[3] She and her husband Will worked very hard to make their living in the newly established American town,[citation needed] and Green became one of the first published Colorado writers (although she would doubtlessly[according to whom?]
She documented their struggles and her budding literary and thespian ambitions in her memoir, Sixteen Years on the Great American Desert; Or, The Trials and Triumphs of a Frontier Life.
[5] Nathan Meeker worked for The New York Tribune at the time as the paper's agricultural editor and posted an ad for the establishment of a new colony in the Territory of Colorado.
[5] He used Greeley as an offer to start over and build a new life among "a middle-class community and sought settlers who abstained from alcohol, were literate, and possessed 'high moral standards.
[1] In order to make ends meet in their earliest days in the Union Colony, Annie's husband started a job at a coal mine which required him to be five miles away from his wife.
In her memoir, Sixteen Years on the Great American Desert; Or, The Trials and Triumphs of a Frontier Life, she writes about Greeley, in "a sort of dark-comedy satire on settler hype reminding us once again that farming was much a gamble as mining.
"[2] She describes the constant struggle to find a way to make money on the side as opposed to completely relying on farming because it was unreliable and there were many obstacles they had to overcome in order to be successful farmers.
She describes becoming a playwright in order to make ends meet, and founded an amateur acting troupe, the Union Colony Victim Company to stage her play "Ten Years on the Great American Desert" in Barnum Hall.