Review by Ed Quillen
History – October 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
Western Voices – 125 Years of Colorado Writing
Edited by Steve Grinstead and Ben Fogelberg
Published in 2004 by the Colorado Historical Society
ISBN 1-55591-531-0
THIS IS THE INTERVAL of querquicentennials – Leadville celebrated its 125th birthday in 2003, Buena Vista and Chaffee County in 2004, Salida and Poncha Springs in 2005 — and along the way, the Colorado Historical Society celebrated its 125th anniversary last year in a fitting way. It published an anthology of material published by the society in the 81 years since it began producing The Colorado Magazine in 1923.
That magazine, which often carried first-person accounts of historical events and times, lasted until 1980. It was replaced by Colorado Heritage, aimed at general readers, and Colorado History, a more scholarly series of monographs. For my part, the full Colorado Magazine collection at the Salida Regional Library, with its solid index, has been worth its weight in platinum on the many occasions I have had to consult it, but I can’t remember ever needing to look up something in its successors.
However, this is a review of a book, not the magazines, and the book is generally a pleasure in both style and content. It starts with an 1859 account, reprinted by the Society in 1931, of “To the Pike’s Peak Country in 1859 and Cannibalism on the Smoky Hill Route,” by noted journalist Henry Villard, and concludes with “Colorado’s Clyciennes,” an account of the state’s early female bicyclists by Modupe Labode published in 2003.
Featured in the cycling account is Dora Rinehart, who took up bicycling in 1895, even though society discouraged two-wheeling women because they could come and go as they pleased, and might find immodest costumes more comfortable as the pedaled. In 1896, she rode more than 100 century circuits (100-mile rides), but commented that “I do not like to go on a hard run when my husband is with me, for you know it does take so much starch out of a man to ride the century.”
There are some nationally famous contributors — among them Louis L’Amour, William Henry Jackson, Wallace Stegner, Helen Hunt Jackson, and David Lavender — as well as many familiar to regional readers: Muriel Sibell Wolle, Duane Smith, Tom Noel, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Stephen Leonard, Clark Secrest, and Dick Kreck.
The scale ranges from the continental, as with “Bent’s Fort and Manifest Destiny” by David Lavender, to the intimate, as with “The Demons of Elizabeth [Baby Doe] Tabor: Mining ‘Dreams’ and ‘Visions’ from the Matchless'” by Judy Nolte Temple. The topics are sometimes ethnic, as with “Los Betabeleros (the Beetworkers)” whom I grew up near in northern Colorado, and there’s some biography, including a selection about Nikola Tesla by Richard Grove and Tom Noel’s account of Big Bill Haywood, the officer of the Western Federation of Miners who went on to organize the Wobblies before fleeing to the Soviet Union; half his ashes are buried in the Kremlin Wall.
The geographic spread seems fair enough, with accounts from all over our state, including an account of a San Luis Valley visit in 1879. The time span extends from the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde to the spread of brew-pubs in the 1990s. One of my favorite pieces, called “A Whiskey Train and a Doughnut Day: Coming of Age on the Eastern Colorado Plains,” took place a considerable distance from here.
Written by Keith Cook and published in 1998, it’s about Cook’s boyhood in Hugo, Colo., during World War II:
“It was along in the autumn of 1941, when I came home from school and noticed a car with Denver license plates in front of our house. Used to be you could look at a Colorado license plate and know immediately where somebody was from. If the license started with a ‘1’ it was Denver, ‘2’ was Pueblo, ‘3’ was Colorado Springs. It was done according to population. Our small Lincoln County was ’33.’ I walked in the house and Mother was happy as could be. Without any consultation, no discussion, I was Hugo’s new newspaperboy for the Rocky Mountain News. I got the job because Bud Sterling was studying for the West Point examinations and didn’t have time to deliver the paper. It must have worked because Bud became a general.”
Cook recounts how he never made much money off the route until three or four troop trains a day started pausing at Hugo during the war. Soldiers in transit wanted to buy newspapers. And even though Cook was well under 21, he was also able to get whiskey from the drug store, and sell pints, along with the newspapers, to the passing soldiers.
Cook put his profits in his savings account, which led the town banker to tell his father that “Keith is sure doing better on that paper route than Bud Sterling did. He’s got about six hundred dollars in a savings account.” His father thus learned of his bootlegging, and the money went to remodel the family’s living room.
Cook concludes that tale: “I had always thought bankers had a fiduciary obligation to their depositors. I learned a couple of important lessons from my entrepreneurship. Never put all your money in one place, and beware of bankers. I haven’t trusted one since.”
That’s one gem of a story among many gems. All of the selections are of interest to the Colorado history buff, and most will please general readers, too –although a few pieces were written in a style too academic to suit me, even though their topics were interesting.
You’ll encounter many fascinating tales in Western Voices, and along the way, you’ll probably learn about things that will make you curious for more (such as Tesla’s electrical experiments near Colorado Springs or the Agnes Vaille tragedy on the east face of Long’s Peak in 1925). And the book also includes historic black and white pictures of people and communities, including: Dora Rinehart, Silver Dollar Tabor, Louis L’Amour, John Wesley Powell, Irwin, Gunnison, and the Arkansas Valley Smelter.
