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Virginia Cornell has a favor due from me, which I repay now by promoting her book. She used to own the newspaper in Winter Park. When this phase of unemployment started eight years ago, she was good about buying columns and features from a starving free-lance writer.
Virginia sold out and moved to sunny California shortly
thereafter, but there's a problem with Grand County. No
matter how you try to leave it behind, you can't. It may be
the coldest inhabited area on the continent; Grand County
is home to Fraser, once the icebox of the nation,
and Fraser is warmer than Tabernash.
The people are more memorable. I fondly recall a
Kremmling town board meeting whereat a retired rancher
complained at length about the town's water. I've drunk
from sheep tracks that tasted better,
he concluded.
A town trustee responded. Walt, I hope you know that
if you lived any closer to civilization, they'd put you
away.
Grand County's lore teemed with cranks and characters, ranging from recluses like George Henricks, who homesteaded so far up the Troublesome that they had to pipe in daylight, to Susan Anderson, M.D., who made house calls to lumber camps and fought off mountain lions on the way. She refused to own a car or telephone -- her theory was that if people needed her, they'd find her.
Doc Susie practiced in and around Fraser from 1907 to 1957. In a time when medical degrees were often acquired by mail order and generally held by drunken quacks, she held a degree from the University of Michigan.
However, few places then would accept a woman as a doctor. She couldn't establish a practice in Cripple Creek. In Greeley, she was relegated to service as a nurse. But the lumberjacks and gandy dancers of the Fraser Valley were so desperate for medical care that they accepted, and came to cherish, Doc Susie.
Doc Susie has long deserved a good biography, and
Virginia Cornell has provided one in Doc Susie -- The
True of a Country Physician in the Colorado Rockies.
Virginia will be at the Tattered Cover at 7:30 p.m.
tomorrow to sign copies of her book.
When I read her engaging story of Doc Susie, it produced a disheartening speculation: The women's movement has doubtless been a good thing for women, but a bad thing for marginal locales.
On account of the prejudices of her time, Doc Susie was forced to make her career in a cold, remote valley where no male physician would stay. Families got good, affordable medical care. Today, a woman of her talents would be commanding good fees in a comfortable city, rather than collecting payments in firewood. Even though prejudice is evil, it can have beneficial side effects.
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