The plaque reads:
Mathew Kinkead inherited the ambitious qualities required of a frontiersman. His family's name is recorded among the founders of Madison and Franklin Missouri. His contemporaries included a list of notable trail blazers, among them Kit Carson. He became a distillery owner in Santa Fe, and farmed on Mora, New Mexico before becoming the first to raise cattle and buffalo on the northern banks of the Arkansas River, 1841. Primary among his business dealings was partial financing of El Pueblo Trading Post, 1842. Kinkead was a successful trader, merchant, rancher and founder of Pueblo. By 1848 California beckoned him, there his varied experiences and adventurous spirit made him a wealthy man.
It is easier to follow Kinkeads life if you follow Teresita Sandoval's (
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"When she was seventeen, Teresita Sandoval married Manuel Suaso. By the time she was twenty-three, she was the mother of four children: Juana, Cruzita, José, and Rufena. The following year, the family moved to Mora, New Mexico, to settle a parcel of land they had received as a grant from the Mexican government. They stayed here for several years, but Sandoval’s life was about to take a turn. While in Mora, Teresita Sandoval met a man named Matthew Kincead. He was from Kentucky, but he was also a Mexican citizen with his own land grant in the area. Sandoval and Kincead decided to leave Mora with her children and move north to the American side of the Arkansas River. They raised livestock, corn, and other crops on their homestead.
In 1841 the Sandoval-Kincead family moved to the new trading post called Fort El Pueblo. The fort was built by George Simpson, Alexander Barclay, James P. Beckwourth, and Joseph Doyle. Simpson married Sandoval’s eldest daughter, Juana, and Doyle later married her second daughter, Cruzita. From the very beginning, Sandoval and
Kincead helped build and run the fort. It was a busy place. Trappers and traders, settlers, and Native Americans all met to negotiate and do business within its walls.
Adventure at the fort was endless. Teresita Sandoval knew and worked with some of the most famous characters on the western frontier. Mountain men Jim Bridger, “Uncle Dick” Wootten, Kit Carson, and the celebrated African-American-Crow warrior, James Beckwourth, were all part of the scene. Life here was filled with hard labor, extreme weather, and retaliation by the many Plains Indian warriors defending their traditional hunting grounds. Sandoval faced these trials with bravery born from true pioneering spirit. Like other women of her time, Sandoval was just as important as the many men who received credit for pioneering settlements in the West.
A few years after moving to the fort, Matthew Kincead headed to California with the couple’s nine-year-old son, Juan. This signaled a new beginning for Sandoval. In 1843, she and British trader Alexander Barclay moved together to a new settlement called Hardscrabble, about twenty-five miles northwest of Pueblo. Five years later, Barclay and the Sandovals moved south near Mora, New Mexico, where Barclay was building his own fort. The Mexican-American War was drawing to a close
in 1848. Barclay hoped to sell his Fort Barclay to the United States government, but the newly victorious U.S. built their own Fort Union a few miles away. Sandoval and Barclay soon parted.
Finding herself on her own once more, Teresita Sandoval joined her daughter Cruzita and son-in-law Joseph Doyle at Casa Blanca, their ranch in the Arkansas River country. Here she stayed for the rest of her life. When Doyle died and left the ranch to Cruzita, Sandoval took control of the property. She prevented the valuable lands from falling into the hands of rival cattlemen. Shaking her fist at anyone who eyed her daughter’s land, Teresita Sandoval remained virtually independent to her last days. She died in 1894 after a long life of toil and achievement. A pioneer in every way, Maria Teresa Sandoval was one of Colorado’s many little-known women who helped pave the way for generations to come in the West" (from (
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