Cornelia Adair
Cornelia Wadsworth was born in 1837 in Geneseo, the seat of Livingston County in western New York State. In 1857, she married Montgomery Harrison Ritchie (1826–1864) of Boston, a descendant of the Federalist Party leader Harrison Gray Otis (1765–1848). During the American Civil War, Ritchie served with the New England Guard. After the Battle of the Wilderness in Virginia in 1864, he crossed Confederate lines to retrieve the body of his fallen father-in-law, General James Samuel Wadsworth, Sr., (1807–1864), and return it to Geneseo. Cornelia was reared near Geneseo on a farm that her ancestors had purchased from the Senecas. A few months later, Ritchie, who had fought earlier in the war under General Ambrose E. Burnside in North Carolina, died of an illness during the war.
Widowed Cornelia Ritchie took her two sons, Arthur Ritchie and James Wadsworth "Jack" Ritchie (1861–1924), to Europe for their education. There she met and married in 1867 the wealthy landowner John Adair (March 3, 1823 – May 4, 1885). The Adairs moved to New York City, where Adair had established a brokerage office. His uneasy temperament led the family west in search of what Benjamin Franklin had once described as the "safety valve" of economic prosperity through westward expansion. They reached Sidney, Nebraska, and proceeded to Colorado, where they joined Charles Goodnight's buffalo hunt. Goodnight told the Adairs about the Palo Duro country of Texas, where cattle could thrive by grazing on the plains in the summer and spending the winter in the shelter of the canyon. The hunting trip ended in misfortune. Adair's gun accidentally discharged and killed his horse, and Adair himself was injured in a fall.
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