What we know
A road ranch on the creek that still carries its name. Mrs. Byron N. Sanford (Mollie Dorsey Sanford) wrote in her journal on Dec. 27, 1861: 'Last night we stopped at what is called 'Dirty Woman's Ranch' and really it could have no more appropriate name'; a pig had got its head stuck in the cream jar (as quoted by Lavelett, S-0011, p. 46; her account of Camp Weld and Fort Lyon in 1861-62 was printed in the Colorado Magazine in 1930, cited by Perrigo, S-0156). Henry B. Walker and his wife lived 'on what was the 'Dirty Woman Ranch'' from 1862; their son Ben was born there on Aug. 12, 1864, and passing soldiers camped there and bought milk, butter and eggs (Lavelett 1979, S-0013, p. 65; see Henry Walker's house burned, Sept. 1868). A clipping in the Larkspur binders calls it a home station on Monument Creek (S-0199). Lavelett's town history says the gulch was named in the 1870s for a woman who kept animals in her shack (S-0011, p. 46), and Case has the woman homesteading in the 1870s (S-0110); the 1861 journal makes the name at least a decade older. Monument's Dirty Woman Creek Park, declared in 1979, keeps it (S-0013).
Where it was
Glenn Scott's historical trails map, which labels it 'Dirty Womans Ranch 1860 (Location?)' (S-0106): about 220 feet from Dirty Woman Creek and half a mile south-southeast of Front and Second streets. Lavelett puts the gulch at 'the first creek crossed when entering Monument from the south' (S-0011, p. 46), and has the Walkers moving 'down to the edge of Monument' to live on the ranch (S-0013, p. 65). Good to about half a mile.
Placed from a written description, such as a land section, a distance from a landmark or an old survey note.
Sources
- S-0005: Larkspur Historical Society, "Historical Site Survey Binders"
- S-0011: Lucille Lavelett, Through the Years at Monument, Colorado: The Story of Monument, Colorado, 5th printing (Palmer Lake: Palmer Lake Historical Society, 2004); first published Colorado Springs: Valliant Press, 1975
- S-0013: Lucille Lavelett, Monument's Faded Neighboring Communities and Its Folklore: Pring, Husted, Gwillimville, Table Rock, Spring Valley, Greenland (Colorado Springs: printed by ABC Printing, 1979), 70, [40] p., illus., map, facsims.; page numbers cited are those of the third printing (Palmer Lake Historical Society, 2026), which is paged differently from the 1979 printing
- S-0072: The Colorado Magazine (State Historical Society of Colorado), 26 issues 1931–1977, full text
- S-0106: Glenn R. Scott, Historic Trail Map of the Denver 1° × 2° Quadrangle, Central Colorado (USGS Miscellaneous Investigations Series Map I-2639)
- S-0110: Linda Saulnier Case, "Monumental Happenings and Histories" (The Tribune, 2018–2019), part of S-0108
- S-0156: Lynn I. Perrigo, ed., "Major Hal Sayr's Diary of the Sand Creek Campaign," The Colorado Magazine 15, no. 2 (March 1938): 41–57
- S-0199: Larkspur Historical Society, the document store behind its "LHS Search Agent" (larkspurhistoricalsociety.org/resources/lhs-search-agents/): 362 files, about 810 MB, uploaded April–June 2026
Sources are named in the text above. Numbers such as S-0080 refer to our source list. Most newspaper quotations were read in the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection. Long quotations from recent books are shortened here.