A pioneer of Grand valley, who left his native heath in youth and came alone to the United States with almost no capital but his energy, his determined persistence, and his never failing faith in himself, Matthew Lane, living three miles north of Fruita, Mesa county, has had a checkered and interesting career, full of toil and varying fortune. He is a native of county Cork, Ireland, born in 1856, and the son of John and Mary (Neill) Lane, also native in that county, where the father died in 1873 and the mother in January, 1904, at the age of one hundred and two years. The father was a prosperous farmer, he and his brother owning together about two hundred acres of good land. On this farm the son Matthew was reared to the age of eighteen, then in 1874 he left Ireland and came to America, landing in New York with ten dollars and the clothes he wore. He went to Philadelphia and during the next eight months was employed there as a longshoreman. In the spring of 1875 he came west to Missouri and, locating in Nodaway county, passed five years there operating a farm for his sister. In the spring of 1880 he came to Colorado and went to mining at Leadville, which he continued there for a year and a half, part of the time engaged in prospecting. His success was only moderate, and in the summer of 1881 he moved to the San Juan country, where for some months he worked in the Silverton mine. In the fall of 1882 he secured employment on the railroad then building into Grand Junction, and since that time has made his home in Grand Valley. In the Summer of 1883 he took up the one hundred and sixty acres of land on which he now lives, and since then has been engaged in ranching, and the stock industry. In politics he is an independent Democrat, and in fraternal relations belongs to the Woodmen of the World, a beneficiary society.
Source: Bowen, A. W. Progressive Men of Western Colorado. Chicago: A. W. Bowen & Co., Publishers. 1905.