Peak and Prairie

Thirteen sketches make up Anna Fuller’s 1894 Colorado collection, all of them circling a health resort she calls Springtown and never identifies further. Fuller set her fictitious characters, as she put it, in a very real environment: the prairie ranch on one side, the mining camp on the other, and over everything the great Peak that had drawn Easterners west for years in pursuit of health, of fortune, or of the free, open-air life. What she caught were hints and suggestions, gathered by a single observer in a narrow field, though she meant them to add up to one picture. The women carry much of it. Fuller gave them real force, and the collection takes on spousal and child abuse as readily as it takes on scenery.