days when the hills are bursting with color, with the cleanest air you have ever tasted, and the hypnotizing motion of a hundred acres of gamma grass in the wind. A couple of decades later I know the other side of the story: the 30-below-zero-not-counting-the-wind-chill mornings, frozen pipes and dead batteries, soul-crushing drought years with no pasture to speak of, sick horses in the middle of the night, a bear who came for my lambs and then came again, the ashes of a few good dogs scattered across the pasture. I also know that the ranch has sunk so much deeper under my skin, not in spite of but because of how hard it can be to live here. As the list of challenges and heartaches lengthen, I grow even more committed to the place.
This must have been how it was for Harriet Fish Backus, whose love of her time living at the Tomboy Mine borders on the ecstatic, even though the delivery mule showed up only once a month and then without any fruits or vegetables, and the fire went out more often than not leaving the food to freeze to ice blocks, and there was something called the Elephant Slide between her and town, between her pregnant self and her doctor, and each time she passed under it, it could have buried her in tons of snow in the blink of an eye. Couple those adventures with the satisfaction of putting a Thanksgiving meal on the table for a gang of hungry miners, with the stupefying beauty of the morning after a storm when the world is all azure and sun-spangled snow, with the deep pleasure of a cup of good tea on a rare becalmed afternoon, with the good company of a husband she loved and a pack of robust girlfriends who, among other things, started the world’s highest branch of the YMCA. It wouldn’t have been the right life for everyone, but it was exactly the right life for Harriet Fish Backus.
Of the 203 homesteaders who staked claims in my valley—the Upper Rio Grande—in the late 1800s, 25 were women. John Pinckley may have filled out the paperwork to stake the claim on my ranch, but since he was often distracted by alcohol and women, it was his daughter Myrtle, Bob’s big sister, who did the hard physical labor of proving up on the place enough to secure the deed. The fact that her father’s name remained on the title makes a person question the accuracy of that number 25. I’ll never meet Myrtle, and there is no one left alive who even knew her, but I can feel her winking at me from between the pages of Tomboy Bride.
Living the joys and challenges on my own homestead for 26 years has left me more in awe of Harriet Fish Backus than ever. She stood strong and optimistic in relentlessly dire circumstances, and was driven by love for her husband and her compassion for others in all things. I hope I am not merely projecting when I say I believe it was her love of the land, her love of the Rocky Mountains in general and the high San Juans in particular, where she found strength and solace and, maybe above all, a constant and ever-expanding wonder. I understand now, on a cellular level, how the tragedies that befell her in her perilous perch on the side of that mountain only served to intensify her love for it. I share with her an unending love for these most magnificent mountains, and understand that I am lucky beyond all reason to call them my long-term home.
PAM HOUSTON
FOREWORD TO THE 1996 EDITION
But on the warmest days of summer, against the blue of the illimitable sky, and eternal white coronet crowned the pinnacles stretched toward the southwest. Long snow banners, woven by winds waved farewell as they disappeared.
When you live, as I do, at 9,000 feet in southwestern Colorado just outside what once was one of the world’s most famous silver mining towns, history is all around you. I can’t go into Creede to pick up my mail without passing half a dozen crumbling shacks, mills, and ore houses—many of them built in the 1890s and decaying slowly in the high, dry air until they are once again part of the earth. I can’t enter a shop in town whose name doesn’t remind me of the mines that made my town famous: the Kentucky Belle, the Holy Moses, the Amethyst, the Happy Thought. I can’t even take my dogs for a walk across my property without passing the homesteaders’ grave site and sending them a word of thanks for claiming this land and clearing it, long before my mother’s mother was a gleam in her mother’s eye.
I’ve often had a fantasy that one day, while cleaning out the barn or digging in the garden, I might uncover a diary or a pack of letters, some written message left from the past that neither time nor weather nor pack rats have carried away. Then I would learn what life was like for the woman who lived on this land a hundred years before me, a woman who was the wife of a rancher or a miner, somebody who believed a good life and untold riches were to be found in this valley tucked under the Continental Divide.
Discovering Tomboy Bride was like finding that diary. And though Harriet Fish Backus lived with her husband two valleys to the west of where I make my home (about 35 miles away as the crow flies, about 200 miles by the paved road), we share the magic of the high San Juan Mountains—in my biased opinion, the grandest and most awe-inspiring mountains in all the Lower Forty-eight.
The largest part of the book takes place in that 11,800-foot valley that hangs above Telluride, where the Tomboy Mine operated successfully until 1925. The chapters that take place at the Tomboy are full of the kinds of stories you’d expect from a mining town: mules and horses plummeting to their death over rocky precipices; gunfights and explosions; bunkhouse pranks and barroom brawls; the rugged lawman who after being brought to trial and acquitted in a double murder asked, “What did Kammer mean in his testimony when he said I used my ‘prerogative’ as a deputy? Hell, man, I used my gun!”
What makes this book unique is that it tells the much less often told tales of a woman’s life in a mining town. Tales of the difficulties of feeding your family when the delivery mule only shows up once a month, and even then there’s not a single fresh fruit or vegetable to be had; and of when the fire goes out all the food freezes to ice blocks; and of baking at that altitude, which is always hit or miss. Tales of small children with fragile lungs and low immunities, of being pregnant and scared in a town without a doctor and something called the Elephant Slide between you and the hospital, and of the danger that any time you passed under it you could be buried in snow in a blink of an eye. Tales of falling head first into eight feet of snow when you stepped just too far to the right out your front door and of the pie you were taking to your neighbor that went sailing. Tales of the woman who sent her dog to the bunkhouse to carry home her mail in his mouth; of candlelit canned food dinners inside shacks that the wind was threatening to blow over; of how in spite of the winds and the snow and the isolation, one woman opened a Sunday School.
From Telluride we follow Harriet and her husband George to the rugged coast of British Columbia, where life revolved around the steamer Britannia that brought the mail and the food once a day; and from there to Elk City, Idaho, and a cabin forty miles from the end of the road; and from there back to Colorado, to Leadville, this time, where the cast of shady characters in town were more priceless than the minerals left in the mines. Harriet faces every challenge, change, and hardship with a practical determination and an unending optimism that even the most spirited modern adventuress would have to stand in awe of.
Harriet Fish Backus’s life took her many places, but her heart never quite left the rugged mountain trails of the high San Juans. I know just how she feels. I am writing this foreword in a lovely house in California, where I’m teaching for a semester. It’s a sunny March day. I can see a bunch of water birds on the small bay out my window. The beach is only a half a block away, and any reasonable person might call where I am paradise. At home right now it’s most likely snowing sideways, delaying the start of mud season for another two weeks, and the March wind is howling the way it likes to do until neither man nor animal can hear himself think. And none of that information is keeping me from being so homesick that I can tell you without even getting out the calculator that I have 10 weeks, or 72 days, or 1,728 hours, or 41,472 minutes until I get to go home to the high San Juans. The people in my valley call it the Creede Curse, that once you live in that country it’ll never let go of you. But if Harriet Fish Backus were alive, I think she’d call it a blessing.
PAM HOUSTON
PART I
THE SAN JUANS