This one-fifth size statue features the stylized sculpting in marble of a woman in traditional Mexican garb. The piece is sitting with a jar, perhaps holding grain or water from a well? The sculpture sits atop a stucco plinth with a brass historic plaque affixed. The plaque reads:
Teresita Sandoval was one of the daring souls that arrived at the Pueblo settlement in 1841. Like other women of that time, she would witness and be partner to changes in her country. She departed from her traditional life as the wife of Manuel Suazo and followed her heart and Mathew Kinkead to the Arkansas River, where her extended family endeavored to establish life at El Pueblo Trading Post (1842). Described as “pretty as a peach,” Teresita captivated another Englishman, Alexander Barclay, who wrote of “TS” in his journals. From his diary a glimpse of their grand undertakings emerges as does her role and contributions. Her life affirms that women moved between cultures, strengthened family and trade alliances, exercised rights under Mexican Law and ventured north for the freedom the frontier promised.
"Teresita Sandoval (1811-1894)
Teresita Sandoval was born in Taos, New Mexico in 1811. At the age of seventeen she married Manuel Suaso. The couple had four children and, in the early 1830s, the family moved to Mora, New Mexico, to settle a land grant they received. Here, in 1835, Sandoval met Mathew Kinkead, a naturalized Mexican citizen and a Kentucky native. She left her husband to live with Kinkead. The new couple moved to the Arkansas River where they formed a trading partnership with a culturally mixed community. Together this group founded El Pueblo, present day Pueblo, Colorado.
At El Pueblo, Sandoval met British trader Alexander Barclay, who eventually drew the only known portrait of Teresita. In 1844 Sandoval moved with Barclay to the Mexican side of the United States-Mexican border. After ten years with Barclay, at age forty-two, Sandoval left to live with a daughter and son-in-law. They supported her until her death in 1894, at age eighty-three.
Teresita Sandoval lived during a time of great change in the Southwest. After the Mexican-American War ended in 1848, the United States took possession of the land south of the Arkansas River to the Rio Grande. Sandoval's homeland was now part of the United States, which ended Mexican laws and customs. Prior to 1848, under Mexican law, women could inherit and purchase land and livestock, share that ownership with their husbands, and establish their own businesses. Under Mexican law, women were even permitted to begin divorce proceedings. When these lands became American territory, after 1848, the new U.S. laws rescinded many of these rights, transforming the lives of the women of the borderlands." (from (
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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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