Helen Hunt Jackson’s Colorado ed. by Joseph T. Gordon and Judith A. Pickle

Abstract

84 Western American Literature Helen Hunt Jackson’s Colorado. Edited by Joseph T. Gordon and Judith A. Pickle. (Colorado Springs: The Colorado College, Hulbert Center for South­ western Studies, 1989. 83 pages.) Helen Hunt Jackson went to Colorado Springs for her health in 1873 and called it home for the rest of her life. Her Colorado essays reflect her awareness that she was living in a place few people of her time would see, and viewing events significant to western settlement. The editors have selected six essays which they believe best reflect the geographical range, authorial style and thematic interests in all of Jackson’s Colorado essays. Four of the essays are largely pictorial, as she describes the new town of Colorado Springs, some of the mining towns to the west, and the mountain vistas and landscapes. These descriptions would more likely have interested a Jackson contemporary than a modern reader, who will find more to appreciate in the two historical essays telling of the coming of the railroad to south-central Colorado. Jackson’s eye is as much on the people as the places, and she provides an arresting view of a country and its people in transformation: “The railroad was begun; the wilderness had surrendered.” ROSEMARY WHITAKER Colorado State University Sundays in Tutt Library with Frank Waters. Edited by Katherine Scott Sturdevant. (Colorado Springs: The Colorado College, Hulbert Center for Southwestern Studies, 1988. 69 pages.) Each Sunday from June 30 to July 28, 1985, Colorado College audiences gathered to hear a prominent interpreter of Frank Waters. .. and on the final Sunday the prominent writer himself. Besides four lectures, this booklet con­ tains a brief introduction by symposium organizer Joseph T. Gordon and a bio-bibliographical essay by editor Katherine Sturdevant. In “Wasteland to Heartland,” Alexander Blackburn empathetically traces Waters’quest from a tragic culture to archaic depths and then back up to teach of “life renewed.” Thomas J. Lyon in “Does the Earth Speak?” makes fine discriminations and skillfully corroborates Waters’ view of place and consciousness as a “living totality.” In his “Tailings from the Pike’sPeak Lode,” Charles Adams bravely “salvages” certain lengthy autobiographical passages which appear in Waters’ hard-to-find fictional Colorado mining trilogy of the 1930s, but which the author “dumped” in redacting his single-volume Pike’s Peak (1971). Finally, in “The Regional Imperative,” Frank Waters (born in the shadow of Pike’s Peak and leaving Colorado College in the early 1920s without his engineering degree) boldly upholds his creed; the similarities between mother earth and her children, man’slong “allegiance to one small portion of earth,” the impera­ tive not to kill our planet, the modern need for ancient cosmic feeling, and ...