As a travel writer and editor, Churchill aimed to promote female independence in the post Civil War West, culminating ultimately in the right to vote in the state of Colorado.

During the long months, she became an avid reader of the editor and Washington Correspondent Jane Grey Swisshelm, whom she later credited in The Queen Bee for opening her eyes to "the wrongs in which women suffer from the absolute power of the ruling class".

[8] In her 1909 autobiography, Active Footsteps, she refers to her coughing fits and weak lungs; some commenters on her life have taken this to mean she had tuberculosis, but it may have been another condition such as allergies.

[9] She believed, as many physicians did at the time, that "outdoor life was the only means in which even fair health could be obtained," and she and her daughter moved west to California to seek a milder climate.

[8] In 1869, Churchill left her daughter with her sister and moved to California to seek a profession as a travel writer and a milder climate that might relieve her health problems.

Her legacy as a writer and editor is not only in pursuit of suffrage for women, but as an early voice of equal treatment for many immigrant and minority groups, including the Chinese and Native Americans, specifically the Ute tribe.

However, traveling back from Chicago in 1879 to arrange publication of Purple Hills, she stopped to rest in Denver and decided that Colorado was the place for her to live.

[15] In Denver, she found a population – both male and female – who showed interest in progressive ideas on women's issues, which prompted her to begin her newspaper the same year.

She named her paper Colorado Antelope, which was supposed to mimic the forward strides of the movement toward Women's suffrage in the United States by describing a small animal that was hard to catch.

[17] The motto of the paper, "Come let us reason together," showed Churchill's attitudes on women's rights in the nineteenth century, and expressed her dedication to the "interests of humanity, woman's political equality and individually.

These challenges varied from scathing reports to humorous adversaries, such as Dave Day from the Solid Muldroon, with whom she carried on a friendly and satirical correspondence.

[20] The late nineteenth century in Colorado was host to a number of forces that ultimately led to suffrage – including the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the Farmer's Alliance populist political party, the merger of NWSA and AWSAA into NAWSA.

[21] Social democratic politics in the west was focused on suffrage, temperance, and populism – such as the Farmer's Alliance – in which Churchill consistently challenged, questioned, and at times affirmed.

[22] Churchill and her writings that demanded equal suffrage were similar, but far more critical than most of the sentiments expressed by many of the women's clubs in Colorado at the time.

[23] These clubs recognized the failings of the first suffrage referendum in 1887 – when the Colorado Constitution was first written and enfranchisement to women denied – and sought to align their politics with the voting body of men – keeping quite on any individual racial sentiments regarding the vast number of ethnic populations in the state.

Said I, 'Brother, I should be an American citizen if I were not a woman, and a slave to the trousers of the country, but I am partially free, and struggling for my freedom, and I shall take the liberty to champion whom and what I please, and your royal highness will be obliged to stand it, and with no back talk Churchill was willing to not only question the racial subtext which underlay the women's suffrage movement, but to constantly question, challenge, and applaud the actions of men in the state of Colorado.

While she was sympathetic to the hardships of many immigrant populations – most vocally the Chinese – she routinely challenged Anglo-American men for their drinking and violence, as well as their involvement against female enfranchisement.