Outside of Pueblo, Colorado, the name James Pierson Beckwourth or Beckwith as it has also appeared, has little modern resonance. Beckwourth was born into slavery in 1798. His father was white, his enslaved mother, African American. Beckwourth’s father freed him in his teen years so that he could apprentice with a local blacksmith. It would be a skill he would add to a handful of others over the course of his life, including Army scout, fur trapper and trader, professional gambler, cowboy and merchant. It was as a merchant that he came to Colorado and where he is often credited with establishing the first trading post in what would become Pueblo in 1842.

But while Beckwourth’s name is, perhaps, more ephemeral in Pueblo than topical, that is not the case for another local Pueblo legend, the late Ruth Steele, an African American woman who dedicated her life to making certain Black history would be far more than a 28-day annual commemoration. Miss Steel died in 2021 but her story remains one of Pueblo’s most endearing and important for African Americans and everyone else who calls the southern Colorado city home.

The story of Ruth Steele began in Texas in 1935. But two weeks after she was born, her family brought her to Pueblo where she was raised and where she would make her mark by her grandmother. The precocious young woman skipped a couple of grades allowing her to graduate from Centennial High School at age 15. She would later earn degrees from then Pueblo Junior College and later the University of Colorado. Professionally, she was a paralegal. But her passion, her life’s work, was civil rights.

As a young woman she was in Washington for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s, “I Have A Dream,” speech. In an interview with The Pueblo Chieftain, she would modestly recall how she “had been one of the ladies sent to Washington to set up for the historic speech. Later, in 1965, she was in Selma, Alabama, marching with King and others on ‘Bloody Sunday,’ as they crossed the Edmund Pettis Bridge.

Miss Steele counted among her friends King’s wife, Coretta, also the late Congressman John Lewis and civil rights advocate and entertainer Harry Belafonte. The red dress she wore for the iconic ‘Dream’ speech and later in Selma were keepsakes until the day she died.

After King’s assassination in 1968, Miss Steele worked relentlessly to honor the King name and ensure that Black his- tory and civil rights remain beacons of both light and hope in Pueblo and southern Colorado.

She along with other members and friends of Pueblo’s African American community lobbied former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb to donate a statue of Dr. King standing with Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Black boy savagely killed in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a White woman in a Mississippi dime store. The statue was removed from Denver’s City Park and now resides in Pueblo where it sits outside of another of Miss Steele’s passions, The Lincoln House, a home that once served as an orphanage to African American children and seniors, mostly older women.

The structure, now restored after years of inattention and long past its days as an orphanage, is known as Friendly Harbor, a mental health services center. Its role as an orphanage ended in 1963. But in its heyday, it provided shelter for African American orphans who came from as many as seven different states. It is also listed on the State Register of Historic Properties.

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed legislation mak- ing January 15th, Dr. King’s birthday, a national holiday. But the law making it official did not take effect until 1986. Again, Miss Steele found herself working in Pueblo and Denver to get Colorado lawmakers to do the same and make MLK Day a Colorado holiday. She and friends successfully staged the first in the nation Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., program in Pueblo two years before the first official MLK holiday.

Miss Steele died one day after the 2021 MLK March in Pueblo. Her illness, however, did not stop her from taking part in the program she had ushered in more than thirty years earlier. From her hospital bed, she listened to the speeches at the Pueblo march and the later the formal program over the telephone.

Friends who knew and worked with Miss Steele said she lived her life in accordance with words from one of Dr. King’s favorite hymns, “If I Can Help Somebody.”

“If I can help somebody, as I pass along…if I can cheer somebody with word or song…then my living shall not be in vain.”

It is not a place one thinks about when the topic of Black History Month comes up. No surprise, Pueblo, Colorado, a city of roughly 112,000, has only a 2.4 percent African American population. We pay tribute to those Black Americans who helped shape Pueblo.

It would be hard to say that New Mexico native Brian Garcia is a cop trapped in a musician’s body or a musician trapped in a cop’s. Whatever the case, Garcia’s found a way to balance these competing forces. He does his police job as a patrolman in Taos during the week and performs—weddings, anniversaries, birthdays and graduations—on the weekend and as often as he can.

The soft spoken Questa, New Mexico, native has been playing an instrument of one kind or another for most of his life. “I started out in middle school learning to play guitar,” he said. He still plays guitar with his band, The Most Wanted, but also plays drums and when necessary, picks up the saxophone. He’s mostly a saxman when he’s gigging with another band.

Garcia has no allusions about where his music will take him. But neither does he place limits on where his dreams will take him. “One of my dreams is to play The Grand Old Opry,” he said. People who’ve heard him—and that includes audiences in scores of the towns, big and little that dot New Mexico—believe he has the talent to punch his ticket for Nashville and ‘the Opry.’

Before he put on a badge, Garcia drove a truck on a route that took him through a lot of the same towns where he plays gigs today. His band plays mostly country, “about 80 percent,” he said, with Al Hurricane tunes, the man he calls ‘the godfather of New Mexico music,’ a good portion of the rest.

While he likes artists like country stars like George Strait and Chris Stapleton, Garcia does not see himself as a clone by any means. “I don’t think I sound like anyone. I think I have a unique voice.”

While he’s well known from east to west and north to south across the ‘Land of Enchantment,’ Garcia and The Most Wanted, have also played up and down the Front Range with periodic stops in Denver. And they’re ready with C&W, Top Forty, Doo Wop and, for good measure, cumbias and rancheras. They are, he said, a band for all seasons.

When the band’s hitting on all cylinders and the audience is cooking, he knows what’s coming next. “’Tennessee Whiskey’ is the biggest request we get,” he said. Other times it’s ‘Don’t Close Your Eyes,’ by Keith Whitley or Johnny Cash’s ‘Folsom Prison Blues.’

There are four members in the band, including a younger brother, Kevin, who mans the skins—drums, for the uninitiated. And before COVID, Garcia said they were booked nearly every weekend of the month. Things are slowly returning to normal.

Garcia and his wife, Veronica, also his high school sweetheart, have two sons, ages eight and fourteen. He said his wife isn’t nearly as troubled about his being away on weekends performing as she is concerned about his job as a police officer. “It’s a little scary for my family,” he said, “but they’ve always been supportive.” Still, everyday when he puts on the uniform and leaves home, he makes sure to “tell them I love them.”

Garcia has found a way to balance his music with his other job and, in a way, he said, there’s a connection with the two. When he’s playing, he said he’s doing it to make people feel good. When he’s patrolling, he said, he looks for opportunities to help people out, to lend a hand. “It’s kind of nice being in Taos. It’s a smaller community and it’s nice to get out and know a lot of people,” he said. “You can take extra time to make sure that things get resolved satisfactorily.”

But there’s an emotional side of the job that, Garcia said, is heartbreaking. Opiates, a scourge that has ravaged small town America, have found their way into rural New Mexico. “It’s bad. A lot of good people have turned to that for comfort,” Garcia said. It’s a big challenge, he said, that makes the job more dangerous. “People can become unpredictable…the nature of crime is just more violent.”

While hitting the stage in Nashville is a dream tons of country singers harbor, Garcia won’t be heartbroken if it doesn’t happen. Playing music, to him, is far more important than where he’ll play it. It would be nice to be on ‘the Opry’ stage, he said. But if it doesn’t happen, he’ll still be landing weekend gigs and performing with the same energy as if it were the big time. “I’ll be playing until I can’t play anymore,” said Garcia, “even if it’s not in a gig.” Even it means strum- ming the guitar alone in his studio.

News of where Garcia and The Most Wanted will be performing as the music season heats up is a work in progress. The band’s website is under construction. But he suggests visiting the New Mexico Hispano Music Association website. It posts the latest information on scores of the state’s performers and can be found at www.nmhma.org.

If you ask for a single reason to visit Cañon City, southern Colorado’s off the beaten path hamlet, don’t ask a local and especially don’t ask the town’s Mayor, Ashley Smith, unless you have a lot of time on your hands. For starters, the Mayor will tell you that Cañon City is celebrating its sesquicentennial, 150 years as a town and it doesn’t stop there. As you might expect, Smith is the town’s biggest booster.

Fremont County and Cañon City, the county seat, are nearly dead center in Colorado and home to just under 50,000 countywide residents. The region’s first White settlers arrived in early 1858 after gold was discovered just north of where the city lies today. But it wasn’t until 1862 when oil was discovered just north of the city’s boundaries that the town incorporated and began to grow.

The first well drilled in the region also became the first commercial well west of the Mississippi River. But any dreams of it becoming an oil boom town faded over time. But while the town didn’t become an oil patch, it became something else and something so much better.

The town of Cañon City, despite a population nearing 20,000, might easily be described as a bedroom community, nearly equidistant from Pueblo to the east and Colorado Springs to the north and east. Both sit approximately 40 miles away.

“We’re a small town,” said Smith, before adding that it’s also a town with both charm and authenticity. She describes it as a place where “everybody waves at you when you pass ’em on the street.’ She sells the town as something akin to ‘Mayberry at the foot of the mountains.’

Cañon City is approximately 120 miles southwest of Denver and an easy a drive in good weather. While there are other routes to take, most drivers take I-25 to Colorado Springs before cutting off to state highway 119 and on to Penrose. From there, it’s an easy twelve miles to the west before arriving.

Once there, you might hit one of the town’s many seasonal celebrations or take in one of a handful of what Smith might call Cañon City’s ‘must see’ tourist attractions. And there are a bunch.

In warm weather months, there’s the Royal Gorge and the country’s highest suspension bridge. Or, said the Mayor, you can ride the train that runs beneath it and parallel to the Arkansas River which, according to Smith, is the “most rafted river in the country”. Not for you? Then, she suggests a visit to the Territorial Prison Museum, a facility that traces the history of the state’s and town’s famous or infamous prison legacy. And, though, the town is rich in prison lore—it either houses “nine or ten” correctional facilities, said Smith, Cañon City is so much more than prisons. Nonetheless, Smith is not afraid to drop a little prison minutiae when the time is right and, during the interview, did drop this nugget: Colorado’s prisons not only make all of Colorado’s license plates, “they make them for the whole country.”

But, not unlike a butterfly, Cañon City is emerging from a cocoon. Its downtown, said Smith, is slowly undergoing something of a minor renaissance. The once abandoned Hotel St. Cloud, a hotel that is on the national registry for historic places, has been bought and transformed into “a boutique hotel and high end experience,” the Mayor said. Smith also recommended a visit to the town’s Fremont Center for the Arts or a visit to the Gibson Mansion. Also, if you’re hungry, there are also a few restaurants that have recently opened, including an Indian restaurant, Nirvana, “that rivals any big city restaurant,” she said.

One thing that may surprise, even shock, about Cañon City is that “71 percent of our community commutes outside the city” for jobs, said Smith. A good portion of the town’s workforce holds jobs in high tech. A lot of workers commute to high tech jobs in Colorado Springs, she said. A lot of others stick around town and telecommute to work, “renting office space with everything you would need for your profession.”

Weatherwise, there may not be a more predictable place in Colorado to visit. Despite an elevation that exceeds Denver’s 5,280 feet, the town claims to be ‘the climate capital of Colorado.’ Sitting at 5,300 feet, it’s earned the nickname for its warm winter temperatures and temperate spring and fall readings.

The town officially celebrates is 150th birthday on April 2nd. Part of the celebration will be the unveiling of “a new ‘C,’ for Cañon City, one that will be lit up every night of the year. The idea of two ‘C’s,’ said Smith, was abandoned because it might appear too blurry.