Anne Ellis

Anna Heister was born in Christian County, Missouri, the daughter of Albert Lawrence Heister and Rachel Swearengen Heister (later Leavitt). She traveled West with her extended family in a covered wagon,^[3] and grew up in mining camps near Bonanza, Colorado.^[4]

Ellis supported herself as a seamstress when she was a young widow with two children.^[5] Later she worked as a camp cook. She was the elected treasurer of Saguache County from 1918 to 1924.^[4] She went to New Mexico to recover her health, and started writing in her convalescence,^[6] encouraged by Santa Fe writer and artist Ina Sizer Cassidy.^[7] She covered subjects including poverty, bereavement, sheep shearing, race relations, Native Americans, county politics, and equal rights conventions in her writing.^[5][8] She was working on a fourth book, In White Bread Time, when she died in 1938.^[9]

• The Life of An Ordinary Woman (1929)^[10]
• Plain Anne Ellis: More About the Life of an Ordinary Woman (1931)^[11][12]
• Sunshine Preferred; The Philosophy of an Ordinary Woman (1934)^[13]

Ellis married George Fleming in 1894; he died in a mining accident in 1898,^[14] when they had two young daughters, Nita and Joy. She married Herbert Manville Ellis in 1901, and had a son, Earl. Her younger daughter died from diphtheria in 1907,^[14] and her second husband died in 1911. She moved to Santa Barbara, California, in 1931. She died in Denver in 1938, at the age of 63.^[3][15][16]

Ellis's face is among those included in a tile mural created by Barbara Jo Revelle in 1989 at the Colorado Convention Center.^[17] In 1995, the gravestone she hand-carved for her daughter's grave in Goldfield, Nevada, was replaced by the state.^[14] As of 1996^[update] the Saguache County Museum in Saguache, Colorado had a display on Ellis.^[18] The University of Colorado awarded her an honorary degree in April 1938,^[19] and has a collection of her papers.^[20]