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
Harriet Fish Backus, 1907.
George Backus, 1904.
CHAPTER 1
I was late for my wedding—so late that the date on three hundred engraved announcements had to be forever wrong. When my sweetheart of high school days telegraphed from Telluride, Colorado, saying he had found a position as assayer at the Japan Flora Mine, he asked me to meet him in Denver to be married. This caused considerable consternation in my family.
“Hattie, I don’t think you should go alone,” said my father with a worried look. “Young girls like you don’t travel by themselves.”
“I’m not afraid of her traveling alone,” said my mother, “but it wouldn’t be proper for her to be unchaperoned in Denver.”
Working for the Telegraph Company after the San Francisco earthquake, preceded by two years of teaching school, had not conditioned me for “wild adventuring.” But since George could not leave a new position for the trip to California, I must go to him.
A graduate from the University of California School of Mines, George had been on guard duty in San Francisco after the earthquake and fire of 1906 which closed the schools. Released from that, he went to Colorado looking for work. Now he was ready to take a wife, and, since his uncle had arrived in Denver, my parents finally consented to our marriage away from home.
“Will arrive November twentieth. Arrange for marriage that day,” I telegraphed, for that was the twenty-ninth anniversary of my mother’s and father’s marriage.
As he had suggested, I packed warm clothing, heavy blankets, linens, and a red and white tablecloth which, according to all the mining stories I had read, was indispensable, the flat silver that had been a wedding gift from my parents, and a few of my precious books. The railroad official assured me that by leaving Oakland on the eighteenth I would arrive in Denver at eleven o’clock on the morning of the twentieth.
“You’re sure there’ll be no delay?” I asked, as though he could foresee the future.
“There won’t be any heavy storms this time of year. Don’t worry. You’ll be there on time,” he assured me good naturedly.
It was a day of blue and gold, typical of Oakland in November, when my farewells were said and my big adventure began. There were few passengers and I was the only woman in the coach. The elderly conductor, seeing me alone, seemed solicitous. Late that evening we pulled into Nevada where a gold strike had aroused excitement. At the Reno depot we heard loud shouts of greetings and farewells. Into the coach swaggered a tall, bronzed miner with the air of a man who had “struck it rich.” The collar of his heavy coat was turned up to his hat brim. He stood and surveyed the passengers as if to make certain they were aware of his importance, and I turned my head to avoid his too prolonged stare.
In the morning he presented me with a rose taken from the dining car. I said, “Thank you,” and turned away. At noon I refused his invitation to be his guest at dinner. After several more rebuffs he snarled, “You and I would get along like a cat and dog.”
“Not as well,” I snapped, thinking of reporting him to the conductor.
In more amiable mood he began to coax me. “I have a sister in Denver who is meeting me at the train. Will you let us drive you around the city?”
“No. I am being met there by a gentleman,” I snapped again.
Our voices carried and a young man seated across the aisle rose and strolled to where I was and sat down beside me.
“Nevada’s an interesting state, isn’t it,” he began as if we were long acquainted.
“It certainly is,” I replied, and as we continued a conversation casually, the miner left abruptly.
“My name is Pinkerton,” said my rescuer pleasantly. “I am on my way to Ohio to be married. I saw that you were being annoyed and decided to interfere.”
“Thank you very much. Tomorrow I am to be married.” I took the card he offered and tucked it into my purse. It remains among my cherished souvenirs.
Harry Pinkerton’s calling card.
At Ogden, Utah, everything was covered with lovely, downy white as I stepped off the train for a short walk.
“My goodness,” I remarked to the conductor, “what a heavy frost.”
“That,” he replied with a superior tone, “is snow!” I had encountered the beautiful stuff in which I was to wallow for many years.
We reached Green River, Wyoming, in the evening and I was early asleep. Waking in the morning, I was aware of an ominous quiet, no chugchug of the locomotive, no clacketyclack of the coach wheels, no lonely “whoooo” of the whistle, no anything. Perhaps we had reached Cheyenne. We were due there this morning. Surely, very soon I would be in George’s arms. Yet something seemed very wrong even to my inexperienced perceptions. Dressing hurriedly I called out, “Porter, where are we?”
Unconcernedly he answered, “Green River, Ma’am. Just where we were last night, waiting for the mail from a branch line that was delayed.”
Like marbles spilled on a polished floor my plans scattered in all directions. At that moment we should have been in Cheyenne leaving for Denver. We still had four hundred miles to cover in thirteen hours, and that would have been really speeding.
Tears stung my eyes but before I dried them came faintly the call “All aboard!” and the wheels began to grind and roll. I turned to the window to hide my tear-stained face. Then I became aware that my name was being called … “Miss Harriet Fish.” The conductor handed me a telegram which I feverishly tore open. Already George was aware of the delay.
“Under the circumstances are you willing to go directly to the minister?” he had wired. I wrote my reply on a telegram blank, “Yes,
