Jewelry, Hats, and Passport Stamps: A Portrait of Great-Grandma Zita

Growing up on her family’s sprawling ranch an hour southeast of Trinidad, Kaylinn Gilstrap recalls that her great-grandfather, who moved to the homestead in the early 1900s, loomed large in family lore: Roy Louden was remembered for dipping his cowboy hat into murky ponds for a drink and popping his fake eye into his mouth to clean it. Relatives said less about his wife, Zita, who outlived Roy but died three months after Gilstrap was born in 1983.

That Zita was overshadowed by her husband eventually began to weigh on her great-granddaughter. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, there is a woman behind these guys,” Gilstrap says, “and she is just as powerful and interesting.”

A professional photographer, Gilstrap now lives in Atlanta and tries to return to the ranch for a month every year. But it wasn’t until her brother called in 2019 to say he’d found “a bunch of hats” that she decided to document the possessions Zita collected during her 92 years, in the context of the wild, remote place the two women inhabited across time. The project led Gilstrap to new family stories about Zita, more still-unsolved mysteries, and, ultimately, a better understanding of how her ancestral roots in rural Colorado influence how she sees herself today.

“We all have perceptions about how our environment shapes us, and some even make the mistake that small-town folks are limited in how big their experience is,” Gilstrap says. “Zita was not going to be limited.”

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Zita grew up “well fixed” in Rocky Ford, as she wrote in a 1981 article in the Frontier Times, but her family struggled after a string of bad investments. So, in 1913, she left the city for a job teaching in a one-room, dirt-floor schoolhouse in the southeastern corner of the state that paid $50 a month. “We think our path is a straight line,” Gilstrap says, “but that turn really shaped her life in ways she probably wasn’t envisioning.”

Zita, who claimed to have been named after a European empress, married Roy in 1916 and settled into the remote ranch house.

Although many people referred to the fashionable Zita as a city girl long after she’d moved to the ranch, she loved the rugged beauty of the arid plains. In the 1981 Frontier Times article, she wrote: “It was the most beautiful spring I have ever seen. The grass was soon knee high, wild flowers bloomed everywhere.”

“It is my favorite place in the world, and it is the place I find the most frustrating,” Gilstrap says of the ranch. “It’s crazy beautiful and very peaceful, but it is also removed from resources and people.” To combat the isolation, Zita traveled often, sometimes with Roy, sometimes with friends.

Family members say Zita and Roy lived frugally—packing sandwiches rather than buying lunch on visits to Trinidad—preferring to save their money for bigger trips.

“I think Zita saw herself as a woman of the world.”

In an old passport, Gilstrap found stamps from Hungary, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, England, Norway, Romania, and Costa Rica. One family member recalls her saying, “I’ve been all over the world, and there are still places on this ranch I haven’t seen.”

Zita was comfortable on horseback but a terror behind the wheel. “She would be getting ready while she drove,” Gilstrap says, “changing hats, putting on shoes, putting on jewelry.”

“A family member said even the cows on those country roads knew her car, and they would part ‘like the Red Sea’ to get off the road for her.”

Zita always dressed up to entertain guests at the ranch. “In a place that had very little comfort, she was going to make people comfortable,” Gilstrap says. But she wasn’t always prim and proper. A grandson-in-law told Gilstrap about a snowy Christmas when the family went sledding: “We could not get Grandma Zita off the sled so we could use it. She did about four or five runs, just screaming and hollering.” Zita was 85 at the time.

From brocade purses to quirky pins to modish hats, Zita collected souvenirs everywhere she went. “We all buy these little things on our journeys that help us remember places and people,” Gilstrap says. “Her big thing was fashion. And so, on her travels, she would buy things that she could wear, and then, I imagine, if she got complimented, she’d be like, Oh, these things? I just got them when we were in Turkey.” By photographing Zita’s mementos, Gilstrap hopes to creatively preserve her personal history in a way that outlasts the objects themselves.

At the ranch, Zita spent her leisure time hosting and building a comfortable home, while Roy preferred to be out riding or hunting. “Whatever their differences, it worked; they carved out a life,” Gilstrap says. The intricacies of their 56-year marriage is among the many mysteries Gilstrap knows she may never fully unravel. Another? The location of Zita’s diamond ring, which she hid so well no one has been able to find it.

“One of Zita’s grandsons asked if I found the diamond ring that she hid around the house for safekeeping. Last known hiding spot was a flour sack. She’s been dead 42 years, and the ring is still hidden.”

Wearing one of Zita’s dresses—likely homemade, by her or a woman in the community—Gilstrap stands at the gate of her parents’ front yard on the ranch. Some parts of the landscape haven’t changed since Zita lived there. “We all carry around stories—some that we’re fully aware of, and then I think there are ancestral stories we are shaped by that we’re not even able to fully tap into,” Gilstrap says.

“This project made me understand myself in a way I didn’t know I was seeking, just by starting to understand my roots.”