In 1835, at an estate auction in Kentucky, a woman named Clara Brown stood and watched her husband and her three surviving children sold off to different buyers.
She spent the next forty seven years looking for her daughter.
Clara was born around 1800 near Fredericksburg, Virginia, and was enslaved from birth. She was moved to Kentucky as a child. She married a man named Richard and had four children, Richard, Margaret, and twin girls named Eliza Jane and Paulina Ann. Paulina drowned when she was small.
When the man who owned them died in 1835, the estate was broken up and sold, which in practice meant the family was auctioned off in pieces to four different people. Eliza Jane was about ten years old.
Clara never saw her husband, her son, or her older daughter again.
She was bought by a man named George Brown in Russellville, Kentucky, and worked for him for roughly twenty years. When he died, his will freed her. She was in her mid fifties.
Kentucky law at the time required freed Black people to leave the state. So being given her freedom also meant being ordered out of the only place she had ever lived.
She worked her way to St. Louis, then to Kansas. In 1859 news of gold in Colorado came through, and she got herself onto a wagon train heading west by hiring on as the cook, in exchange for the outfit agreeing to haul her laundry kettles. Seven hundred miles.
In Central City she opened the first laundry in Gilpin County and washed for the miners.
And it turned out she was a formidable businesswoman. She saved. She bought property. She put money into claims. At her height she owned sixteen lots in Denver, seven houses in Central City, and property and mining interests in Boulder, Georgetown and Idaho Springs. Somewhere around ten thousand dollars, which is roughly a million now.
She also fed and housed whoever showed up needing it, which is where the name Aunt Clara came from, and the church services she hosted in her own cabin became Colorado's first Protestant congregation.
And the entire time, she was looking.
After the Civil War she went back east, to Kentucky and then Tennessee, trying to find her family. She did not find them.
What she did instead was find other formerly freed people with nowhere to go and no way to get anywhere, about sixteen of them, and pay out of her own pocket to bring every one of them to Colorado.
The money went. Some into claims that failed. Some to real estate men who cheated her. Most of it to people who needed it, and to the search, which she never stopped running, decade after decade.
Then in 1882 word finally came back to her. There was a woman in Council Bluffs, Iowa, named Eliza Jane.
Clara was 82 years old and had almost nothing left. She went anyway.
It was her.
Forty seven years. She brought her daughter and her granddaughter back to Denver with her.
She died three years later, in October of 1885. The governor of Colorado and the mayor of Denver came to the funeral, and the Colorado Pioneers Association, which had voted her in the year before, conducted the service.
She arrived in Colorado with a load of wash kettles and no money, built a small fortune out of other men's dirty shirts, and spent essentially all of it on other people and on one ten year old girl she had been sold away from in 1835.
She found her.