The following article is quoted entirely from the book, Uncommon Men and the Colorado Prairie by Nell Brown Propst.
Others did not even possess a wagon. Or a horse.............
.......One spring day in 1885, Charles Erickson and Charles Timberlake got off the train in Julesburg Colorado and walked forty miles south through grass so high they couldn't see their way. Timberlake eventually became a congressmen of note, and Erickson was responsible for much of the settlement of a place that became Haxtun Colorado.
He was twenty eight, only six days removed from his native Sweden and was what W.L. Hayes described as hordes of foreigners claiming free land in the mid 1880's under the Homestead Act. Mr. Erickson spent his first summer in a hole on the South Fork Creek and worked at breaking out his homestead and by fall had himself a permanent dugout. ( He lived in that dugout for about 9 years) He and Timberlake survived by collecting bones on the prairie for fertilizer, selling them in Julesburg.
Soon Erickson and a partner A. M. Axelson were locating farmers on the land. They surveyed 2500 farms, measuring boundaries by laboriously counting revolutions of a wagon wheel with a rag tied to it as a marker. They recorded the transactions in the Julesburg Land office, eighty miles round trip on horseback.
In 1894, Erickson married Elonida Carlson and built a sod house for her. Ten years after their marriage, Elonida died following the birth of their fourth child Agnes. Agnes was brought up by another early pioneer family Pastor and Mrs. Joel Kinzie. Charlie continued to raise his older three children and even baked bread for them.
Charles continued to farm and ranch south of Haxtun Colorado and became a prominent resident of the community. He is buried in the Haxtun Cemetery along with his wife Elonida.
Credit: Uncommon Men and the Colorado Prairie by Nell Brown Propst, Wilbur Kipp Photo collection. (Wilbur is the grandson of Charles Erickson.)
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