Colorado

Colorado is the promised destination of the Enders family’s westward journey: Mr. Enders hopes to find gold there, while the road toward it becomes inseparable from Mama’s reluctance to leave home and her death before the family arrives. In the story, Colorado is at once a hoped-for beginning and a place that remains beyond reach as the family’s plans change.

Destination and Motive

Mr. Enders decides that the family must go west to seek gold in Colorado’s hills. Mama does not want to leave Independence, Missouri: her brother’s home, her church, her friends, and her literary ladies are all part of the life she is being asked to abandon. Her grief at leaving is shared by Lizzy, making Colorado a destination approached through separation rather than uncomplicated hope.

Lizzy nevertheless describes the family’s intended future as a return: they will go on to Colorado, find gold, and someday come back for Mama so she can receive a proper burial. The plan links the search for a new livelihood to a promise concerning the dead. It expresses what the travelers hope to do, not an outcome the account confirms.

The Route West

The journey toward Colorado takes the family along the Santa Fe Trail. Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy writes that he wants his grandniece to experience that travel, as he had often done, before railroads take over. A train could carry them to southeast Colorado, the farthest point reached by rail, but the route they undertake preserves the overland passage as part of the journey’s purpose.

By the time Mama dies, the trip has already lasted fifty days, and the family still has farther to go. That measure gives the westward movement a cost in time as well as distance: Colorado remains the objective, but the journey has already been altered by loss before the travelers reach it.

An Uncertain Destination

After Mama’s death, Lizzy still speaks of continuing to Colorado with her father and returning for her mother. Yet she is also told that she cannot go on to Colorado with him. The evidence establishes this interruption to the plan, but does not specify here what ultimately happens to her or whether she reaches Colorado.

Colorado therefore functions less as a completed arrival than as the point toward which the family’s hopes and separations are directed. The gold search gives the journey its stated aim; the Santa Fe Trail and Mama’s death make clear that reaching the destination is not the same as fulfilling the promises made along the way.