One Little Snake River Odyssey

[This version: all photos in B&W.]\nOne Little Snake River Odyssey is a different kind of memoir. It recounts the lives of the three St. Louis siblings—David, Kenneth, and Rita—especially their 1950s and 1960s childhood in the sheep and cattle country of northwest Colorado. It’s a world of 4-H experiences, a one-room schoolhouse, and precious connections with others in the lonely country where the mountains give way to high desert. Like most families, the St. Louis clan lived out experiences ranging from comic to tragic, and David, Kenneth, and Rita all pitch in with some of their own most vivid memories and, from the perspective of seventy-some years, comment on the similarities and differences in their life trajectories.\nThe history of the St. Louis family is the history of the land, and the story of this land has its origins in the nineteenth-century quest for gold at nearby Hahns Peak. When the mostly disappointed prospectors moved on, they left behind some people who looked down from the mountains to the valleys and formed tight-knit little ranching communities. Folks who followed as schoolteachers, hired hands, dryland farmers, and adventurers joined the cowboys of this region and gently transformed it into a rare cultural milieu that forever influenced the St. Louis siblings.\nThe memories and history in One Little Snake River Odyssey are lavishly supplemented with nearly 600 photographs, genealogies, indexes, and more. It is a book for “locals” as well as anyone interested in the West, families, or the human experience.