Both are excellent books about a fascinating woman, who defied tradition, worked in a man’s job, which included bossing the men in hard hats and demanding superior workmanship from them. Another lengthy biography of Colter by Arnold Berke is also available. During the first decades of the 20th century, that task fell to Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter (18691958), the Minnesota-bred daughter of Irish immigrants. I have recently finished a Colter biography for middle school children, and am working on a picture book biography for younger children.Ĭolter is a fascinating woman introduced to me by Virginia Grattan. 35 After the West was won, somebody had to imaginatively lose it. She commented that “There is such a thing as living too long.” All through the 1920s and into the early 1930s passenger traffic boomed.Ĭolter also saw the decline of passenger traffic in her senior years, to the point some of her favorite projects were torn down or closed. Travelers found comfort and good service supplied by the Fred Harvey Company wherever the Santa Fe went. The Santa Fe introduced the American public to the Southwest’s scenic wonders in style. From 1902 until her death in 1958, her life was tied to the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway, and the Fred Harvey Company, which operated restaurants, hotels, and sight seeing services along the Santa Fe line.Ĭolter was called upon to design and decorate hotels, restaurants, and Indian buildings alone the line, and especially at the Grand Canyon. Her life paralleled the rise and fall of passenger railways. Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter was born one month after the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads met in Utah to join and create the first transcontinental railway in the United States.
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