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Susan Harris is a remarkable woman in more ways than one. Born in the mining district of Leadville. Colorado November 20, 1872 of white and negro parents. Not only rugged in body, but character and spirit the survival of the fittest is strictly shown in her every manner. The rigor of hard living imbedded in her life those sterling qualities so often found in women of western birth and living. Her father was the mine blacksmith and as a girl she played and afterward worked around the shop. She learned the language of the miner their daringness and the slogan to make money at any price or cost. The gambling instinct was a native gift, her mother keeper of the boarding house, was an expert at black-jack and poker. At school she was known as Sue the tom boy caring but little for the companionship of girls she was the "it" girl with the boys. When fights were on she was in the center of it all doing a lion share, and it was too bad for a boy who was a coward.
Once a pious schoolmaster came in for a serious flogging by the gang Sue leading the attack. The writer was informed that she was not a spoiled child but was born bad. At the swimming hole she was the only girl who would dare go in swimming with the boys. Fire arms were her playmates. No horse was too bad for her to ride.
School and its program was too tame an affair to hold her attention long, action was the key word in her outlook on things as they seemed.
Somehow she did manage to finish the grade school and that was enough of the stuff for her as she understood matters then. At fifteen she was playing and dancing in the town dance hall and ever so often with her father she would go to Central City and Denver. It was on one of these trips to Denver that she met George Walker, a minstrel man, he at once saw in her a meal ticket in the dance game and under the direction of her father they formed the team of Walker and Snow which was her maiden name, tap dancers. They traveled for a year with a medicine show. This brought her into a new world and people so very different to what she had been used to. She recognized at once that her way was not their way and she loved their way so much she decided to change.
The new situation charged and surcharged her soul as a rushing stream. Beautiful dressed women refined and cultured, flashy dressed men, cities with gas lights and mule cars and lovely homes, charmed this dance hall girl of Leadville, the crude mining town. So after one year on the road she located her fathers sister and her husband at Kansas City, Missouri and it was goodbye forever to the world of her birth.
The kindly old folks, who had no children loved the girl and heard with bated breath of her manner of life. Being Christians they warmly joined her in her new faith and birth. Now eighteen years old she attended church and Sunday School for the first time in her life. Due to warmth and understanding of her Uncle and Aunt and their tenderness and loving sympathy she accepted the Christian religion and the church.
Again school that was once stuff and tame became a challenge, she reentered and finished her high school work in two years, specialising in music.
The summer following her graduation she planned to spend with her parents at Leadville. However, it didn't plan out well. They just lived in different worlds, the air of Leadville was foul and repulsive to her now and its people and their way was far from her liking. So after a stay of two weeks instead of all summer she returned to Kansas City. That fall she taught school across the river in Clay County. Saving her money she entered a Missionary Training school for girls in Chicago. On graduating from same she offered her services to the Baptist Home Missionary Society and was sent to Liberia as a teacher missionary. Here she met the Rev. Mr. Joseph Harris, a native minister and they were married.
Together they labored to raise the standard of their people along all lines. And this they did in a major way. Ill health, due to yellow fever forced her to return to America in 1902. Two years later her husband joined her. Since then they have touched every phase of the religious life of Colorado.
On the outskirts of Colorado Springs on a two acre tract of land with a beautiful house of five rooms covered with flowers, now pressed with age they live a simple quite life. The house is one of that type sitting by the side of the road where the race of men go by and the occupants are friends to man. The raising of chickens and a small pension from the Home Missionary Society serves to keep the wolf from the door. Lovely neighbors and passers by, it can be said of them that they are Christ like.
