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Ida:Her Labor of Love

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This book should be required reading for every woman living on the Western Slope of Colorado. The format reads like a novel, but Ms McManus inserts factoids at chapter breaks to remind the reader what else was going on in the state & nationally to put Ida's travails into perspective. I thoroughly enjoyed this read & would highly recommend it to anyone interested in Western History and women's adventure stories.

An interesting and well written story of one woman's life. You will not be disappointed in this book. Ida's life is written in novel form with her many triumphs and disappointments drawing the reader in. I couldn't wait to get back to Ida and her life while I was reading this book.

I am not the typical book reader you usually see in this site. I seldom read, because I get easily distracted and bored. Yet this book was great. Now I want to read more books on Western Colorado hoping to find other stories as interesting as this was.

As a member of the Herwick clan, I was captivated by the story of family members that I never got to meet as well as those that I have known and loved. While this is a work of fiction, the story itself is based on factual people and events. I was moved by Ida's experiences and in the manner she carried herself. I have lost count of the number of copies I have purchased for gifts and to replace the loaned books that I have not gotten back, and still continue to recommend Ida: Her Labor of Love to Colorado history buffs.

All women everywhere should read this book about a truly amazing & courageous woman. Ida is a lady that all women can admire & appreciate. I didn't want this book to end. You won't be disappointed in this beautiful book.

Ida, her labor of Love, by carol crawford mcmanus


A book of local interest to historians, women's groups, those who want to learn about the old mountain west, "Ida", written by Carol Crawford McManus, is the true tale of
a Colorado woman whose bittersweet life spanned from 1873 to 1919. The author,
one of Ida's granddaughters, chronicles the events beginning with Ida's childhood, and ending with her death. Bittersweet is the perfect word to describe this life, full of the sweetness of love from her husband and numerous children, but so too full of the bitter physical hardships felt by the inhabitants of this harsh country, especially it's women, who like Ida, bore many and lost several children.

Before the fortunes made here by ski resorts owners and real estate investors, the high dessert plateau and soaring mountains of Eagle County, Colorado made few wealthy. Agriculture and timbering were the primary enterprises. A few struck it rich in the silver mines of Leadville, but most miners just worked and lived like beasts. For the most part, early settlers got by on homesteading, raising a few summer crops for home consumption, and hunting. Later, when game was gone, and more people moved in, cattle was brought to the area and sheep too, although those two grazing animals proved incompatible on the same range. The short summer growing season here in the mountains and the dry conditions reduced crop yields. Irrigation for that which could grow was and is a necessity. Whatever was grown or purchased had to be stored for consumption throughout the winter. Plagued by cold temperatures and the snows that arrive in September, and leave in May, residents of this area, before the advent of modern heating, must have felt the cold the minute they left the open fire. Transportation for us, using our highways and SUV's with snow tires, is no problem. For the people of former generations, venturing forth in the deep freeze of winter could have been deadly. Early homesteaders, according to "Ida", used home made sleds pulled by men in snowshoes to bring home supplies from the trading post. Travel by horse and carriage in the deep of winter was almost impossible. Horses would have been buried up to their withers and beyond in drifts of fluffy white snow, termed precious "powder" by the modern skier who comes here from all over the globe for the experience of skiing on "the champagne of snow". For modern inhabitants, a white Colorado winters' blessings' of several hundred inches of snow at resorts situated some 10,000 feet above sea level is no real threat to quality of life, but to a pioneer, these harsh realities could threaten life itself.

Into this wild, unsettled, mountainous area, Ida came as a young wife and mother. Ida had been born in Nebraska, and left motherless there at age twelve. This was not an unusual occurrence as the average life span of the frontier woman was 29. After the death of her mother, Ida was left to clean and cook and care for her younger siblings. A few years later, Josiah, Si, Hendrick came along and courted Ida. He was an adventuresome young man several years her senior who worked in construction. Ida made the difficult decision to leave her Father and siblings and follow her young man. When Ida was fifteen, they married, and that first year, Si moved his bride to Kansas in hopes of finding better paying work on the railroads that were being laid across Kansas. At the end of that hard overland trip to Kansas by horse and wagon, Ida's first child was stillborn. Once in Kansas, Ida made a home for the two of them in a small cabin. She planted a large vegetable garden, and harvested and stored the crops. She baked breads and biscuits, cooked the meat her husband killed, and again began her family. She bore two children in that cabin, and then was left for two years while Si ventured to Colorado in search of a better job. Fortunately, her Mother-in-law, Susannah, lived just a few miles away, and could provide help and companionship. Eventually,
Si sent $100 for his wife and children to take the newly finished rail road to Colorado. Instead of spending that huge sum on a ticket, Si's brothers, their Mother Susannah, and Ida and her children, gathered their forces and traveled to the mountains by wagon. Their trip, like that of so many others, was rather uneventful until they encountered the Rocky Mountains. However, once there, they were met by Si who by now had mastered the territory. Together, they traveled the Tennessee Pass, and once over that treacherous continental divide still closed today to winter traffic, they continued to the Eagle River Valley. Except for the mining city of Leadville, filled with miners and saloon girls, and the trading post at Red Cliff, this vast country was wide open and almost uninhabited. The little party built two cabins along side the Eagle River. Susannah and her two single sons lived in one, and Ida and Si and their growing family lived in another. Happiness settled over this brave little troop for a few years. Then, Susannah died, leaving Ida without her female friendship and midwifery support, and once again, Ida found herself pregnant with another child. They seemed to arrive every two years, starting with her first, a still born, at age sixteen. Into a loving but unstable home they were born, for their father, Si was always in search of a better job, a better life. Si and his brothers had the idea to cut timber and sell it to the railroad which was expanding into Colorado. Again, according to the pattern that had become established, Si moved the family. This time, appalling, Ida was left alone with her young children in a dug out earthen hole near a raw tent city. Again, Ida was pregnant. By the end of her winter in a dirt hole, living like an animal in its' burrow, Ida and the children were suffering from malnutrition as they had not been left with enough money or food. That pregnancy did not go well, and ended, without medical care, when a sickly newborn son died. Ida did recover, and her husband reclaimed her and their family, and moved them again to another spot on this high plateau pierced with scores of soaring peaks over 14,000 feet in elevation. Eventually, after working at construction and providing timbers to the railroad, Si took up homesteading again, and, this time, stuck with it. They family settled into a stable situation with some modicum of physical comfort and financial stability. There, the large brood grew into maturity. Along the way, Ida made sure that at some point, they had some schooling. The children, who were born later rather than sooner into this family of numerous offspring, got more formal education due to improving, stable circumstances. There were several infant deaths, but all of the children born healthy, survived into adulthood, save one young boy who was bitten by a poisonous snake. When Ida died, of cancer near age fifty, her children had grown and were somewhat scattered across western Colorado,like seeds on a fertile field. Many had married, and all seemed to be making their way
in the world. The overall success of this family is in itself a remarkable feat for people who lived with such limited resources and in such a wild time and place. It speaks to the resiliency of the American frontier spirit, and is an inspiration to us all. This tale is also a stark reminder to modern women of how difficult their role as bearer of the next generation was and can be; a possible death defying ordeal for both mother and child.

The biographer granddaughter writes this family story in a simple straightforward way. Ida is a revered family legend, and described as being almost perfect; her one possible mistake was in marrying a man with wanderlust. Described in less saint- like terms, Si is shown in a selfish way to abandon his head of the household responsibilities from time to time in search of adventure. He also is described as being "lusty", even as the years and decades of marriage mount. This reader reviewer had the distinct impression that this was the first book ever written by this author. Nevertheless, it seems to be an interesting, accurate portrayal of a life in a bygone place and time. A wild place, this was, now conquered by modernity. Only a catastrophic snow storm, a winter `Katrina', it seems, could once again reduce mountain inhabitants to live on the edge in terms of creature comforts, and survival, as Ida and Si had to do on a regular basis.