HARVEY AND DORA (James Harvey Lafon and Dora Jane Knapp)

In late November of 1887, Harvey, his brother-in-law Tom Cook, and one of their neighbors hitched up a couple of wagons and headed west to Dillon, Colorado for supplies. About 30 miles out of Egeria Park, they stopped on the side of Gore Range to wait for Harvey's family.
Nicholas [Alexander Lafon], Elizabeth, Will, Carl, Ella, Don and Mort were coming from Kansas to see the wonders they'd read about in Minnie and Nellie and Harvey's letters home: Rocky Mountains flush with wild game, cold mountain streams thick with fish, and rich caches of gold, silver and other minerals just waiting to be tugged from the ground. They had been on the road about a month, making excellent time by traveling light, Nicholas driving a farm wagon pulled by three horses, with a spare for mountain passes, and Will handling a good-sized team of geldings hitched to an almost new three-and-a-quarter-inch mountain wagon. On today's freeways, the journey from Wilsey, Kansas to Egeria Park (now Yampa), Colorado is about 660 miles, making the Lafon's average speed a surprising 20.6 miles per day.
On November 23rd or 24th, the family met up with Harvey's welcoming party. Tom Cook served bear steak for supper, butchered from the black bear he had shot the night before. None of the family had ever eaten bear meat before and Nicholas didn't like it, but some of the family did. That night they all camped out in the beautiful Gore Mountains. The next day, Tom and the neighbor went on to Dillon while Harvey escorted his family to their new home. They pulled into Harvey's ranch about nine or ten o'clock at night on November 25th, just as the first snow of the winter started covering the ground.
Harvey's place was one hundred and sixty acres in the lush Yampa River valley. He and the Cooks lived there, the Cook family comprising Tom, Harvey's sister Nellie (Sarah) , and their children. They kept cattle, but seldom butchered one for themselves. As Don said, "cattle would always sell for money and money was a scarce item among them." Like most settlers along the Yampa River, they "went shopping" by camping at the hunting lodge on Oak Creek for a day or two to kill their winter supply of elk meat.
In December, Nicholas, Harvey, Will and Tom took a team and sled with provisions, bedding, horse feed for one night and their rifles to the hunting lodge. Harvey and Tom told Will that he should go with one of them at least the first day so that he didn't get lost, but Will, then twenty-one, was determined to go on his own. Before noon he ran into a herd of elk and spent the next few hours tracking and finally killing a spike bull. By the time he took out the entrails and started for camp, Will realized that he was lost.

Tom had told him what to do in case he did get lost. His recipe is very simple and is as follows. When you find you're lost, don't get frightened or panicky. Take it easy, there is nothing to be afraid of. If you don't know positively which way you should go, don't go very far from where you are. There will be somebody looking for you the next day. If in a timbered country go into the timber, it is warmer than in the open. Collect wood sufficient before dark to keep a fire going all night. Don't build your fire too close or under any tree lest you may start a crown forest fire. Don't build a big fire. Just enough to keep warm by is best. And as a last resort start DOWN stream and keep going down stream. You will come to some settlement where there are people living before long.

Tom had heard Will's gunshots so he knew what direction to go to pick up his trail. At daybreak, he and Harvey set off, Tom walking upstream and Harvey walking down in case Will was in that direction. Will too left camp at daybreak, walking downstream as per his brother-in-law's instructions, and he soon met Tom. Tom and Harvey agreed that whoever found Will would fire two shots in quick succession. So Tom fired two shots and the manhunt was over. Despite this minor setback, the family had more elk meat than they could possibly use that winter thanks to Harvey's excellence as a hunter.
In addition to elk, the valley was rife with game: bear, deer, mountain lions, lynx, badgers, coyotes, groundhogs, woodchucks, antelope, grouse, duck, rabbits, mountain sheep, wolverine, grey wolves, Sandhill cranes, plover, Canadian geese, red and silver fox, beaver, and Yampa squirrels. There were thousands of sage chickens and all the streams of any size were full of fish, mostly trout with some grayling. Harvey was as good at fishing as he was at hunting, so there was always plenty to eat.
Harvey had a strong and virile iron-grey stallion that he used for breeding in the summer, a service that several ranchers in the area paid for. Unbeknownst to him, Don and Mort, who were nine and seven at the time, decided to breed the stallion to Harvey's iron-grey mare in the middle of winter. When Harvey found out he was furious, and threatened to "cut some willow switches and wear them out" on the boys. While Harvey fumed, Nicholas and Elizabeth looked serious and Ella looked at her brothers and grinned knowing they were in for it. Nicholas finally broke the tension by laughing, "You are pretty small fry to be handling that kind of horse", and the matter was dropped. The colt came about the first of March and was a good one, Don writes, so Harvey was quite pleased in the end.
One summer Harvey took Elizabeth and the three youngest children camping for a week about ten miles from Yampa. A large forest fire had burned over the tops of several hills, killing the timber for several thousand acres, and it was now covered with wild raspberry bushes. They spent the week picking raspberries and making gallons of jam and jelly. There were several raspberry patches closer to Harvey's place, but they never went to any of them unless Harvey could go along with his good Marlin repeating rifle in case there were bears feeding on the berries. Harvey and Tom trapped several bears before the family moved out there.
Not too long after he moved to Colorado, Nicholas bargained with Harvey for his place and some of his cows. So, Harvey filed on a homestead adjoining Frank and (his sister) Anne Bird's ranch on a sagebrush flat on Yampa River six or seven miles away. Tom and Will filed claims on Hunt Creek a mile or so away. That winter, the men all worked building log houses for Tom and Will. Harvey lived with his folks and helped everyone with their fencing, grubbing willows, irrigating, putting in crops and haying. In the summer, Nicholas and the three youngest boys helped Harvey build a house and fence on his new homestead.
Meanwhile, Will went back to Kansas and married Lydia Knapp, the girl he had been going with before leaving Wilsey, and brought her back to Colorado. Lydia had five sisters, the oldest, a dark beauty with Frieda Kahlo eyebrows, named Dora Jane. In 1882, age seventeen, Dora had married Edward D. Brown of Wilsey. Their brief alliance ended when Edward died digging a well. According to Don, she was already Harvey's "girl" when he left Kansas in 1885, and Harvey had been corresponding with her ever since. After four years of separation, Harvey finally sent for Dora and they were married October 9, 1889 by Nicholas Mandell, Justice of the Peace, in Egeria, Routt County, Colorado. Nicholas and Elizabeth were witnesses.
For some reason, Harvey's parents decided to sell their property and leave Yampa in March 1890. Harvey and Dora stayed put, and their first child, Ethel May, was born in October 1890. Four more children were born in Yampa: Jennie Elizabeth (1891), Anna Pearl (1893), Raymond Harvey (1895), and Phyllis Thelma (1897). In the spring of 1898, Harvey and Dora sold their ranch in Routt County and moved to Creede, Colorado, presumably because Harvey's folks had settled near there.

Creede, 8854 feet above sea level, got its start in 1889 when Nicholas Creed stopped for lunch while he was passing through and discovered what became the Holy Moses Mine. Almost overnight his camp became a tent city. The town grew by 300 people a day in the summer of 1890. By 1892, when Creede was yielding a million dollars worth of silver ore a month, over 10,000 people lived there, including Calamity Jane Canary and lawman Bat Masterson. Bob Ford, the man who shot Jessie James, ran a saloon in Creede and con-artist Soapy Smith had a gambling den. According to Don LaFont, Creede had the reputation of being "the wickedest town in the world for the size of it."
Along with his family, Harvey brought two teams of work horses, a covered wagon, a heavy spring wagon, and a young man named Bert Rakestraw to drive one of the teams. He leased a farm, and raised a good crop of hay the first year he was in Creede. In 1899, he rented the John C. MacKinzie ranch in Old Sunnyside, just a walk over the hill from Creede. That September, Dora delivered a healthy baby boy, James Martin (Jim).
In 1900-01, Don writes, "Harvey built a nice four room log house, a horse barn, cow shed, a cellar, corrals and had ditched the land he bought from John MacKinzie." Dora's sister Alice came out to marry Harvey's brother Carl. Harvey and Dora had another son, George Alexander. Nicholas and Ella's husband, George Higgins, both filed on homesteads, and George built a nice log house. Life was going well. Then the bottom started to fall out.
In August 1902, Harvey's mother became ill and within six weeks she was gone. The family never seemed the same after that. Nicholas went to live in a two-room cabin close to Harvey and Dora's. They had another son, Clifford, who died from pneumonia a week before Christmas 1904, one month before his first birthday. A year or so later, Carl, Mort, and Nellie's families left for Washington State, and Will took his family to Missouri. Before long, Nicholas left to join his family in Washington, and Don intended to do the same.
Harvey decided to leave. He planned to sell the John Mackinzie place and go to Missouri. When Don heard these plans, he changed his mind about leaving Colorado and bought Harvey's ranch. Shortly thereafter, in June 1907, the brothers received news that Nicholas had died in Seattle. In September Harvey and the family left for Missouri. Dora was five months pregnant. She gave birth to their fifth son, Lemuel, on December 16. The baby died in Sleeper, Laclede, Missouri two months later, February 21, 1908. Dora died the next day.
Two years later, the 1910 US census shows, Harvey and the children were living in a middle-class neighborhood on the Main Street of Linn Creek, Missouri. Harvey was employed as the proprietor of a business with neighbors including a dentist, a merchant, a manager at the telephone office, and a public school teacher. Jim, now ten, was awarded a Perfect Attendance Certificate from Linn Creek School. Despite the difficulty of caring on his own for seven children, ranging from nineteen to eight years old, of living and working in town when he had always lived and worked on his own land, and of being away from an extended family that had always before stuck together, Harvey appears to have managed rather well. We can only guess what might have happened over the next decade to leave him, in 1920, with practically nothing.
The few facts we have may offer possible clues. In August 1910, twelve-year-old Phyllis died of typhoid. Typhoid took her eighteen-year-old sister, Jennie, the following month. In 1913, the eldest daughter, Ethel, was buried in Fort Bridger, Wyoming, aged twenty-two. In just over a decade, Harvey had lost both of his parents, his wife, and five of his nine children.
We don't know why Ethel was in Wyoming or whether she was there alone, with her sister Annie, or with the entire family. When Annie married Lester Gourley in 1914, both the bride and groom gave towns near Fort Bridger as their homes. Despite claiming residency in Wyoming, the pair was married in Ogden, Utah. What brought them there we don't know. Harvey, presumably with his three remaining sons, came to Ogden about 1916.
On June 5, 1917, Jim enlisted in the US Army, serving until January 1919. A year later, the US census shows Harvey and his sons living in a boarding house on Washington Avenue, not the most salubrious area of Ogden. George, eighteen, was unemployed; James, age twenty, worked as a glazier in a paint store; and Ray, age twenty-three, worked as a farm laborer. Harvey, now fifty-nine, worked as a laborer in a coal yard.
When he was sixty years old, Harvey contracted pulmonary tuberculosis. On July 15, 1923, the doctor was called to his home, now at 235 35th Street, Ogden. The following day he died. His stated occupation was retired rancher.

James Harvey Lafon (7 Jan 1861-16 Jul 1923 and Dora Jane Knapp (19 Nov 1864 - 22 Feb 1908)
1. Ethel May (4 Oct 1890 - 13 May 1913)
2. Jennie Elizabeth (8 Oct 1891 - 22 Sept 1910)
3. Anna Pearl (11 Sept 1893 - 13 Feb 1979)
+ Lewis Osborn Gourley (20 Jun 1891 - 24 Mar 1966)
4. Raymond Harvey (13 Jul 1895 - 18 May 1968)
+ Laura Ellen Stokes Barton(14 Sept 1894 - 7 Aug 1979)
5. Phyllis Thelma (31 Aug 1897 - 2 Aug 1910)
6. James Morton (4 Sept 1899 - 27 Jul 1970)
Ruby LaVon Hansen (18 Dec 1906 - 24 May 1951)
7. George Alexander (28 Sept 1901 - 30 Jul 1954)
+ Lila Jensen Bullough (26 Nov 1903 - 28 Aug 1983)
8. Clifford Conroy (10 Jan 1904 - 16 Dec 1904)
9. Lemuel Leslie (16 Dec 1907 - 21 Feb 1908)