According to regional historian Adelaide (Turner) Hawes, who knew Kitty personally, the couple's first child, “Burt” (Elbert or Albert), was born on the trip west.
[4] Starting on December 6, he began advertising “the largest variety and best meats that can be procured in the Territory.” Unfortunately, just a month later, a fire swept along the block and totally destroyed the City Market, along with eleven other businesses.
From the Academy, Kitty continued her education at the Notre Dame Convent school in San Jose, California.
[8] During his years in Tuscarora, John Wilkins became interested in the Bruneau Valley, in Idaho, and the high rangeland to the south.
Thus, in June 1885, he established a ranching station near what is now Murphy Hot Springs, on the Jarbidge River less than two miles from the Nevada border.
[9] In June 1887, a newspaper “Brevity” reported that Kitty and her brothers had “shipped two carloads of horses to the Omaha market” from Mountain Home.
Perhaps father John told him the filly was for his little girl, but Kitty left it to the reporter to “fill in the blanks” on that notion.
For other thirty years, the Wilkins ranch shipped thousands of horse all over the country and into Canada, as far north as the Yukon Territory.
Thus, she developed top-notch stock that was specially bred for different markets: Clydesdale and Percheron lines for heavy freight, Morgans for saddle and harness, and so on.
Customers included the U. S. Cavalry, and some of her best stock went to Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show.
A reporter for the Denver Post larded his interview article with effusive praise: “Her face glowed with intelligence, gentle humor and glorious health, such as can only be acquired by outdoor life, and that is the life that is led by Miss Kitty C. Wilkins, the wonderful horse raiser of Bruneau, Idaho.”[13] Still, the reporter did acknowledge, and discuss, her business skills.
That surely received further impetus when, in 1910, a late-coming homesteader successfully contested their weak title to the tract of land near Murphy Hot Springs.
She moved from the ranch to a fine home in Glenns Ferry, Idaho in the early Twenties, perhaps not long after her mother died there in February 1921.
According to Hawes, she “was extremely charitable toward the poor and unfortunate, though little of her charity is known to the world.” Philip Holman, who has studied Kitty's life extensively, said that, at her death, her papers contained “a number of unpaid bills and applications for public assistance.” Kitty's last appeared in public for the 1934 Fort Boise Centennial Celebration, which commemorated the founding of the old Hudson's Bay Company station at the mouth of the Boise River.