Caroline Westcott Romney

Caroline Westcott Romney – St. Mark’s Best Known, Albeit Imperfect, Saint

A Sermon Preached by Kip Boyd, St. Mark’s Historian

All Saints’ Day, November 5, 2023

Caroline Westcott Romney is arguably St. Mark’s most memorable (albeit imperfect) saint. In 1881 she was not only a charter member of the church, she was also the owner-editor of Durango’s first newspaper, The Durango Record.

Always precocious, Caroline was tutored by her father, J.N. Wescott, a judge, who enrolled young Caroline in public schools and personally tutored her in Latin and Greek. At the age of sixteen she was teaching Greek at an Ohio school, and at the age of twenty she held an administrative position in a Chicago school.

By the time Caroline was thirty-six years old in 1876, she was a reporter for The Chicago Times who had already covered three sessions of congress in Washington D.C., when she claimed to have met John Romney whom she said was a Chicago attorney. She told her family that he was starting a law practice in Denver and that she would go there to marry him. She did move to Colorado but claimed that her husband died of pneumonia three months later “in [the] San Luis Valley, below Del Norte,” and that he was buried there. The only marriage notice we have been able to find in any newspaper, however, is one Caroline posted in Homer, Michigan, where her father and other family members were living at the time. The same is true of John Romney’s death notice. We have been unable to find any other evidence that an attorney named John Romney ever existed either in Chicago, Denver, or the San Luis Valley. It is the current opinion of several local historians that Caroline invented John Romney, her wedding, and his untimely death – perhaps to escape family expectations that she marry or to travel and run a business independently as a “widow” without need for a male chaperone or sponsor. In any case, she continued working as a journalist, portrayed herself as a widow, and remained single and childless for the rest of her life.

In 1879 Caroline, along with her brother George’s family, moved to Leadville, Colorado, where she founded and edited a newspaper with George as her business manager. After only a year, Caroline and the Westcott family decided to move to the new mining boomtown, Durango. They left Leadville by train in the late fall of 1880 and traveled to Chama, New Mexico, which was then the end of the line. From there they made a perilous winter journey by coach (which fell apart) and wagon over a route lacking roads, crossing the Navajo and San Juan Rivers multiple times without the aid of any bridges. They arrived in Durango in late December of 1880. At that time, Mrs. Romney was described as: “about forty years of age; small in stature and tending to plumpness; a very good looking woman with blonde hair, snapping eyes, and a witty tongue.”

Because her newspaper office had not been completed on time and because no other building “could be rented for love or money” Caroline opened her press in a tent, after clearing away “sixteen inches of snow.” The first edition was published and printed with a small “old-fashioned Gordon hand press” on December 29, 1880. Though another newspaper, The Southwest, already existed in Animas City, Mrs. Romney’s was Durango’s first paper. By the end of February 1881, her “commodious” 22 x 50-foot wooden office was completed and her full-size press from Leadville had arrived by train. By late summer, she advertised almost one hundred businesses.

Already a seasoned journalist, Mrs. Romney had tremendous energy, a nose for news, and a literary gift for late Victorian hyperbole. She was also fearless and by mid-January took up a journalistic campaign against some of the local outlaws and rustlers. In the second edition of her paper on January 1, 1881, she described a shooting that occurred during a Christmas Eve “social dance” held at a ranch near Farmington.” During the evening, “three ruffians, Oscar Pruett, Dison Eskridge, and James Garrett . . . conducted themselves in such an indecent and boisterous manner using profane and obscene language in the presence of ladies, that they were requested by the host to leave. They then left the house and assembled in front of it, and began a row, shooting off their pistols, and behaving in a boisterous manner . . . .” Gunfire escalated, leaving George Brown, a young bystander, and Oscar Pruett, one of the ruffians, dead. Dison Eskridge and James Garrett disappeared for a time but eventually turned up in Durango because they had relatives there. Members of the Eskridge family were upset by Mrs. Romney’s coverage of this incident and demanded that she retract her characterization of Dison as a “ruffian.” His sister sent a letter to the Record, insisting that her beloved brother had “never sworn in his life.” Dison’s brother, Harg Eskridge, had also sent threatening letters to Mrs. Romney at the Record – which she published.

By April of 1881, the Eskridges, the Stocktons, James Garrett, and some other desperadoes had formed the Stockton-Eskridge gang of about twenty men engaged in rustling cattle, jumping claims, and murdering folks who offended them. Meanwhile a group of Farmington vigilantes had organized to deal with the gang. They came to Durango to bring Dison Eskridge and James Garrett to justice for the murder of George Brown at the Christmas danced. However, they arrived in town just in time to see the Durango Committee of Safety (about three-hundred masked, armed vigilantes) lynch a local scoundrel for getting drunk and shooting an innocent man in a local dance hall. When the Farmington vigilantes saw the Durango vigilantes, they decided to postpone any attempt to capture or kill the two outlaws and decided to return to Farmington. Unfortunately, they were spotted riding south along the little mesa (now occupied by E. Third Avenue) by the Stockton-Eskridge gang who opened fire and attacked them. A pitched gun battle on horseback ensued with bullets flying through the streets and buildings of Durango. Two local men were wounded, and one of the bullets went through the Durango Record building narrowly missing Mrs. Romney. The next day she wrote an editorial, demanding that Durango citizens call a meeting to make plans to get rid of the gang, stating they were a “menace.”

The meeting was called, and a resolution was adopted, urging members of the Stockton-Eskridge gang to leave the area. In response, Ike Stockton and Harg Eskridge showed up (armed to the teeth by one account) in the newspaper office, demanding to see the author of the inciting editorial and were surprised to learn that Mrs. Romney was that author. They confronted her, demanding that she retract it, stating that if she were a man, they would force her to do so. She refused. For the next ten days, her printers worked wearing revolvers with a dozen rifles within reach. The Committee of Safety was also notified and provided a guard around her office.

On April 30, 1881, Mrs. Romney was able to report, “The Stockton, Eskridge, Garrett party together with their aiders and abettors have left Durango for good. . . . . they concluded to skip the town knowing full well that the citizens of Durango would not protect them against any legal demand for their surrender.” At least one other source, however, suggests that a $700 payment was made to the gang as a further incentive.

Mrs. Romney is considered an early Colorado feminist and suffragist. She was not, however, very interested in protesting or publicly demanding women’s rights. In one 1881 issue of the Record she wrote: “The best way for women to pursue, in business enterprises at least, is not to wait for men to accord them their rights, but to go ahead and take them. Such women have so much practical work to do, that, as a rule, they haven’t much time to talk women’s rights. They do what is better – they act them.”

By February of 1881, Parson Hoge was building St. Mark’s Episcopal Church on East Second Avenue, a wooden building that was the town’s first church structure. Another newspaper noted at the time, “There were rumors that gambling money was used to complete the project, but what can we expect when the congregation was ‘made up of about as rough an assemblage as ever gathered to hear the Word of God’”? Whatever concerns she may have had regarding St. Mark’s financing, Mrs. Romney became an active member of the church. She read a poem at the official opening on March 3rd of 1881, helped form the church’s Ladies Aid Society, and served as the society’s first Vice President. Whether or not they engaged in community service as we understand it today, those ladies knew how to raise money and organize parish fun, including: strawberry festivals, pantomimes, “phantom parties,” charades, “mystery evenings,” organ solos, card playing [!], curious games (stagecoach, dumb crambo, and proverb shouting) singing, public readings, and dancing.

Later that summer, in June of 1881, Mrs. Romney’s father, her widowed sister-in-law, Liela Wescott, and Leila’s children moved to Durango. Sadly, Leila’s daughter (and Caroline’s niece), Katie Wescott, then thirteen years of age, contracted typhoid fever and died in September.

In her paper Caroline wrote a dramatic description of Katie’s funeral:

“At about half-past one, on Wednesday, the tolling of the bell at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, announced the approach of the hour for the last sad rites to be celebrated, over the remains of ‘the little girl that died,’ last Monday night, and in memory of the bright young spirit that then entered Beulah Land.

Her little mates, together with many friends of the family, had gathered at the house of her grand-father [sic] where her death occurred. Eight of the former . . . . the little girls all in white, and the little boys with white crepe badges and gloves – attended the little flower-laden casket, (all white too, like her white young life,) as pall-bearers [sic]. The procession wended its way to the church, where the rector [Parson Hoge], in his robes, met it at the door, and led the way to the altar, reading the solemn services of the church. Then came the prayers and lessons, and two hymns, ‘Asleep in the Arms of Jesus,’ and ‘There is a Land of Pure Delight,’ were beautifully rendered. The wailing of the little brothers and sister and the playmates of the dead child was heart-rending.

. . . . Then the procession formed and moved on, to the Animas City Cemetery . . . and there laid sweet little Katie Wescott in her dreamless bed, and on the little rounded mound, they left the cross and crown of flowers, fit emblems of the dreadful sufferings through which she entered the Kingdom, and of the crown of glory which there irradiates her angel brow; for ‘Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.’”

After being here only a year and a half, Mrs. Romney left Durango in May of 1882. She sold her printing press to the Durango Herald. By 1883 she had started a newspaper in Trinidad. Later, she started newspapers in El Paso (where one report says she suffered a “nervous collapse”), and Socorro. In 1887 she sailed from Boston to tour England (where she may have met Queen Victoria) and France. Upon her return to the United States, she went back to Chicago and became a writer for, editor and owner, of the Chicago Trade Journal. Returning to Colorado, she became secretary of the Women’s Protective Union in Denver in 1891. By 1893 she was back in Chicago working as a journalist. Earlier that year she presented a paper and lecture on her unaccompanied tours of Mexico to the World’s Columbian Exposition (a world’s fair in Chicago). At the same exposition she exhibited fourteen devices she had invented: “filters, conservers of heat and cold, and other inventions of value and importance to economic and comfortable housekeeping.”

In 1897 at the age of sixty, she planned to start a newspaper in Dawson, Alaska during the Klondike Gold Rush and subsequently a women’s business “syndicate” there. Reports of these efforts were published worldwide to include England, New Zealand, and Australia. I have, however, been unable to find any evidence that she ever actually made it to Alaska.

Back in Denver from 1899 to 1902, Mrs. Romney did genealogy work. In February of 1900 in an address covered by the leading feminist/suffragist newspaper of the day, she shared reminiscences with the Denver Woman’s Press Club regarding her time on the frontier in La Plata County. In 1902 she visited and toured Cuba (unaccompanied as usual) and described that visit in detail for a Kansas newspaper.

Around 1905 Mrs. Romney got into the real estate business with her brother, George, first in Seattle and later in Los Angeles. She died at 76 years-of-age following two strokes in 1916 while living with her sister in Denver, Colorado.

So, why should we remember a gadabout with a checkered history like Mrs. Romney as a saint and follow her “in all virtuous and godly living”? Though a faithful Episcopal parishioner, most of her life was lived in the likely false guise of being a widow. In her writing she expressed negative racist opinions regarding native Americans, but publicly supported Mexicans and other Hispanics. She was courageous when personally facing outlaws but approved of paying them later to be Indian fighters. She wrote with hyperbole that was often inflammatory. She was an opponent of prostitution, and a critic of opium dens and their patrons. Her opposition to prostitution was, however, very principled and nuanced for her time, recognizing that many such women came west to escape domestic problems and had almost no other way to survive.

I think it is appropriate to remember Mrs. Romney as a saint, because like most of ancient Israel’s heroines (and heroes) and recognized Christian saints, she was a remarkable but imperfect human, who despite her personal trials, failures, and sufferings, tried to follow God, supported her faith community, and worked to make the world a better place (particularly for women) –and in so doing, experienced life as a grand adventure.

References:

(R): Romney, Caroline Westcott; “Four Months in Old Mexico”; in The Congress of Women, World’s Columbian Exposition; Mary Kavanaugh Oldham Eagle (editor), 1893
(E): Eckenrode, T.R.: The Eyes of Faith and the Sounds of Time: St. Mark’s Journey with Durango, 1880-1921
(F): FindAGrave Website; https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/105059827/caroline-romney; extracted 09/25/2018
(S1): Smith, Duane; “Record Thrived on Opium Dens, Cries for ‘Blood’”; in the Durango Herald, 09/24/2010
(S2): Smith, Duane: “Condemned By Many, Read By All,” Durango’s Newspapers, 1880-1992; 1992
(T): Thompson, Jonathan P; River of Lost Souls, March 2018