Reviewed by Kathryn Retzler

When Irish immigrants Maggie O’Malley and her mother Margaret arrived in Ouray in the late 1800s, they found it a busy place. Wide streets teemed with miners, prospectors and the folk who fed, housed and supplied them. Horse-drawn wagons rumbled through town, freighting in supplies and hauling out ore. Mule teams, roped together and heavily packed, carried ore down and supplies up to the mines. The assay office and freighting companies did a brisk business. So did the restaurants, for all those hungry people had to be fed.

Margaret chose to feed them, and soon had a prosperous restaurant business going, with living quarters above and a busy kitchen and dining room below. Maggie, more in tune with the beasts of burden than feeding the men who used them, chose another course. Donning trousers and packing a pistol on her hip, she became a mule skinner, one of the few women to lead mule teams over the treacherous trails to the mines. Sundays, Maggie put on a dress and joined her mother in church, held in a local saloon, but the rest of the week she defied culture and tradition, pursuing an occupation that won her the grudging respect of most all who knew her. 

In time, Maggie forsook the mule teams and married the preacher. Together they prospected then prospered on their homestead-turned-cattle ranch on the Dallas Divide.

In this, her first novel, author Lucinda Stein captures the spirit of Ouray’s early days. She draws you into a well-written, engaging story as she relates the life of this courageous pioneer woman. Maggie’s Way is a great read!