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Mystic Imaginary Idyllic West
Historian Duane Smith charts 20th century in mountain states
Arts & Entertainment Editor
Photo by Courtesy of Evelyn Cameron, Montana Historical Society
Click image to enlarge
Photo by Courtesy Richard L. Gilbert
A mountain goat looks over Hidden Lake in Glacier National Park in Montana.
Photo by Courtesy Richard L. Gilbert
A mountain goat looks over Hidden Lake in Glacier National Park in Montana.
Photo by Courtesy of Christine Bailey
Georgetown, west of Denver, is shown in the 1950s before the tourist boom, which was brought about by the completion of Interstate 70 and the Eisenhower Tunnel.
Photo by Courtesy of Mesa Verde National Park
Members of the Civilian Conservation Corps play volleyball in their camp.
Review
Rocky Mountain Heartland: Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming in the Twentieth Century by Duane A. Smith, University of Arizona Press, 305 pages, 23 black-and-white photos, two maps, $50 hardback, $22.95 paperback.
Our state takes the forefront throughout the book's contents. Smith dutifully includes parallels for Montana and Wyoming in many places, but if I were a Montana or Wyoming reader, I'd feel disappointed if I bought this book. Still it's great for Coloradans.
Smith takes a chronologically generous view of the 20th century, setting the stage in the 1890s and again at the start of this century, comparing where the states found themselves at the start of each period.
The most intriguing sweep within the 300-plus pages is charting the rise and fall of towns, cities, wildernesses and farm lands. They all changed because of rain or lack of it, minerals or the lack of them, inventions, immigration, disease, war, politics and rivalries. It's salutary to be able to look at three spacious, if not highly populated states, over decades to see how the fortunes of any region can ebb and flow.
My favorite part is the characters Smith paints like Boss Speer, the longtime mayor of Denver. Speer believed in the City Beautiful. He built a library, gardens, fountains and outdoor Greek theater and had the phone and telegraph lines buried to improve the view, surely far ahead of his time in that. But he also bribed, held classes to teach people how to vote early and often, and encouraged police to close their eyes to violations of liquor, prostitution and gambling laws. He caused such chaos that, in 1904, the state had three governors in 24 hours trying to escape from his clutches.
And then Smith throws in appealing snippets that do no earthly good but are fun, from the earliest days to the present.
For instance, Denver's first attempt at staging a rodeo "ended in a disastrous riot at the barbecue, with gate-crashers, fistfights, and food shortages that soured community leaders on the whole idea."
It's equally useless to know that "A 2005 study indicated that residents of Wyoming and Montana chewed tobacco at a rate far above the national average."
The saddest part of the book deals with the Great Depression, perhaps to be read with special attention these days. The individual stories make it real. An unnamed woman remembered how, as a little girl who had been "especially good" for a whole week, she asked her mother for a nickel ice-cream cone. Her mother cried because they couldn't afford it.
"We fortunately had a home. We lost it. We couldn't make the taxes. We couldn't keep up with the taxes, so we just walked out, didn't get a dime out of it," Bessie Finegan said.
The flu epidemic in 1918 is pretty hair-raising too with its worldwide death toll between 30 million and 60 million people. As for Colorado, 7,683 died within 10 months, five times the number killed in combat during World War I from the entire Rocky Mountain region. Silverton, for example, lost more than 10 percent of its population of about 1,500. People who were healthy in the morning would die within the day.
The book is so full that it's hard to give a comprehensive picture of what's there, but salient points include numbers. Smith includes a plethora of stats that seemed to me to inspire confidence. They're backed with five pages of notes and a bibliography of nearly eight pages.
The style is readable and moves along in a man's book, written by a man and addressing the conventional issues that men usually put into histories. Granted, there are pocket biographies such as the one of the 82-year-old union activist Mary Harris, who became known as Mother Jones, but I'd be intrigued by a companion volume in which an equally talented female historian undertook the same subject.
Smith's book would make an enjoyable Christmas present for the guys stuck inside lazing before the fire when the snow falls. It's the sort of thing the narrator of "The Night Before Christmas" would have been reading before he "settled down for his long winter's nap" and was disturbed by Santa. Perhaps Santa had brought his book early.
pahmiller@durangoherald.com
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