Join us for one or two or all three of a mini book club series featuring three non-fiction books about the region!

July 14th at 5:15 pm- Tomboy Bride: One Woman's Personal Account of Life in Mining Camps of the West by Harriet Fish Backus, discussion led by Harriet's grandson, Rob Walton and Telluride Historical Museum staff

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Harriet Backus writes about her life as an assayer's wife and true pioneer of the West with heart-felt emotion and vivid detail. Sharing her amusing and often challenging experiences as a new bride in the high San Juan Mountains where the Tomboy Mine operated above Telluride, Colorado, she paints a poignant picture of the people, and the life centered around silver mining where most of the book takes place. It is a skillfully written account from a women's perspective in a rough and tumble mining town that has made this book a classic for women's studies.  Harriet's life followed her husband George's career which took them many places beyond the San Juan Mountains including the rugged coast of British Columbia, and the mountainous mining town of Elk City, Idaho and back to Colorado's Leadville. Although both Hattie and George were from the San Francisco bay area where they eventually retired, her heart never quite left the rugged mountain trails of the high San Juans of Colorado.

August 5th at 5:15 pm- Dead Run: The Murder of a Lawman and the Greatest Manhunt of the Modern American West by Dan Schultz, discussion lead by author, Dan Schultz

Evoking Into the Wild and The Monkey Wrench Gang, Dead Run is the extraordinary true story of three desperado survivalists, a dangerous plot, a brutal murder, and a treacherous manhunt.

On a sunny May morning in 1998, three friends in a stolen truck passed through Cortez, Colorado on their way to commit sabotage of unspeakable proportions. Evidence suggests their mission was to blow up the Glen Canyon dam. Had they succeeded, the structure's collapse would have unleashed a 500-foot-high inland tsunami, surging across the American Southwest and pulverizing everything in its path―crashing through the Grand Canyon, overflowing Hoover Dam, washing away downstream communities and crippling the water supply of Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, Los Angeles, and San Diego.

Instead, the truck was pulled over by an unsuspecting small town cop and the outlaws opened fire. After shooting him twenty times, they blasted their way past dozens of police cars and vanished into 10,000 square miles of the harshest wilderness terrain on the North American continent. The pursuit that ensued pitted the most sophisticated law enforcement technology on the planet against three self-trained survivalists. Seventy-five local, state, and federal police agencies; dozens of swat teams; U.S. Army Special Forces and more than five hundred officers from across the country followed the fugitives into a landscape only they could survive.

previously:

June 23rd at 5:15 pm- One Man's West by David S. Lavender, discussion led by David Lavender's grandson, Telluride resident, David Lavender

The American West of the 1930s and 1940s was still a place of prospectors, cowboys, ranchers, and mountaineers, one that demanded backbreaking, lonely, and dangerous work. Still, midcentury pioneers such as David Lavender remembered “not the cold and the cruel fatigue, but rather the multitude of tiny things which in their sum make up the elemental poetry of rock and ice and snow.” And as the nation exhausted its gold and silver veins, as law reached the boomtowns on the frontier, and as the era of the great cattle ranches and drives came to an end, Lavender felt compelled to document his experiences in rugged southwest Colorado to preserve this rapidly disappearing way of life. One Man’s West is Lavender’s ode to his days on the Continental Divide in the Telluride region and the story of his experiences making a living in the not so wild but not yet tamed West. Like stories told around a campfire, One Man’s West is captivating yet conversational, incredible yet realistic, and introduces some of the most charming characters in western literature.