Alice Russell Newcomb, the oldest of four children, was just six years old when her mother died. Evidently the children were reared by their Truesdell grandparents. In the letters we have there is no mention of her father or of her step sisters and brothers. Her grandfather was the formidable George Truesdell, but her Aunt Adalaide and her grandmother, Margaret, apparently were warm, dear and fine parent substitutes.

I learned to know and love Alice from her letters, from Daddy's lovely memories of his mother, and from details in newspaper articles. Clearly she was a very intelligent, resourceful woman who adored her family.

While she was attending Illinois Normal College, she became interested in the Unitarian Church, and later when she pioneered in the West, she kept up a lifetime correspondence with her Unitarian friends. Her religion was nourished by correspondence in as much as she seems to have been the only Unitarian in the San Luis Valley. After graduating from college she taught school for a while. It was still the custom there for the school teacher to live for a short while in each pupil's home. The experience was a good way to get to know each child and his problems, but agony for a young girl to have no home and to have to adjust to each circumstance. During her college days she had met Daniel E. Newcomb, and in 1869 she became his bride. He was then the school principal of the La Gonda (Golconda Public) Schools in Illinois. He soon went west with his brother, S. Edgar Newcomb, to seek his fortune. Later, in 1873, Alice and their two sons, Charlie and Eddie, joined Dan in the New Territories. (It would not become the State of Colorado until 1876.)

Fortunately Adalaide Truesdell saved the letters that Alice wrote back from Del Norte, New Territories-later called Colorado. Alice describes a trip that a modern traveler can scarcely believe. Charlie was four years old and Eddie was a twenty month old. The train trip was accomplished -without benefit of a diner or a pullman sleeper, but she said other passengers were most kind and helped her with the two children. (This trip was from Illinois to Pueblo, New Territories.)

On the way from Pueblo to Del Norte across the San Luis Valley, along the Rio Grande River, they were obliged to go by oxcart "through some of the poorest country 1 have ever seen." There was a rough trail over Mosca Pass, in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, that rose as high as 10,000 feet on which a team could get a cart through to the San Luis Valley. Alice says the children stood up very well the first five days, but the sixth and last were very hard on them. She doesn't say whether they were obliged to sleep on the ground, but lurching over rocks and holes must have been severe. When she arrived home in West Del Norte, it was a log cabin with rough pine floors at the west end of Grand Avenue.

The front part was Dan's (and Uncle Ed's) "Newcomb Bros." store that they had started with the living quarters behind. The land was desolate "which nobody pretends to like." "There are many things I have to do without and things get dirty twice as fast here because of the dry climate and the sandy soil uncovered by vegetation." Thread, materials, and all clothes were scarce. She sent home for patterns, stockings-everyone depended on getting things from "the States." In addition to material lack, there were no doctors. She had to treat her family with home remedies and bear her children with the help of neighbors.

Many of these first settlers to the San Luis Valley were college educated men and women, so friends were resourceful and helpful even though they were widely scattered. The Spanish conquerors (and white soldiers) had long before discouraged the Indians from this part of Colorado, so few were seen (the Southern Utes were friendly), but there were problems with outlaws which made vigilantes necessary.

With his business of selling and trading in New Mexico (Santa Fe and Taos), Dan was gone for weeks at a time, bringing back goods by horse and wagon. During these trips Alice had to manage the store and family alone, and it didn't take her long to become enured to the hard work and the hardships of a settler. In her later letters she gently boasts of what nice things they have and how prosperous they have become. Little or nothing is left of those "nice things" for they all were destroyed when their home on the La Jara homestead burned to the ground. Finally Alice falls in love with the San Luis Valley and writes glowing descriptions of the lush farms with beautiful snowcapped mountains surrounding them.

Being a Unitarian she didn't follow the strict religious pattern of the community. She believed in finding the truth of religion within ones own soul and in the universal brotherhood of man which is not divided by race, creed, or nation. She was admired for herself but criticized for being too liberal, if not even non-Christian. She was a hundred years ahead of her accusers.

She must have been a very loving mother because Daddy was such a kind, gentle soul. Even though only a few of Alice's letters remain, they are well worth reacting.

That Fourth of July 1887, when Alice died at the age of thirty-nine, she and Dan had been on a long horse-and-buggy ride to Conejos, the county seat, for a county celebration and both had had a wonderful time. She apparently died quietly without pain. Her daughter, Anna, later told me that death came as a result of a blood clot. The newspaper account of her death is poorly written.

Even though she had been saddened by the death of two of her children, Alice enjoyed living very much, so she died a happy woman with many blessings. All of her effects were thrown out by Dan's second wife. (The partial set of dishes, white glazed with rose-colored birds, was later found in the barn.) Two more of her children died (of scarlet fever), and as the final thrust into oblivion, Maria, the second wife, put up a headstone on Alice's grave with the name "Alice Russell." She is buried in the La Jara, Colorado, cemetery with her four children, but without her husband's name. (Later the name Newcomb was added to her gravestone.)

Her bereaved husband, Dan, had to care for six children: six-month-old twins, a five year old, and nine, ten and fifteen year olds. The later was Ed, our father.

Courtesy of Peggy Newcomb Barr
This page was produced by Bob Newcomb in Brea, CA