Harriet Fish Backus
Tomboy Bride
(Boulder, Colorado: Pruett Pub. Co., 1969)
This autobiography details the life of Harriet Fish Backus. She tells, with great love, her life in the Tomboy Basin, 11,000 feet above ground.
Harriet Fish Backus, a teacher, married her high school sweetheart, George Backus, an assayer. Together they moved to Telluride, Colorado, where a job waited for George at Japan Flora Mine. Together they braved their new environment, the constant downfalls of snow up to 20 feet at a time, the high altitude, and hunger.
Her love for her husband and their home sustained her throughout her lifetime. She tells of disastrous avalanches, stretching out food supplies, growing accustom and enjoying their isolated home, and welcoming virtual strangers into their home for a well cooked meal. Her ongoing battle with ingenious, food snatching rats became almost a game to her and George.
Though she describes extreme happiness there were various times of violence and sorrow. Backus tells, with fury and heartache, of the inhumanity to the mules and horses, a neighbor losing a child, a friend being shot, whooping cough, meningitis, robbery, injury and deaths.
A freight clerk unknowingly hands Backus a package loaded with four thousand standard blasting caps. A package Backus takes with her on her daily rounds around town. Later, assuming it was a Christmas gift, tucks it safely under the Christmas tree. Her family and neighbors, by some grace, return it to the clerk, all of them unharmed.
Serious injury befalls George one night at the mine. A freak mechanical accident breaks his jaw in three places, requiring hospitalization. After several attempts to set it they finally his wired jaw. Several times the wire slips and has to be reset. After five weeks a 115lb George made his way home.
Backus moved several times, including Telluride, British Columbia, Nevada, and Montana, before finally settling in Leadville.
Her first child, Hattie, barely escapes death with a tooth infection, and survives colic and nasty pinkeye. Her second son was born healthy. But her last child was born during the flu epidemic of 1918. Her town alone had a death count of 18 people a day, including desperately needed doctors. Unfortunately, along with half a million other Americans of that year, the child, Mary Kathrine Backus died.1
Sometime after this, mining slowed. George was offered a job at Oliver Filter Company, where he worked for 35 years. This job allowed the still happy couple to travel together to places such as Canada, the Hawaiian Islands and Australia.
After fifty-seven years together George passes away in Harriet's arms from Parkinson's disease.
Harriet Fish Backus, fluent in Spanish, fan of Willie Mays, patriot, and volunteer for the USO died at the age of ninety-two.2 She is survived by her daughter, Harriet, her grandson, and great grandchildren.
Notes:
1 Pat McBroom, UC Berkeley Demographer Finds Undetected Tuberculosis May Have Been Real Killer in 1918 Flu Epidemic, http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2000/10/25_flu.html (December 2000). [also mirrored locally]
2 Harriet Fish Backus, Tomboy Bride (Pruett Publishing Company, 1977), p. 305.
Further Readings:
Elizabeth Jameson, All That Glitters: Class, Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998).
Marat Moore, Women in the Mines: Stories of Life and Work (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996).
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