinks that she has the best chance of trying to find her children. She gets to Kentucky, starts asking around, by the way,

offered all of her life savings, offered all $10,000 as a reward for information about where her family was. Like she was willing to destitute herself to try to find her children. She is unsuccessful. She does not find any of her children or her husband, but she does hear through the grapevine that it's very likely that her husband and her daughter Margaret had died and that her son had been sold too many times and nobody knew where he was. And that it was very, very unlikely that she was ever going to be able to find him. But she does find 16 other relatives, cousins, etc., that were living in Kentucky. The Civil War has now ended. They are freed slaves, but they have very little ability to support themselves.

And she says, you know, life is a lot better in Colorado. Why don't you go there? They were like, how would we get there? So she paid for 16 of her relatives to move to Colorado with the funds that she had intended to be a reward for information about her children. She moved 16 relatives back to Colorado. She returns with them. This is how well known she

was. The governor of Colorado sent her a letter and said, would you go as a representative of the state of Colorado to Kansas and try to convince some of those people to move here? She's like 79 years old. And she's like, yeah, I will do that. You know, I got my relative settled here in Colorado. Let me go to Kansas and let me just talk up Colorado. Let me convince them that like Colorado is where it's at. Pick up and move there. By the time she was 80, she had supported women who wanted to attend college, like given money for them to go to college. She had started churches. She had literally given away or lost all of her money. Around that timeframe, the state of Colorado started a program for what they referred to as official pioneers,

the people who made the state of Colorado what it was, the people who came here before 1865. You came here before 1865, you can be designated an official pioneer and you can get a pension for being an official pioneer. So she, at age 80, went down and applied to be an official pioneer. And they said, oh, you do have to be a man to be an official pioneer. And they said, oh, you do have to be a man to be an official pioneer. And you also need to be white to be an official pioneer. She was, by the way, as far as we know, the first African-American woman in Colorado. So she tells her friends, like, they won't give me official pioneer status. Her friends were outraged that she had been like the pillar of the community.

She'd given all her money away. She paid money to start churches she didn't belong to, delivered all these babies and nursed sick people and cooked for the destitute. And she can't be an official pioneer? That was ridiculous. So people wrote letters, they gave speeches, they petitioned the government to designate Clara Brown as an official pioneer. And they finally relented when they had that many angry people saying, how could you not give official pioneer status to Clara Brown? She is an old woman who has given her life to this state. They relented and she became an official pioneer. When she was 82,

she got a letter in the mail saying that they might have information about where her daughter Eliza was and that she was potentially living in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Clara immediately headed to Iowa to see, is this my daughter? Obviously, they didn't have telephones. There was no easy way to ascertain this kind of stuff. You had to go in person. And she was like, I'm 82. I do not have time to write a bunch of letters back and forth. Also, I don't know how to write. So she went there to see like, is this my daughter? The newspaper got wind of this story of this 82 year old woman who is an official pioneer of the state of Colorado, who is coming here searching for her daughter. They sent reporters and Claire was described as still strong, vigorous, tall,

her hair thickly streaked with gray, her face kind. That was what the reporter said of her. It was pouring rain when she arrived in Council Bluffs, Iowa. She goes to where she thinks her daughter might be, and her daughter runs toward her. They recognized each other immediately, and they began hugging in the rain, not caring that they were soaking wet. And they eventually tripped and fell in the giant mud puddle and continued hugging each other. Like, I don't care that I'm in a mud puddle. Like this is my baby. Her daughter was like almost 60 years old by that time. She's an 82 year old woman and her daughter has four children. So she has four grandchildren that she doesn't know of and convinces her daughter, listen, and that she doesn't know of and convinces her daughter, listen, why don't you come back to Colorado with me? Life is better there. And her daughter and one of her granddaughters came with

her and moved back to Colorado to live with her. Clara died within a few years of moving back to Colorado, but her daughter and her granddaughter were with her when she died. She died in 1885. She was around 85 years old. She had no money. She had no money left. And the Colorado Pioneer Association donated a burial plot for her. This is what they wrote of her. She was a kind old friend whose heart always responded to the cry of distress and who rising from the humble position of slave to the angelic type of noble woman won our sympathy and commanded our respect. Okay. That's great. okay that's great yeah yeah that's perfect me too so you can you can find online her grave site is still open to the public she's this beautiful headstone she was buried in

colorado and they later made a stained glass window of her and the stained glass window of her. And the stained glass window hangs in the old Supreme Court chambers in the state of Colorado. And she is an official pioneer. Wow. What a life. What a life. It's also remarkable that she lived so many years, right?

Like longevity wasn't really a thing back then. Right. Diseases and the lack of healthcare, that she lived so many years, right? Like longevity wasn't really a thing back then. Diseases and the lack of healthcare, lack of, you know, life-saving antibiotics and medication. So that's also remarkable that she had such longevity. I know. Yes. Anytime you hear about somebody that was born during that timeframe that lives longer than the average American today, right. And had a harder life filled with more trauma than the average American today, right? And had a harder life filled with more trauma than the average American experiences. It makes it even more remarkable. Truly. Truly. I just, I, I love what her biographers have to say about her. It's just that like, she was a rare woman and she really did earn the title of angel of the Rockies. I mean, to describe somebody's

face as kind is extremely descriptive. Like I can see her face in my mind and I can understand how that would come across despite the horror of her life. You know, the fact that somebody would say she's got a kind face, like it's hard to imagine not growing in bitterness and growing in rage, you know, to have that life and then just be, oh, I'm just going to be really benevolent and loving and self-sacrificing. What a woman of character. Truly. That she had every right. Mm-hmm. That she had every right. We would all understand if she had lived a life of anger and bitterness. Absolutely. We would all be like, and that's how I would probably feel too. Yes. You know, we would all understand that. And I'm sure she absolutely felt such incredible sorrow and still chose to persist in doing what good she could do in the world.

That to me, it's just so inspiring that she took in the person on her doorstep. She didn't think I need to start the red cross. You know what I mean? Like so often we feel like our small gifts, our small offerings are inconsequential. We feel like cooking this minor a breakfast, how does that make a difference in anybody's life? You know, like what is the lasting legacy of that? The lasting legacy is being known as the angel of the Rockies. The lasting legacy is being remembered as the person who always responded to a cry of distress. The lasting legacy is you are on a stained glass window in the Supreme courts of Colorado. I just love that she did not let her condition or circumstances dictate who she became. She decided who she would become.

Yeah. Is that common, like American history that's taught in Colorado, especially like, you know, African-American history, like is she a matriarch in the history books? You know, in Colorado women's history, yes. You know, like she's very well known. If you, if you know about Colorado women's history, I certainly never learned about her as a history teacher or anything like that. We, you know, we learn about Harriet Tubman and we learn, you know, our small little, like this person, here's our little small handful of people. But first of all, women's history is very undertaught and obviously African-American history, very undertaught. And some of that just has to do with systems in place. Some of that has to do with

the fact that this kind of history was not recorded. Right. You know, it wasn't recorded. And so it becomes a lot of these stories are lost. Yeah. There was a movie made about her, like a documentary made about her that was on PBS that, you know, talks about her and her incredible entrepreneurship. That's the other thing that I admire about her. I'm like, okay, go ahead and save up $10,000. That is impressive. It is. It's impressive. As like a 60-year-old woman, you know what I mean? Like, that's impressive. It is. It's impressive. As like a 60 year old woman, you know what I mean?

Like this impressive. And also I would hope that people weren't taking advantage of her because I can't imagine not it also being easy to be a woman with a lot of cash and with a lot of assets when she was single. Right. She wasn't, you know, have nothing. Right. Like he was able to be savvy enough to not get taken advantage of, to manage her records and manage her money and buy multiple pieces of property, which is not very logistically easy to do. I mean, it's complicated today, I'm sure, but I can't imagine it was like a cakewalk either back then. No, again, like you were just saying, trying to think about the logistics of that in today's situations, somebody who had invested in seven

homes, 16 parcels of land, three mines, and also had hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank. And we would be like, that person is very accomplished today. And has a whole team of people working for them. Yeah, that's right. That's right. I could not manage that many tabs open in my brain. That's right. And they would have tons of employees and who's overseeing the properties,

who's running this business on a day-to-day basis, who is doing all the laundry from this business that I started. But also, tell me about gold dust. How do you accumulate that much gold dust? And how does she know to do that? That's one of the things that I think is super interesting. And there's not a lot of records on how much gold she accumulated. You know what I mean? A lot of the money she earned from her businesses, from cooking and laundry. So I don't know precisely, I don't know

that history knows how much she actually accumulated from the gold dust. Like if I, you know, accumulate enough of this, this will be worth a lot of money someday. But again, she's a smart woman. She's not going to wash gold dust down the drain, right? Is dust the right word? Or are we talking like little tiny like grape nut sized nuggets i don't know is it actual dust i i'm like fascinated at her being like oh yes and you know the colorado gold mines were so they were so productive during that period of time that she was there that a u.s mint built in the area that you know minted tons of coins because it was too dangerous to ship the gold back to the u.s mint on the east coast like your stage is gonna get wrapped yeah right so they

started a mint there because it was too dangerous to transport all of the gold and they started making gold coins and then later silver coins and all that kind of stuff. The U S mint is still, still there in Colorado. That's fascinating. I didn't know that. Isn't that interesting? What a woman. I love that story. And I love like just her memory going to be lasting in my mind. Yes, absolutely. Like what a, what a role model. Truly. I mean, Absolutely. Like what a, what a role model. Truly. I mean, it just like, you know, brings up a lot of those mama bear sentiments where I'm like, I would literally do anything. Absolutely. My kids. Yep. And most women will too. Most moms will too. Mm-hmm. And we can all imagine just for one moment, the heartache we would experience being separated

from our children, never knowing what happened to them. And that she's not unique in that story. She's not alone in that story that happened to hundreds of thousands of people. And it gives me just like more, just a little tiny peek, more insight and compassion to what humans in this country have endured. Yeah. A lot. A lot. Thanks for telling me that story. Yes. I am so glad you were able to join me. Tell everybody where they can find you.

Well, they can find me on Instagram at Jessica Malati Rivera or on Twitter, Jessica Malati. And, you know, you'll find a lot of science and a lot of debunking misinformation. I approve of both of those things. Thank you so much, Jessica. Thanks, Sharon. What a pleasure.

Thanks for having me. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor, would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or review, or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. I cannot wait to have another mind moment with you next episode.

Thanks again for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast.