Holmes, Julia Archibald (1838–1887)

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Holmes, Julia Archibald (1838–1887)

American feminist who was the first woman to climb Pike's Peak. Born Julia Archibald in Nova Scotia, Canada, on February 15, 1838; died in 1887; married James Holmes (an abolitionist), in 1857 (divorced 1870); children: four (two died before reaching adulthood).

The daughter of staunch abolitionists, Julia Holmes was born in Nova Scotia in 1838. The family first settled in Massachusetts but moved to Kansas in 1848 to assist in the effort to make that territory a free state. Holmes, whose home was a stop on the Underground Railroad, developed into an independent and adventuresome woman and, in 1857, married abolitionist James Holmes. A year later, the couple risked a move further west to New Mexico, an arduous journey that Holmes made mostly by foot while the only other woman in the party chose to travel in a covered wagon.

When the band reached Colorado, Holmes made her historic Pike's Peak climb. Dressed in bloomers, moccasins, and a hat, and carrying a 17-pound pack of supplies on her back, she accompanied her husband and two other men on the trek, while the rest of the group remained in camp. Although it was July, the party encountered several snowstorms on their ascent of over 14,000 feet. On August 5, 1858, from the top of the mountain, Holmes penned a letter to her mother in which she expressed her pride in accomplishing the climb. "Nearly everyone tried to discourage me from attempting it," she wrote, "but I believed that I should succeed; and now here I am.…How I sigh for the poet's power ofdescription, so that I might give you some faint idea of the grandeur and beauty."

Holmes and her husband eventually settled in Taos, New Mexico, where she worked as a news correspondent for the New York Tribune and gave birth to four children, two of whom did not survive childhood. After divorcing her husband in 1870, Holmes returned East, settling in Washington, D.C. Employed by the federal government, she was one of the first women to be promoted in the civil-service system, advancing to become chief of the division of Spanish Correspondence in the Bureau of Education. She also wrote poetry and worked for the suffrage movement before dying prematurely at age 48.