Prairie Fires; Death of an Heir

Two really good ones I've been looking forward to reading. First up: "Prairie Fires" by Caroline Fraser. I love Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House" books, and over the last few years there have been quite a few books published that have researched Wilder's life and theorized how much her daughter, Rose, actually helped her write them, and if they were factual or not. This one was much, much better than "Libertarians on the Prairie". Fraser concludes that yes, Rose helped her mother edit and polish her original stories, but manuscripts in Laura's own hand show how much she did on her own, and she tried to keep them as factual as possible. What really got me about this one, something I had thought about before but it didn't really hit me until I read this, was poor Almanzo's story. He grew up comfortable in Malone, New York, his parents weren't rich by any means, but they weren't poor like Laura's parents were. They always had plenty of food (as anyone who's read "Farmer Boy" knows only too well) and Almanzo got an early start working on the farm, with horses, and he loved it. He was a brave, hardworking man, he saved the budding town of De Smet when the hard winter hit, risking his life to go get wheat so the settlers could eat. He and Laura were very, very happy at first, and he had no reason not to believe his hard work would pay off and someday he'd be just as happy and comfortable as his folks had been when he was a kid. He wanted to provide for his wife and their future children. He was honest and faithful and a bit of bad luck, catching diphtheria, crippled him for life. He told Rose, so poignantly, that his life had been "mostly disappointments", and that broke my heart. Not just for him, but for all the pioneers who struggled and scrimped and did their best just to stay afloat and failed, not through laziness or bad decisions, but sheer bad luck.

"Death of an Heir" by Philip Jett broke my heart as well, I cried a lot while reading it. Adolph Coors III, eldest grandson to the founder of the Coors brewery, was by all accounts a wonderful man: a good, fair boss; a loving husband and father to his four children; a dutiful son to his demanding father; and a hardworking partner with his two brothers, who helped him run the brewery. Everyone liked "Ad", as he was called. Ad loved living out in the country on a ranch and raising horses, at forty-four years old he was looking forward to phasing out the brewery side of his life and concentrating more on working outdoors. All that ended on February 9, 1960, when Joe Corbett Jr. carried out his audacious plan to kidnap the heir and collect a big ransom. Corbett was a fugitive from California who had murdered a man and managed to escape and get to Colorado. He had worked on his kidnapping plan for years, but what he didn't count on was Ad Coors, a healthy, athletic man, putting up a fight. Rather than surrendering meekly to Corbett, Ad fought back and as a result Corbett shot him, killing him. He then bundled his body up in his car and drove to a dump, where he cast him aside and returned to Denver to mail the prepared ransom note to the widow. After several months on the run, the FBI eventually caught him (well, Canada caught him and let the FBI know) and he was brought back to Denver to stand trail for the murder of Ad Coors. In Colorado, in order to get the death penalty, you had to have either an eyewitness or a confession. The police tried to get a confession out of him with no luck, so he stood trial and got life imprisonment. He professed his innocence to the end of his life, but the kicker was he only served about 18 years in prison and was paroled. He ended up killing himself in 2009 when he found out he had cancer. It just disgusted me that he took a good man's life and only ended up spending 18 years in prison. Ad Coors and his family deserved better.