The Fabulous Life of Angeline Louisiana Munn
On the 6th of September 1890 in the bayou country of Louisiana, probably in the family home, came a child Angeline, the seventh of ten children, and the fifth girl. Unusually for a girl so late in the birth order she was named for her mother, who went by Angie. Her father was Edward Huff, a comfortably well-off rice farmer and the deputy sheriff of Vermilion Parish. Little Angeline quickly became Angie Lou Huff, the name by which she was known for most of her early life.
Nearly 80 years later she died in the mountains of Colorado and is buried there. Her gravestone records two things she picked up along the way: “Dixie,” her preferred name after the age of about 50, and the “Munn,” the name she kept by choice from the second of her three husbands.
The symbols on her gravestone memorialize her life as a gold miner, though missing from the inscription is a title she probably bestowed on herself: the Gold Woman of Colorado. Instead, her epitaph is a mere cliché, “Gone But Not Forgotten,” a phrase that implies no affection and perhaps is not meant to. In between the dates inscribed on the headstone was a life of great event, and by any description, a fabulous life. As you read…
