People

: Laura (Franklin) Chapman; With her husband William Edward Chapman, they settled and farmed in the First Fruitridge area of Grand Junction. Born in Pennsylvania.

: Laura Evans; Laura Evans (1871-1953) was Salida’s most prominent madam. She conducted business from what is now the current home of the Mon-Ark Shrine Club on West Sackett in Salida, Colorado.

: Laura Gertrude (Bristol) Foster; Laura Foster was born in Pennsylvania and claimed to have moved to Telluride, Colorado, around 1890, when she was two years old. There, she said, her father was a miner who worked the night shift, and her mother took in washing. Yet U.S. Census records from 1900 show her still living in Pennsylvania with her siblings and parents. Foster claimed to have married John L. “Peg-leg” Foster when she was thirteen, but Colorado marriage records show her marrying him in Telluride in 1904, and list her age at the time as seventeen. She ran a boarding house In Bull Canyon, at first with the help of her husband, and then by herself after their divorce. U.S. Census Records from 1910 show her divorced from “Peg-leg” and living with her parents and siblings in Paradox Valley on a farm. She then later married John Keski and was part of the card game that ended with the shooting death of family friend Henry “Indian Henry” Huff by Keski. She and Keski divorced in 1918. Foster claimed to have begun work as a miner’s cook near Norwood at age eleven, but if she was still living in Pennsylvania at age 13, it would not be possible that she began this profession at such an early age. It is more likely that she became a cook sometime between 1904 and 1910. The family would have moved to Paradox sometime during those years, and Foster would have been anywhere from 17 to 23 years old.

Main menu