ROSA V. BEALL. Rosa Beall was Gallatin Valley’s first white woman settler, according to the headline of the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, article by Carly Flandro. Rosa was born in New York in 1838, and was taught the fine arts of a finished young lady by her parents, Mr. And Mrs. James Barker, and later graduated with a degree in art and music. She was taught painting, art history, and music, and taught piano lessons to children until she moved with her family to Wisconsin, where she met and married Abram H. VanVlierden, and bore two daughters, Minnie and Lola VanVlierden. When the girls were five and three years old, the family struck out on a wagon train headed for Idaho. At Fort Laramie, the VanVlierden family joined the Montana bound Townsend Wagon Train, and headed toward Yellowstone Country, experiencing many hardships and accidents along the way, including being swept downstream in the wagon along with the oxen, being attacked by Indians, who killed nine of the men, and tried to burn out the train, and avoiding deaths by diseases such as chicken pox and measles that decimated many of their fellow travelers. Rosa and her daughters often got out and walked the trail, taking in fresh air and getting exercise, while pulling grasses for the livestock along the way, and she attributed this to keeping them healthy during the trip. Free land was being offered in Gallatin Valley, ant that is where Rosas family and other white settlers staked claim to lands that the Crow, Blackfeet and Shoshone tribes had traditionally used for hunting. Later, as the Indians came to her door, she sometimes fed them, sometimes ran them away using a revolver. Once the family settled in Gallatin Valley in 1864, Rosa and the girls were often left alone, living in the wagon for the winter months while her husband went out on hunting trips, once keeping a pack of wolves at bay until he returned. That following year, they build a cabin with sod for a roof, which dripped so much mud after rains that it ruined much of the items she had brought with her. She not only survived, but played the generous hostess, keeping the only candles she had, to use when guests called. She gathered fuel from fallen trees nearby for fires and light, and carried water from the creek. She befriended the famous John Bozeman one late night, by attending a birthing in his cabin, and survived the flour famine in the winter of 1864, living only on Elk meat for those months. In late 1867, Rosa and Abram VanVlierden were divorced, she was left penniless and homeless, and he took her daughters back East, where both passed away within two years of their departure, a loss that Rosa never recovered from. During the ensuing months, Rosa, never took charity, but supported herself by sewing and cooking, until November 1868 when she married prominent architect and co-founder of Bozeman, William J. Beall, and they lived in a home he built for her, on land that is now Beall Park. Rosa Beall, continued through the years as a prominent supporter of the need to bring culture and learning to this rough Western city, and was active and implemental in several organizations, including, the Lending Library of Bozeman, in 1884, the Pioneers’ Society of Gallatin County, the Ladies’ Guild of St. James Episcopal Church, the Lily of the Valley Chapter, Order of Eastern Star, the Bozeman Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and worked to develop the arts by introducing painters and sculptors to wealthy patrons, and later donating the stone building that now houses the Beall Park Art Center in Downtown Bozeman. Four years before her death, in 1930, Rosa was honored with an invitaiton to unveil the monument to John Bozeman in Livingston, Montana, because of her personal friendship with that legendary man. Rosa Beall was a true Pioneer Daughter, and left many writings, scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, invitations and letters, which are housed in the MSU-Bozeman Library, and which contain voluminous information about the exciting early days and times of Montana. She eventually wrote for the newspaper about the history of the early days of Bozeman, and one quote in a 1923 article, she ended by saying: To those who have been permitted to remain to see this, our beautiful city, as it is today, there is great happiness in the knowledge that others are completing and making beautiful what was begun in the long ago of ... 1864.
Posted on: Tue, 09 Sep 2014 11:00:00 +0000
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