Colorado
Mountain Women: Tales from the Mining Camps
Sherie Fox Schmauder
Western Reflections.
Reviewed by Carol McDermott
Compiling, collating, and combining collections of the stories from and of the women of Colorado’s mining camps, Sherie Fox Schmauder creates an interesting cross-section of characters.
Writing in a wistful style, she paints portraits of hope and hopelessness,
drear and delight, essentially the strength and survival of women in rough
circumstances. These vignettes are not biographies. Rather, they are representative
of some of the mining town castes: soiled dove, schoolteacher, cook and
entrepreneur. Readers cheer for scrappy Gerta Trader, who took on a man’s
job delivering supplies to high country mines. They ache for Susann
a, whose artistic talents are feared by her family. They appreciate
the solution found by Naomi and Ruth, who share a husband.
Under the best conditions, the lives of women in the late1890s and
early1900s were not idyllic. Add long snowful winters and men crazed with
gold fever to that, and women of the mining camps fared worse. Often left
alone to raise children, those youngsters who avoided accident and disease,
the women brought a modicum of civilization into the untamed culture of
miners.
Author Schmauder is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Idaho,
with an MA from New York University. She received a New Jersey Council
for the Arts grant for prose in 1994. In addition she has taught writing
and is a newspaper columnist.
“Colorado Mountain Women” extends Schmauder’s “focus on the effect
of landscape on women, particularly those who persevere in difficult situations.”
172 pages. Soft Coverrica of Baltimore, www.publishamerica.com
and at local bookstores, including Readmore Books, Hastings and Barnes
& Nobles in Grand Junction, Colo.