Yetta Kohn, Pioneer New Mexico Ranch Woman A Brainpower & Brownbags Lecture

Santa Fe author and historian Sharon Fried speaks on "Yetta Kohn, Pioneer New Mexico Ranch Woman,” at noon on Wednesday, Nov. 9, part of the Brainpower & Brownbags Lecture Series. Lectures are held in the John Gaw Meem Room. Enter through the museum's Washington Avenue entrance. Free.

In a December 2008 story for the New Mexico Jewish Historical Society (http://www.nmjhs.org/dec-08.pdf), Fried explored the life and times of Yetta Goldsmith Kohn, a German-Jewish woman who settled in Las Vegas, N.M., in the 1860s – after traveling from Bavaria as a teenager, settling first in Leavenworth, Kansas, then Cherry Creek, Colorado. Widowed in 1878, she first took over her husband's business, then homesteaded near present-day Conchas Dam, where she built a cattle empire that continues today. 

She is one of the historic New Mexico women memorialized on the state's highway markers.

Fried came to New Mexico in 1992 with a wide-ranging academic background n art history, education, cognitive psychology, urban design, drama therapy, and neurolinguistic programming. In 2005, she began  mastering the skills of book production in order to craft life-story and family history books. Today she researches, writes, designs, and produces personal memoirs in art-book format. Her research into Kohn is part of a seven-family history that she is preparing for the Bidegain family of Tucumcari.