Silverheels

Silverheels is a novel built on a Colorado legend. In the mining camp of Buckskin Joe, so the story goes, a woman nicknamed for her fancy shoes stayed to tend the sick when smallpox hit and most of the town fled. Historians still argue about whether she ever existed, but her story is told often enough that a mountain carries her name.

Tara Meixsell follows the woman before and after the epidemic as well as during it. A summary of the book says she arrives in Buckskin Joe to start over, leaves an affair with a married man behind, and falls for a local businessman. A dance at a fundraiser earns her the nickname. She catches the disease after caring for others, survives, and then disappears.

The Western Reflections first edition came out in 2002. The author's blurb says she spent six years researching a story that some feel is legend and others suspect is historical fact. Our catalogue files the book under historical fiction and westerns, with smallpox and women pioneers among its subjects.

Silverheels suits readers of Colorado historical fiction, and anyone who has looked up at Mount Silverheels from South Park and wondered where the name came from. It is a story of love, sacrifice and starting over, set in a gold camp in the early 1860s. Readers who like a western built around a real legend, rather than pure invention, will find that here. It is fiction, so enjoy it as a retelling and look to other sources if you want settled history.

Tara Meixsell wrote Silverheels. The author blurb on the book's Amazon listing says she graduated from Reed College with a degree in Historical Literature and describes her as running a ranch near Alma, Colorado. Alma is the town closest to the old Buckskin Joe camp, so she wrote about country she lived beside. This is the one Meixsell book in our catalogue, and her author page says more about what we can and cannot confirm.

More about Tara Meixsell →

Buckskin Joe was a small mining camp a couple of miles south of the present town of Alma, in South Park. In one retelling of the legend, a veiled dancer arrived in 1861 and worked in a saloon there. That October two men drove a flock of sheep into camp and sold most of them for fresh mutton, and one soon fell ill and died. Smallpox spread, burials multiplied, businesses closed, and women and children left for Denver. The legend says the dancer stayed to nurse the sick until she caught the disease herself. A committee collected $5,000 for her, according to the story, but found her cabin empty. The mountain above the town was named in her honor. Mount Silverheels rises 13,829 feet in Pike National Forest, about 4.9 miles northeast of Alma. The same retelling notes that there are several versions of her story, and that in some of them her real name is unknown.

Source: Sweethearts of the West: The Legend of Silverheels