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Book Review
| America's Switzerland: Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park, the Growth Years. By James H. Pickering. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2005. xii + 457 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index, $29.95.)
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One of the great ironies of the American West is the dilemma of independence. A belief that private enterprise and personal initiative built the West has anchored all manner of stories, films, art work, and advertising. Yet as James H. Pickering has outlined in this narrative of the first four decades of Colorado's most-visited tourist town (and one of the country's best-patronized national parks), the bond between federal spending and the free market explains the complexity of life in a community that grows from a few thousand in the winter to a medium-sized city each summer. |
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Pickering, a retired professor of English and university administrator, has written several treatments of Estes Park, among them a biography of Freelan Oscar Stanley, a tubercular refugee from the very industrial life of Maine that gave him the wealth to build a small New England village in the heart of the Rockies. Co-inventor with his brother, Francis Stanley, of the steam-powered vehicle and dry-plate photography, F. O. Stanley set the tone in Progressive-era Colorado with his investment in a decorous retreat for like-minded middle- and upper-class tourists. While small Colorado Plains communities had to wait for the New Deal for electrification or highways, Stanley's Estes Park would, by the 1920s, be poised to share in the bounty of the car culture that he also brought to the east face of the Rocky Mountains. |
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Weaving a linear narrative that at times borders on the encyclopedic, Pickering nonetheless offers the patient reader a wealth of detail about the dichotomy of Estes Park's international flair and parochial interests. The famed Kansas newspaper columnist, William Allen White, spent his summers in a cabin above Estes Park, and dignitaries from the eastern United States and Europe journeyed to the high mountain valley for its scenic beauty and surcease from the heat of the Great Plains. Pickering also writes at length about ownership of buildings, the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps in Rocky Mountain National Park, and the middle-brow tastes of Estes Park's summer residents. |
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In so doing, Pickering offers his audience a glimpse of the broader themes to be explored by other scholars of the twentieth-century West, or of environmental history in general. For this reviewer, the most revealing passages were the tragedies of natural disaster in the national park, and the unintended harshness of race relations in a town that Pickering described in the 1940s as "on average better educated, more affluent, and more racially homogeneous than the population of Colorado and the nation" (p. 381). |
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The author's writing, as befits a student of the English language, is smooth and clear. Those who journey after Pickering to tell the Estes Park tale would do well to maintain his prose style while examining the literature of national parks, Progressivism, the Second World War in the West, and the way that "America's Switzerland" drew heavily from Denver to become a haven for families and children, rather than the more-celebrated image of national parks as zones of wilderness and challenge. |
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| Michael Welsh
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| University of Northern Colorado |
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ISSN 1939-8603
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