Ancestry Magazine

A graphoanalyst examines the writing of Willard Darling, an early Colorado resident.

In 1870, Willard Mortimer Darling left his wife and children at home in Independence, Iowa to join the Union Colonists upon Colorado’s eastern plains. The Union Colonist movement was established in New York by Nathan Meeker and newspaper magnate Horace Greeley in an effort to create a “model town” in the unsettled lands of the West. Greeley and Meeker extolled the virtues of a fertile, pristine frontier paradise in speeches and newspaper articles. (It was Greeley who, in 1850, had immortalized the phrase, “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country,” something he’d borrowed from Indiana journalist John Soule.) Greeley and Meeker’s Union Colony plan attracted hundreds of people.

When Willard Darling arrived in the spring of 1870 at the plot of land which was to be the Union Colony, he and his fellow travelers were aghast at what they saw. The land was dry and brown, barren of trees and water. Many, feeling betrayed and misled, did not stay the hour; they reboarded the train and returned east. Though shocked at the aridity of the land, Darling chose to remain and try his luck at establishing a home and business.

A Successful Homestead
He sent for his family the following year, and eventually the Union Colony flourished into the town of Greeley, Colorado. The Darlings built a house in town; several years later, they secured ranch and farmland northeast of Greeley, where they built a two-story brick farmhouse with surrounding outbuildings, including barns and tool sheds. This was the home where my parents moved in the spring of 1973 with my brother and me.

I grew up surrounded by the legacy of the Darlings and others like them-hardy souls who braved the unforgiving plains and built a life there. Though I never knew the family, I reconstructed their story in my mind from tell-tale objects they left behind: beaten and worn harnesses and leather straps, broken carts, a hitching post, old bank checks.

Last autumn my curiosity about the Darlings drew me to start doing research at the Greeley Museum in Greeley, Colorado. I located copies of letters Willard Darling had written to his wife. The content of the homesteader’s letters gave me insight into his life and personality, but so did the actual script of his writing.

A Portrait Emerges
By analyzing Darling’s handwriting samples, I doubled the information I learned about him and his family. I was able to create a picture of the pioneer.

The strong rhythm, precision, and consistency in Darling’s handwriting point to a person who was consistent, stable, and proceeded into situations with a sense of rhythm. The well-balanced “f”s are a sign of strong organizational ability. Despite his predisposition to organization and balance, the breaks in the handwriting betray his intuitive nature. The loops reaching into the upper and lower portion of his handwriting show his ability to have both material and abstract imagination. The long t-bars in his “t”s show a certain enthusiasm, and the straight, strong line in the descending portion of his lower loops designate strong determination.

I formed a profile of Mr. Darling as a warmhearted, generous, and stable man. He tended to be more objective than emotional, and there were hints of pessimism in his attitude. He was selective in his generosity, but not stingy. He was consistent and not given to mood swings, carrying strong patterns in his daily routines. Darling was a good organizer, both in thought and daily habits. He used a great deal of intuition in his reasoning, functioning as much from a gut level as he did from his intellect. He was a logical thinker, building each new conclusion upon the last. He was someone who experienced strong visual imagination, with an ability to structure concrete or material ideas in his mind. He could also grasp abstract thought, but was not prone to creating abstract ideas. This was someone who had vision, but was not given to flights of fancy. Darling’s enthusiasm, determination, and stubbornness extended far beyond the point when others had given up. His ambition was strong and practical—he did not underestimate himself. There was an underlying restlessness that drove him. He was an honest person who carried himself with pride and dignity.

Dana Judy is a freelance writer and graphoanalyst living in Fort Collins, Colorado with her fiancé and his two cats.