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A review by nferre
Gilded Mountain: A Novel by Kate Manning
Did not finish book.
5.0
Gilded Mountain takes place a couple of hours away from where I live in Colorado. The book is rich with the history of mining towns, and the operations of these towns at the turn of the 20th Century. It goes deep into women’s rights, worker’s conditions and made me think, ‘we’ve come a long way” with so much more to go.
Marble Colorado, where the story takes place is a real mining town, still existent. Sylvia, who was slated to become a Catholic nun, is there with her family as a young girl and sees her father, worked to the bone, her mother and siblings living in squalor, animals mistreated. And on the other hand, she is employed by the wife of the owner of the mine as her secretary and enjoys the lifestyle of relative opulence in which they live. She is pulled in both directions – as someone who would like to fight for social justice and someone who enjoys the comforts of her boss's home. She is also employed in the winter by a female editor of the Moonstone register, a paper that reports the truth. As she begins her job there, she is timid, afraid to speak her mind, "silence is a woman's best garment" was her mother's refrain. and slowly, with the help of different female mentors, she grows up and finds her voice.
Smiling was a disguise of appeasement.
Last year I visited the cemetery in Leadville after attending a talk about the history of the Irish miners living there in the late 19th century. Leadville is the highest city in the United States at 10,158ft. It is cool and breezy in the summer, and snowy and frigid in the winter. There are over 1,000 Irish miners buried in sunken graves, many with no headstone, in the pauper's area at Evergreen Cemetery, and that doesn’t count the endless graves of their wives and babies. They were given tents to live in over the winter. Who could survive? I suspect that Marble was no different, nor were all the other mining towns that abound the mountain towns of Colorado.
I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he Sid he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator. Mary Harris "Mother" Jones
The book is a work of fiction, with many of the stories based on real events that happened in the mining towns here. What surprised me in the book was the account of the Pinkerton patrols, the fact that in 1908 there was so much vigilante justice, that women were openly treated as second class citizens and that this part of the west was still so wild. A terrific read.
5 stars.
Marble Colorado, where the story takes place is a real mining town, still existent. Sylvia, who was slated to become a Catholic nun, is there with her family as a young girl and sees her father, worked to the bone, her mother and siblings living in squalor, animals mistreated. And on the other hand, she is employed by the wife of the owner of the mine as her secretary and enjoys the lifestyle of relative opulence in which they live. She is pulled in both directions – as someone who would like to fight for social justice and someone who enjoys the comforts of her boss's home. She is also employed in the winter by a female editor of the Moonstone register, a paper that reports the truth. As she begins her job there, she is timid, afraid to speak her mind, "silence is a woman's best garment" was her mother's refrain. and slowly, with the help of different female mentors, she grows up and finds her voice.
Smiling was a disguise of appeasement.
Last year I visited the cemetery in Leadville after attending a talk about the history of the Irish miners living there in the late 19th century. Leadville is the highest city in the United States at 10,158ft. It is cool and breezy in the summer, and snowy and frigid in the winter. There are over 1,000 Irish miners buried in sunken graves, many with no headstone, in the pauper's area at Evergreen Cemetery, and that doesn’t count the endless graves of their wives and babies. They were given tents to live in over the winter. Who could survive? I suspect that Marble was no different, nor were all the other mining towns that abound the mountain towns of Colorado.
I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he Sid he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator. Mary Harris "Mother" Jones
The book is a work of fiction, with many of the stories based on real events that happened in the mining towns here. What surprised me in the book was the account of the Pinkerton patrols, the fact that in 1908 there was so much vigilante justice, that women were openly treated as second class citizens and that this part of the west was still so wild. A terrific read.
5 stars.