Warriors, Widows, & Orphans
Author Kay Beth Avery has written an amazing composite of life in southern Colorado in the 1800s. We often read of the warriors, but what of the widows and orphans? Southern Colorado embodies an amazing mix of Spanish, English, Indian, cowboy, outlaw, and pioneer culture.
- Published
- 2003
- ISBN
- 978-1-890437-77-0
- Pages
- 216
- Category
- History
- Place
- Colorado
- Publisher
- Western Reflections Pub. Co.
- Listed at
- $18.29
Publication details from Open Library. The price shown is the last one on record and is historic, not a current offer.
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About this book
Warriors, Widows & Orphans, subtitled And Other Tales of Southern Colorado, collects stories of life in southern Colorado in the 1800s. Kay Beth Avery asks a simple question in the description: we often read about the warriors, but what about the widows and orphans?
The catalogue describes a mix of Spanish, English, Indian, cowboy, outlaw and pioneer culture. An AbeBooks listing says the stories draw on local tall tales, with historical facts and imagined scenes added to portray the people of the region.
Open Library classes it as American historical fiction and lists the Western Reflections edition as 2003. AbeBooks, which gives the same year, lists it at 216 pages.
Who it is for
This book is for readers of Colorado frontier history who want the human side of it: the settlers, families and survivors alongside the gunmen and soldiers. It also suits anyone with roots in southern Colorado who likes regional storytelling.
Ways to use this book
Driving a southern Colorado history loop
Pueblo, La Junta and Trinidad each keep a different layer of the region's past. Pick two, check hours on their websites, and read a tale or two from the book at each stop to see how the places compare.
Choosing between fiction and fact
The catalogue lists this as historical fiction and describes it as a composite of frontier life. Use the museum pages above to separate what is documented, such as the trading posts, from what a storyteller might have added.
Reading with students
Teachers can pair a story with the Bent's Old Fort pages on trade and a look at the Trinidad museum's buildings, then ask students what daily life on that frontier would have required.
Go deeper
Southern Colorado's frontier mixed Spanish, Native, trader and settler worlds. These places keep that history in buildings and on the ground, which makes them good companions for a book of regional tales.
Bent's Old Fort National Historic Site
The National Park Service describes the reconstructed trading post near La Junta, built for the bison robe trade, and explains the multicultural, multilingual world of its traders.
El Pueblo History Museum
History Colorado says the museum stands on the site of an 1842 trading post in Pueblo, and that visitors can see a reconstruction and an open archaeology pavilion.
Trinidad History Museum
Its site explains that the museum fills a city block with the Baca House, the Bloom Mansion and the Barglow Building, and traces its start as a pioneer museum in 1955.
Good to know
Is it fiction or nonfiction?
What part of Colorado is it about?
When was this edition published?
How do I get a copy of Warriors, Widows & Orphans?
Have a book of your own?
This is the kind of book the house publishes: regional history, biography, memoir and the stories that belong to a place. Send us yours and a person will read it.