You are currently viewing
Photo postcard of William Perdieu standing at the front with sugar beet crew on his farm south of Platteville, CO, ca. 1908.

William Nuton Perdieu was born in Indiana on June 25, 1885,  the fifth of six children of  Caleb Clinton and Ellen (Callahan) Perdieu.  When William was three months old, his family moved to western Kansas, locating outside Goodland.  When William was thirteen, the family came out to Colorado by wagon and farmed just south of Gowanda.

William mailed this postcard, postmarked February 10, 1909, to older brother Bryan and sister-in-law Clara Perdieu, in Holyoke, where they farmed.  William writes: 

“You will find on the other side of this card most any kind of a looking man you want to see from the homeliest or the second to the prettiest you can guess who that is.  This is the crew that is hard working in the beets last fall.  I guess you can make out who they are.  It is not a very good picture as it has a sun spot all over it or suns spotted here and there I don’t no (sic) which.  Ever your brother W. N. Perdieu.”   

Gowanda

Gowanda, an unincorporated community, is located on the west side of the South Platte River and was platted in 1910 on the Union Pacific line that ran from Firestone.  The line would eventually be extended to  Fort Collins.  Gowanda sits 4 miles west of Platteville on Highway 66 and was likely named after Gowanda, New York.  Its post office was open from 1915 to 1930, and its agricultural attributes included rich irrigated land producing a variety of crops, a grain elevator, a sugar beet dump, and cattle and dairy farming. 

An interesting story involving horses and bees appeared in a 1916 edition of the Longmont Ledger newspaper.  A man and his team of horses traveling the road between Gowanda and Longmont were severely stung by bees from hives that had been placed close to the road.  The eyes of one horse were closed by the stings, and it was feared that another horse would have to be put down.  The driver was sickened by the numerous stings he received. 

The Fort Vasquez Ranch

Around 1906, William, probably with help from his family, established his farm about one mile south of Platteville.  In the photo note “W.N. Perdieu”  painted on the side of the wagon. 

I was very interested to learn that William’s farm contained the standing remains of Fort Vasquez, a portion of which William had incorporated into his barn.  In fact, the Perdieu place was referred to as the Fort Vasquez Ranch. 

Fort Vasquez

In July of 1835, Pierre “Louis” Vasquez and Andrew Sublette obtained a trading license from William Clark, superintendent of Indian Affairs at St. Louis, and would establish Fort Vasquez that fall.   Vasquez, born in St. Louis in 1795, was the twelfth child of Benito and Julie Papin Vasquez.  His father was Spanish, and his mother was French.  Andrew W. Sublette, born in Somerset, Kentucky, was one of five brothers prominently identified with the western fur trade.   In 1830, Andrew accompanied his brother William, who led that year’s caravan to The Rocky Mountain Rendezvous, the annual gathering where trappers and mountain men sold their furs and hides and replenished their supplies.  It is said that this rendezvous involved the first wagon expedition to the Rocky Mountains.   

Andrew Sublette was reportedly quite a marksman.  While accompanying the supply train for the 1832 Rendezvous, he successfully captured a wild horse by “creasing” it, an inhumane practice. It consisted of shooting a horse in the upper neck near the spinal column, just in front of the ridge between the shoulder blades.  If done correctly, this would stun the horse, causing it to fall.  The shooter would then rush to the horse’s side, tie the animal’s feet together and put a rope halter around its neck before it recovered.   Old mustangers (hunters of wild horses) would say, though, that for every horse caught this way, fifty were killed.  An unnamed cowboy from the dusty past was quoted as saying, “One of the best cow ponies I ever owned I bought from a mustanger who had creased him on the plains east of the Pecos River in New Mexico.  There was a hole in his neck fully two inches deep and wide, where the ball from the heavy buffalo gun had plowed its way through the flesh….”

Vasquez and Sublette hired workers from Mexico to construct the fort of adobe.  The walls of the fort’s perimeter each measured about 100 feet and were two feet thick, and at one corner stood a tower twenty-four feet high.  John Sabile, who reportedly helped build the fort, reported that the adobe mud was prepared by driving oxen around to tramp and mix it.  In 1842,  Vasquez and Sublette sold the place to two men who fared poorly in the business, losing their horse and mule herds to Indians.  They eventually abandoned the fort without paying for it.  In 1864, a man named John Paul took over Fort Vasquez and made it into a way station for stagecoach travel.  Settlements eventually closed in around the old fort.  Its remaining buildings served as a military bivouac, a school, a post office, and a church.   

Many early twentieth century travelers going by the Perdieu place on the road which would someday become Highway 85 recognized the landmark status of the fort’s remains.  Unfortunately, two back-to-back hail and wind storms in August of 1922 tore the barn’s roof off and caused a collapse of the barn’s walls.   No matter what the state of the fort’s remains was, it was known that William, Sarah, and Sarah’s sister Ethel were interested in preserving those remains for history’s sake.  

Marriage

William married Edna Pearl Hoffman at a ceremony in Platteville on June 4, 1911. Edna, who went by her middle name, Pearl, was born in Indiana in January of 1850 to Jacob and Alice Hoffman. Jacob immigrated from  Germany in 1865, and Alice was born in Illinois.  By 1900, Edna’s parents had moved to Weld County to farm and were deceased by the time of Pearl’s marriage to William.  Before marrying William, Pearl worked as a bookkeeper in Platteville.

(Shortly before William and Pearl married, a Greeley Tribune article dated February 9, 1911, reported on a meeting of the Sunday school council hosted at William’s house and attested to William’s culinary skills.  It said, “the ladies went home thinking that someday they would return to take lessons in cooking” from William.)

In a generous gesture, William, knowing that Pearl was itching to visit her relatives in the Northwest with her sister Ethel, persuaded Pearl to make the visit after their wedding. Pearl took him up on it, and he stayed behind to tend the crops until her return in September.  The story about this in the Rocky Mountain News was headlined, “Her Honeymoon is Manless.”

Death

Unfortunately, William would not live to see the preservation of the fort’s remains.     He died at home from pneumonia on February 26, 1930, at age 44.  Family and a large number of friends attended his funeral on February 28th at the Methodist Church in Platteville, where a quartet of two women and two men sang “No Night There,” “Sometime We’ll Understand,” and “Home at Last.”  William’s remains are interred at Platteville’s Mispah Cemetery.

Rebuilding Fort Vasquez

By 1932, only the foundations and a few feet of the fort’s exterior walls remained.   In 1934, Pearl Perdieu and her sister Ethel Hoffman deeded an acre of land surrounding the fort to the Weld County commissioners, and the Platteville Community Club subsequently initiated a plan to rebuild the fort. Thanks in part to an infusion of over $2800 from the U.S. Government’s Works Progress Administration, the fort was rebuilt using bricks from the original. The result was not an exact replica of the original, partly because little archaeological work was done before the reconstruction began. The walls were moved a few yards from the original location.

August 2, 1937, would be a day stacked with significance, marking Platteville’s annual Pickle Day, the dedication of the new fort in front of a crowd of 2,000 people, and the straightening of Highway 85 south of Platteville, thereby eliminating two sharp turns in the original roadway that were considered dangerous.  These elements were tied together by a half mile long parade that gathered at 10:00 in Platteville.  Bearing an historical theme, the parade featured stagecoaches, Indians, covered wagons, scouts and cowboys.  The parade would travel on the newly straightened highway and end at the site of the new fort, where Pearl Perdieu would make the opening address.  Attending on behalf of Colorado Governor Teller Ammons was State Treasurer Homer Bedford to accept the presentation of the fort.  A man named George Hudson of Fort Collins, dressed in full Indian regalia, would treat the crowd to a retrospective on the many interesting events of the early settlement of Northern Colorado by Whites.   

Between 1968 and 1970, archaeological work was completed at the old fort site.  It resulted in the excavation of over 4,000 artifacts, the determination that the original fort’s dimensions were 100 feet X 98.5 feet, and the identification of the true foundations for the interior walls and fireplaces.  

Pearl’s Passing

Pearl Perdieu would pass away at age 78 at the Weld County Nursing Home in Greeley.  She had moved to Greeley in 1944.  Her remains would be interred next to William’s at the Mispah Cemetery. 

REFERENCES:

Leave a Reply