A Tenderfoot Bride: Tales from an Old Ranch

What a wonderful book! I am thrilled to read a memoir like this that puts a different twists, or point-of-view, on a familiar subject. To be honest, this is a book my wife had picked up, but once I started reading it, I was hooked. For anyone who would like a 'realistic view' of the early days in Colorado, this is a 'must read' item.

In the summer of 1897, Clarice Estabrook of Dayton, Ohio, came to Nebraska to visit her friend Inez Richards. There she met and fell in love with Inez's brother-in-law, Jarvis, and in 1900 they were married. Jarvis was in the cattle business and had bought a ranch on East Bijou Creek in Elbert County, Colorado, to which he brought his new bride. This memoir by Clarice Richards, written around 1920, is her account of the first few years living on that ranch. Clarice and Jarvis were well-off monetarily, so the "hardships" she had to get used had more to do with accommodating herself to a different lifestyle living on a somewhat isolated ranch than life in the more metropolitan Dayton would have afforded her. Refined in style and outlook in her writing, she is still capable of being down to earth and humorous, as with her story about the loony Van Winkleses. She also uses a lot of invented dialogue, which gives the book the feel of a novel, though this tends to reduce the power of her observations. The time period she writes about is likewise at the tail end of the "wild" times of the West, and her book doesn't contain the reckless and uninhibited flavor of some earlier memoirs. She is rather unkind to the former owners of her ranch, and says things about them that are not supported by history. Also, the Richardses at the time of which she writes were involved in a widely followed legal case involving fencing and open range policies, which they lost at trial, and the author barely mentions any of this at all. Beyond the scope of the book, the couple spent a great deal of time in Denver after 1905 or so, and after Jarvis died in 1928, Clarice moved to Ward, Colorado, west of Boulder, where she lived until her death in 1949. They had no children. The book is a competent and mildly interesting telling of a woman's experiences living on a ranch in eastern Colorado around the turn of the twentieth century. Other books of a similar nature are more exciting and more adventurous, but Mrs. Richards relates her story in a lively enough manner to keep anyone interested in the time period or locale or circumstances entertained and informed.

What a wonderful look at the 1900's wild west in Elbert county Colorado. She was the brid of a minister and these two cultured souls moved west. They witnessed the ebb tide of the wild lawless days. This book was first published in 1920 and was praised then for its charm and accuracy. Both qualities are still quite evident today.

Clarice Richased went as a bride to a ranch on the high plains of Colorado. She set herself to become a good ranch wise. She writes with a great deal of insight and humor during her coming of age and the passing of an era - the old wild west.