Tales from Pioneer Days
The CWA Pioneer Interviews
Late in 1933, in the thick of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Civil Works Administration, a job-creation program that was part of the New Deal he’d created earlier in his presidency. Although most CWA jobs were manual labor, the program also employed artists and writers left jobless in the dismal economy of the early ‘30s. These new jobs were temporary, and by mid-1934 the program had disbanded. Though it was short-lived, Coloradans of today owe a debt of gratitude to the CWA, because among the projects it created is an incredible set of interviews that shed light on the early days of our state.
Moving quickly after the establishment of the CWA, the noted Colorado historian LeRoy Hafen helped launch an ambitious project to use CWA funding to hire unemployed writers to travel county by county to conduct interviews with Colorado “pioneers.” The interviewees were individuals who’d resided in the county over a long period of time and could provide personal insights into the area’s history. The State Natural and Historical Society of Colorado, today’s History Colorado, administered the program. The writers Hafen chose for the project tackled their task with gusto, and as a result, by the summer of 1934 about two-thirds of all the counties in the state had been canvassed. The resulting interviews were transcribed as the “CWA Pioneer Interviews” collection, and in the 1960s the transcriptions were microfilmed. But until now the interviews were never cataloged properly, and as a result this amazing resource has been little used by historians and others researching the history of Colorado.
Often, the CWA writers sought out elderly pioneers, some of whom came to our state in the initial gold rush in 1859. As first-person accounts by ordinary people, the interviews tell an amazing story of the hardships, sacrifices and triumphs of these early-day residents. As I’ve gone through these interviews in detail, I’ve been humbled by the grit many of these people displayed. One man told of surviving a cannon blast during the siege of Vicksburg in the Civil War, his life saved only by a cartridge canister on his belt that had slipped to the front of his torso and took the brunt of the shrapnel that exploded at his feet. Another told a humorous story of helping a Navajo chief win a horse-race bet with a chief from another tribe by bringing in an actual racehorse from Kentucky. And a woman who’d had a difficult life prior to her arrival in Colorado didn't blink an eye in relating how she and her husband accidentally built their first home on top of a nest of rattlesnakes. Stories like these are legion in this unique collection.
We hope to have all the CWA Pioneer Interviews cataloged and in our online Library & Research Center catalog within the next year. As part of this process, we’re also creating digital scans of each interview, and the full text of the interviews will be available free online via the History Colorado website. These interviews will prove to be an invaluable resource for understanding how real people, people of different races and cultures with real hardships and real hopes, helped shape the Colorado we know today.