this town in the very desert of sand and sage-brush. Its first inception
is a wonderful idyl of the extension of progress into the unknown West.
The vision of the bands of singing angels in the air that fell upon the
shepherds in the Judean plains was hardly more wonderful than the vision
out of which the town of Greeley arose from the desert. On a December
night in the late sixties Mr. Meeker found himself one evening standing
under the brilliant starry skies of Colorado near the foot of Pike's
Peak. The marvellous splendor of the scene filled his mind with sublime
picturings. In the very air before him he seemed to see a city arise in
the desert--a city of beautiful ideals, of high purposes, of temperance,
education, culture, and religion. The vision made upon him that
permanent impression which the heavenly vision, revealed for one instant
to a life, forever makes, however swiftly it may be withdrawn; however
deep and dark the eclipse into which it fades and seems forever lost.
To Mr. Meeker had been granted the angelic vision. The ideal had been
revealed, and it was revealed in order that it might be realized in the
outer and actual world. He felt the power, the nameless thrill of
enchantment that pervades this wonderful country. One who is a poet in
heart and soul has said of this Pike's Peak region:--
"Over the range is another world--a happy valley hundreds of miles
in extent, fenced in with beauty and joy; palisaded with God's own
temples; roofed with crystal and gold, and afloat in dream life;
perpetual youth in thought and growth--all of it life to the soul;
music and rapture to the weary traveller of earth. Oh, the leaping
ecstasy of it by day and by night, and at the dawn!"
This indescribable ecstasy of the Colorado air communicated itself to
Mr. Meeker. He went home to New York; he called a meeting in Cooper
Institute; Horace Greeley presided, and Mr. Meeker outlined his plans to
the large audience. He presented them, also, in full detail in the
columns of the "Tribune," and the result was that in 1870 he led a
colony of some seven hundred to this most favorable site--now mid-way
between two state capitols--fifty miles north of Denver and fifty miles
south of Cheyenne; he laid out the town with broad boulevards and double
rows of shade-trees while yet they lived in tents, and the shade-trees
seen in his imagination are now an established fact. Greeley is to-day a
town embowered in trees. The first work was to dig a canal at a cost of
sixty thousand dollars, this being the initial experiment of upland
irrigation. Such is, in outline, the history of Greeley, which the
colony desired to name Meeker--for its founder--but which Horace
Greeley's friend and associate editor insisted should bear its present
name. Greeley is known as the "garden city" of Colorado, and that it was
founded in faith and in ideals has been a determining fact in its
quality of life and its phenomenal progress.
Nathan Cook Meeker was born in the "Western Reserve," in Ohio, in 1814,
coming of the order of people whom Emerson characterized as those "who
go without the new carpet and send the boy to college." Behind him were
a long list of distinguished ancestry, men who through successive
generations had stood for achievements. Mr. Meeker in his youth taught
school, went into journalism, was connected with the New York "Mirror,"
and later was associated with George D. Prentice on the Louisville
"Journal," now the "Courier-Journal," edited by the brilliant Henry
Watterson. A versatile writer in both prose and verse, he wrote two or
three books, one of which he dedicated to President Pierce. He married a
woman of great force and exaltation of character, a native of
Connecticut, and a descendant of Elder Brewster. She shared his aims and
ideals.
In the decade of 1860-70 Horace Greeley, who was always waving his
divining rod to see if it indicated the proximity of genius, discovered
Mr. Meeker, and invited him to become the agricultural editor of the
"Tribune," succeeding Solon Robinson. Mr. Meeker's work made a strong
impression on the reading public of the day, and even Emerson inquired
as to the authorship of some of Mr. Meeker's editorial work, which won
the appreciation of the Concord seer.
In 1868 Mr. Meeker made a trip to the West for the "Tribune," writing a
series of valuable letters embodying his observations of the country. It
was during this journey that the night came which lends itself to
imaginative picturing with dramatic vividness when, just after
Christmas, he stood in the Garden of the Gods near the foot of Pike's
Peak, while the stars of the Colorado skies blazed above him, and, as if
by a flash of vision saw a town arise in the desert. The vision fell
upon him like an inspiration. Founding towns seemed, indeed, to run in
the family, as one of his ancestors had founded the town of Elizabeth,
New Jersey, naming it after his wife.
Mr. Meeker returned to the Tribune office with his dream of a beautiful
city to arise out of the sand and sage-brush of the desert. An idealist
himself, Mr. Meeker had also the good fortune of having married a woman
capable of sharing ideal dreams and of rising to the heights of
sacrifice, and she, too, embraced his new enthusiasm.
"Go ahead," replied Mr. Greeley, when Mr. Meeker mentioned his new
project, "the 'Tribune' will back you."
A meeting was then called in Cooper Institute, as before stated, Horace
Greeley presiding, and John Russell Young entering into the idea with
sympathy. Mr. Meeker presented his project of a Union colony to
establish itself in Colorado. Of the conditions he said:--
"The persons with whom I would be willing to associate must be
temperance men and ambitious to establish good society, and among as
many as fifty, ten should have as much as ten thousand dollars each, or
twenty should have five thousand dollars each, while others may have
from two thousand to one thousand dollars and upward. For many to go so
far without means could only result in disaster."
The members were to each contribute one hundred and fifty-five dollars
to a fund to purchase and prepare the land. It was in April of 1869 that
the committee made the purchase of forty thousand acres, located between
the Cache la Poudre and the South Platte rivers, twenty-five miles from
the Rocky Mountains and in full sight of Long's Peak. Greeley has a
beautiful situation, and a perfection of climate that perhaps exists
hardly anywhere else in all Colorado. Whatever the heat of the day, the
nights are cool. The days are so bright, so beautiful, that they seem a
very foretaste of paradise.
In the spring of 1870 the seven hundred members of Union Colony, with
their families, arrived.
Mr. Meeker further stipulated:--
"In particular should moral and religious sentiments prevail, for
without these qualities man is nothing. At the same time tolerance and
liberality should also prevail. One thing more is equally important.
Happiness, wealth, and the glory of a state spring from the family, and
it should be our aim and a high ambition to preserve the family pure in
all its relations, and to labor with the best efforts life and strength
can give to make the home comfortable, to beautify and to adorn it, and
to supply it with whatever will make it attractive and loved."
He added: "I make the point that two important objects will be gained
by such a colony. First, schools, refined society, and all the
advantages of life in an old country; while, on the contrary, where
settlements are made by the old method, people are obliged to wait
twenty, forty, or more years. Second, with free homesteads as a basis,
with the sale of reserved lots for the general good, the greatly
increased value of real estate will be for the benefit of all the
people, and not for schemers and speculators. In the success of this
colony a model will be presented for settling the remainder of the vast
territory of our country."
Every deed granted forbade the sale of intoxicating liquors. The town
was founded in the purest moral ideals of education, culture, faith, and
prayer, and Greeley is everywhere pointed out to the tourist in Colorado
as one of the most interesting features of the Centennial state.
Of the town Mr. Meeker himself said in one of his letters to the
"Tribune": "Individuals may rise or fall, may live or die; property may
be lost or gained; but the colony as a whole will prosper, and the spot
on which we labor so long as the world stands will be a centre of
intelligence and activity."
In 1876 Mr. Meeker was appointed commissioner from Colorado to the
Centennial Exposition. He was strongly talked of for Congress, but his
destiny led elsewhere.
Early in the seventies he founded "The Greeley Tribune," which he edited
with conspicuous ability, making it the leading country paper of that
part of the state.
The Indian troubles became a prominent problem of the government in the
decade of the seventies, and this question deeply engaged Mr. Meeker's
attention. He had his own theories regarding their treatment--ideas much
in advance of his time, and which in some respects have been adopted in
the best Indian legislation in Washington within the past two years. One
point in Mr. Meeker's policy was that "work should go hand in hand and
to some extent precede school education"--an insight comprising much of
the truth taught to-day by the more eminent leaders of industrial
education, and one which the recent Indian legislation, during the
fifty-seventh Congress, has recognized. Mr. Meeker believed that the
Indian could be advanced into the peaceful arts of civilized life, and
this aim he held with conspicuous courage and fidelity.
With a desire to carry out these theories, Mr. Meeker applied for and
received, under President Hayes, the post of commissioner to the Utes on
White River in Colorado, his appointment being, as before stated, of a
somewhat confidential nature, and charged with more important
responsibilities than are usually included in this office. Mr. Meeker
entered on the duties of this position with much that same high and
noble purpose that inspired General Armstrong in his work at Hampton.
General Hall of Colorado, who is said to be the most authoritative
historian of that state, thus wrote of Mr. Meeker's entrance on the
agency at White River.
"In the spring of 1878 Mr. Meeker, founder of Union Colony and the
now beautiful city of Greeley, at his own solicitation was
appointed resident agent, succeeding several who had attempted to
carry this benevolent enterprise into effect, but without material
success. He was a venerable philanthropist, eminently representing
the humanitarian school of the Atlantic seaboard, under the example
of Horace Greeley, whom he revered above all the public men of his
time.
"Thoroughly imbued with the purpose of educating, refining, and
Christianizing the wild rovers of the mountains, and longing for an
opportunity to put his cherished theories into practice, confident
of his ability to bring about a complete transformation of their
lives and character, he entered upon the work with deep enthusiasm.
His ideals were splendid, eminently worthy of the man and the
cause; but, unhappily, he had to deal with savages, of whose
natures he was profoundly ignorant. He took with him his wife and
youngest daughter, Josephine, and also a number of mechanics from
Union Colony to aid in the great work of regeneration and
redemption."
The Honorable Alva Adams of Pueblo, Colorado, ex-Governor of the state,
writing of Nathan Cook Meeker, said:--
"Meeker was a patriot, and no soldier upon the field of battle was
more loyal, and no one in the annals of our country has ever made a
more awful sacrifice than the Meekers. But I need not tell the
story. Back of it is the incompetent treatment of the Indians that
was responsible for the Meeker massacre. Upon the government rests
the blood and outrage of the Meekers. Nor can I recall that the
Indians were ever adequately punished for the crime. It is a black
spot."
Mrs. Meeker entered into the views and the work of her husband in this
new field with sympathetic comprehension and sustaining aid. Their
youngest daughter, Josephine, who shared the idealism of the family,
opened a free school for the Indians.
Mr. Meeker encountered peculiar difficulties over a period of several
months, during which he appealed, unsuccessfully, for government aid and
protection. General William T. Sherman, in his report (1879) to the
Secretary of War, alludes to these troubles; General Pope was familiar
with the situation, and Major Thornburg, at Fort Steele, held himself
ready to send protection to Mr. Meeker at a day's notice; but the
government failed to give that notice.
The tragedy came swiftly and suddenly, like the fates in a Greek drama,
and on September 29, 1879, Mr. Meeker was brutally massacred, his wife
and daughter were taken into captivity, where, for twenty-three days,
until rescued by General Adams, they endured unspeakable sufferings, and
the agency buildings and their contents were burned.
To the awful spectacle of her husband's mutilated body, his wife--a
woman of gentle birth and breeding--was led by the Indians, in their
savage cruelty, to thus first learn of the tragedy. Through her agony of
tears she pleaded to be allowed to stop and kiss the cold lips of him
whose faithful, tender companion and wife she had been for thirty-five
years. This last sacred consolation was denied her. With diabolical glee
they reviled her tears and her prayers.
Her daughter Josephine, a girl of twenty, with the Evangeline type of
face, was torn from her arms and hurried away into a deep, lonely canyon,
which is now called "Josephine Valley." Mrs. Meeker herself was shot in
her hip and left lame for life. She was thrust on a horse without even a
saddle and carried off into the lonely mountains in this terrible
captivity. Yet so sublime is the character of Mrs. Meeker in her deep
religious feeling that in this moment of supreme desolation,--her
husband's murdered body left alone on the ground; her daughter snatched
from her arms; her home in smoking ruins behind her,--so remarkable is
her character in its religious exaltation, that even in this hour of
supreme agony she could say, "_Though He slay me_, yet will I trust in
Him!"
A little mountain town of some five hundred inhabitants, named Meeker,
for the heroic man who there met his tragic death, now marks the site of
the massacre. Even at this day it is forty-five miles from the nearest
railroad station, Rifle, on the Denver and Rio Grand scenic route. The
little town reminds one of Florence, Italy, in the way it is surrounded
by amethyst mountains, and the White River on which it is located is far
more beautiful than the turbid Arno. The name of Nathan Cook Meeker is
held in the greatest reverence by the people of the entire region.
On an August afternoon more than twenty years after this tragedy a
visitor to Colorado stood on the site of the massacre under a sky whose
intense blue rivalled that of Italy. With the peaceful flow of the river
murmuring in the air and the hum of insects in the purple-flowered
alfalfa, the tragic scene seemed to rise again and impressed its
lesson,--the ethical lesson of apparent defeat, disaster, and death in
the outer and temporal world, while, on the spiritual side, it was
triumph and glory and the entrance to the life more abundant. The man
might be massacred,--the idea for which he stood cannot die. It rises
from the apparent death and is resurrected in the form of new and nobler
and more widely pervading ideals which communicate their inspiration to
all humanity.
In the cemetery of Greeley lie buried the body of Mr. Meeker and of his
daughter Josephine, whose early death followed close upon the tragedy.
The aged widow, now in her eighty-ninth year, still survives, occupying
her home in this Colorado town. Mrs. Meeker retains all her clearness of
intellect; all her keen interest in the affairs of the day. She reads
her daily newspapers, writes letters that are models of beautiful
thought and exquisite feeling, and still continues to write the verse
which through life has been the natural expression of her poetic nature.
Mrs. Meeker writes verses as a bird sings--with a natural gift full of
spontaneous music.
The work of Nathan Cook Meeker in all that makes for industrial and
social progress and moral ideals contributed incalculable aid to
Colorado. All over the state the tourist is asked, "Have you seen
Greeley? That is our ideal town."
During all the years of Mr. Meeker's residence in Colorado he remained a
staff correspondent of the "Tribune." Horace Greeley went to the West
and visited the Colony; and in the fine high school building of Greeley
to-day, there hang, side by side, the portraits of Horace Greeley and
Nathan Cook Meeker.
In this world in which we live events are not finished when they have
receded into the past. They persist in the texture of life. They stand
for certain fulfilments, and, like Banquo's ghost, they will "not down"
until their complete significance is worked out to its final conclusion.
"Say not the struggle naught availeth."
It always avails. It matters little as to amassing of possessions; but
it matters greatly as to the purity of a man's motives and the degree to
which he keeps faith with his ideals. Unfalteringly, even unto death,
did Nathan Cook Meeker keep faith with those ideals that revealed
themselves to him.
A noble work like that of Mr. Meeker is like the seed sown which is not
quickened except it die. Sown in weakness, it is raised in power; sown
in dishonor, it is raised in glory. The three years of the ministry of
Jesus on earth ended in defeat, disaster, and death. Was his life
thereby a failure? Who has won the triumph's evidence--Pilate or Christ?
Lincoln had to die that the nation might live. Heroism is forever being
crowned with martyrdom.
All life is better to-day for every noble individual life that has been
lived in the world. Nathan Cook Meeker was one who literally gave his
life to lofty ideals, and this hero whom the Silver State holds in honor
and reverence merits the recognition of the nation.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: A Remarkable Mystic.]
"The only affections which live eternally are those of the
soul--those which have struck deep into the man and made part of
his inmost being. The loves of the earthly mind die with it and
form no part of the permanent man.... To enter the heavenly sphere
and to come into communion with souls a generated state is
necessary. There are four atmospheres surrounding us, and only in
the highest of these do we find the freed soul. Interior knowledge,
earnest aspiration, and purity of thought and life, are the keys by
which alone can be opened the gates of the inmost and highest
sphere. The lowest is enlightened by the natural sun. It is that of
the present life of the body. The next is enlightened by the astral
or magnetic light, and it is that of the sidereal body. The next is
that of the soul, and it is enlightened by the spiritual sun. And
the highest is the immediate presence of God."
Since the days of Jacob Behmen there have been no such remarkable series
of mystic writings as are contained in the two volumes called "The
Perfect Way" and "Clothed with the Sun," by Doctor Anna Kingsford. Her
belief and her illuminations were crystallized in the affirmation, "Life
is the elaboration of soul through the varied transformations of
matter." She saw the entire purpose of creation to be the evolution and
elaboration of the soul. Very little is generally known of Doctor
Kingsford. She was descended from an old Italian family, one of whom had
been the architect of the Vatican, and, on her mother's side, from
mingled German and Irish ancestry. She was the daughter of John Bonus,
born in England in 1846, and she married, in 1867, Algernon Godfrey
Kingsford, who subsequently took orders in the English Church. Three
years later Mrs. Kingsford entered the Catholic communion, and some
years afterward she studied medicine in Paris and received her degree.
She is said to have been very beautiful, with great talent in painting
and in music, a poet of lyric gifts, and from her childhood she saw
visions and dreamed dreams. She died in 1888, and is buried in Atcham,
near Shrewsbury, where her husband had his parish.
In 1881 Doctor Kingsford delivered in London, before drawing-room
audiences, comprising representatives of literature, art, fashion, and
the peerage,--audiences inclusive of the most notable people in London,
the nine lectures that are published under the title of "The Perfect
Way," and at the time these lectures inspired a profound interest. Their
central theme is the Pre-existence and Perfectibility of the soul. "The
intuition," she says, "is that portion of the mind whereby we are
enabled to gain access to the interior and permanent region of our
nature, and there to possess ourselves of the knowledge which in the
long ages of her past existence the soul has made her own. For that in
us which perceives and permanently remembers is the soul. And all that
she has once learned is at the service of those who duly cultivate
relations with her." And those relations, she taught, are cultivated by
living so purely in thought and deed as to prevent the interposition of
any barrier between the phenomenal (or the outer) and the substantial
(or the inner) self; and by steadfastly cultivating harmonious relations
between those two, by subordinating the whole system to the Divine
will,--thus does one gain full access to the stores of knowledge in the
soul. Doctor Kingsford further explains:--
"For, placed as is the soul between the outer and the inner
mediator, between the material and the spiritual, she looks inwards
as well as outwards, and by experience learns the nature and method
of God; and according to the degree of her elevation, purity, and
desire, sees, reflects, and transmits God. It is in virtue of the
soul's position between the worlds of substance and of phenomenon,
and her consequent ability to refer _things_ to their essential
_ideas_, that in her, and her alone, resides an instrument of
knowledge competent for the comprehension of truth, even the
highest, which she only is able to behold face to face. It is no
hyperbole that is involved in the saying, 'The pure in heart see
God.' True, the _man_ cannot see God. But the divine in man sees
God. And this occurs when, by means of his soul's union with God,
the man becomes 'one with the Father', and beholds God _with the
eyes of God_....
"And he to whom the soul lends her ears and eyes, may have
knowledge not only of his own past history, but of the past history
of the planet, as beheld in the pictures imprinted in the magnetic
light whereof the planet's memory consists. For there are actually
ghosts of events, manes of past circumstances, shadows on the
protoplasmic mirror, which can be evoked.
"But beyond and above the power to read the memory of himself or of
the planet, is the power to penetrate to that innermost sphere
wherein the soul obtains and treasures up her knowledge of God.
This is the faculty whereby true revelation occurs. And revelation,
even in this, its highest sense, is, no less than reason, a natural
appanage of man, and belongs of right to man in his highest and
completest measure of development."
Doctor Kingsford was an evolutionist, holding that development along
evolutionary lines is a true doctrine, but she held that this
development was not of the original substance, because that, being
infinite and eternal, is always perfect; and that the development lay in
the manifestation of the qualities of that substance, in the individual.
"The highest product, man," she said, "is the result of the spirit
working intelligently within. But man attains his highest and becomes
perfect _only through his own voluntary_ co-operation with the Spirit."
Doctor Kingsford regarded Jesus as a spiritual Ideal and an Eternal
Verity, and Religion as an ever-present actuality.
We find her saying:--