Early Boulder naturalist Martha Maxwell was a shy, diminutive woman who immortalized animals in lifelike settings. She opened her own museum in Boulder in 1874. Two years later, she jumped into the national spotlight when she displayed her self-taught taxidermy skills at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.
Martha came to Colorado in 1860 from Wisconsin with her husband James A. Maxwell. The couple initially settled in Black Hawk. Later, James operated a sawmill in Boulder and spearheaded the construction of the road up Boulder Canyon.
In the years to come, Martha made many collecting trips into the mountains, studying birds and mammals in their natural habitats. She then shot and stuffed the animals herself. Apparently, James was not particularly supportive, as he was said to have commented that Martha was “married” to her work.
When Martha had enough animals to exhibit, she established the Rocky Mountain Museum in a former brick building on the northeast corner of 12th Street (now Broadway) and Pearl Street. There, in 1874, she was visited by nationally acclaimed author Helen Hunt Jackson, who stated that she had expected to see corpse-like animals but was impressed by the realism of the displays.
Jackson later wrote in her book, “Bits of Travel at Home,” that she viewed a stuffed deer standing by a table “in as easy and natural a position as if he had just walked in.”
In 1876, the U.S. celebrated its 100th anniversary with the Centennial Exposition, held in Philadelphia. The same year, Colorado was admitted to the Union as the “Centennial State.” Meanwhile, Boulder was still a frontier town with a population of less than 3,000.
Martha prominently displayed her dioramas in the “Kansas and Colorado Building.” She also included fossils and minerals, but her animal exhibits stole the show.
“The artificial rock work and grotto in the rear are fairly swarming with animal specimens in the most natural positioning,” stated a visitor. “It is not difficult to imagine the savage old grizzly or lordly buffalo alive, or that the mountain lion is really in hot pursuit of the panting deer or the industrious beaver surveying the thirty-inch stump from which he has just cut a tree of that diameter.”
Lines of people formed early each morning at the exhibition to see Martha and her artistic groupings of stuffed birds and mammals. She stood within one of her dioramas with her shotgun at her side. In front of the display, she had placed a small sign that read, “Woman’s Work.”
In the 1880 federal census, Martha was listed in Boulder as a taxidermist, while James was a stonemason and their daughter, Mabel, was a teacher. The following year, Martha died of ovarian cancer at the age of 49. Her dioramas were placed in storage, where most of them deteriorated. Today, a few remaining specimens are located at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
Maxwell’s work not only pleased museumgoers, but she also was taken seriously by the scientific community. Scientists credited her with the discovery of the Rocky Mountain Screech Owl, Scops maxwellae — the first North American animal to be named for a woman.
At the exposition, a group of Colorado dignitaries presented Martha with a new gun. A man named Commodore Decatur stated, “I am proud that I am from Colorado. This is not for Mrs. Maxwell, but for Colorado. In honoring her you honor Colorado. She is a little woman, but she shoots.”
The commodore added that he hoped the time would come when all women could use firearms. “If the West were full of women like Maxwell,” he speculated, “there would be no more Custer massacres.” Another man then stated, “I am glad, as this occasion indicates, that the time is coming when equal rights will be recognized, when woman performing the same service, side by side with man, shall receive the same reward.”
Throughout her life, Martha was a vegetarian. When a Boulder County News reporter questioned her about shooting animals she replied, “Which is the more cruel? To kill to eat or to kill to immortalize?”
