Ranch Homestead book created for Boulder Heritage Festival by Sister Ann, and neices, Camille and Cheryl

The scenes are from a page featuring my mother and her store, government corral scenes west of the store, and my Grandfather King building 'rip gut' fence. Click to read print.

I just got my copy of this impressive book, the subject of much research by the authors, my nieces, Cheryl Roundy Cox and Camille Griffin Hall, and my sister Ann K. Roundy. The photos are all in color whenever possible. I thought this was a very original idea to trace the ranch history back to the original homesteads up to property owners of the present time. I am sure many will want to keep a copy of this book around. My sister Ann had the foundation send me one for my birthday. I will treasure it.
I also got a newsletter to which I subscribed listing other original books that will be available this summer to the festival. One is a cookbook with original paintings that features old pioneer recipes (I love those). The other book is a series of sketches of pioneer women of Boulder submitted by relatives and others. Cheryl said she got a good number of contributions so that should be another book of memory for people who have an interest in Boulder history. My sister Ann is also hurrying to see if she can finish a book she has been working on called The Escalante Staircase Monument and Me, featuring photographs along the way and her text. I can hardly wait to see that one!
I am very pleased to see publishing these books become an important part of the Boulder Heritage Foundation activities, especially since I am working on my memoirs about growing up there. I don't know that they will publish mine, but my niece has certainly encouraged me to overcome all the obstacles in my way and continue my writing of them.
My son Raymond King Shurtz is the other member of the Heritage Foundation who has been working on it from the beginning. He will emcee the music part of the 3 day festival held on the grounds of the Anazazi Indian Center, a lovely spot. Some of the history features will be done outside as well as inside the center in conference rooms. This year a Smithsonian roots of music display exhibit will be shown this summer. A Bake oven cook off dinner is always featured which is just delicious.
I have been very sorry not to make it up there this summer, but I have been involved in so many conflicts about the issues I am addressing in my memoirs that I decided to give it one more year or so before putting in an appearance. I don't want to run into any unpleasantness since I have been featuring my memoirs so far in my blog and have also been writing other pretty controversial entries. I wanted more people from Utah to read my blog but I expected there to be reactions.
My neo counter as you can check and see (click cities) suggests that a number of people from Utah have tapped into my blog. In fact my neo counter registers 85 hits from Cedar City, Utah, which puzzles me, as I know my relatives are not reading my blog to that extent, who live there.
But I grew up on ranches in Boulder and I did quite a lot of cow punching with my dad and Grandfather King. I was a child of the times when horses were even more important than they are now in the ranching world. Since my dad had no sons I had more opportunity to do boy's work than most girls, which was a mixed blessing for me and my sisters. We had no electricity or running water in the house when I lived there, so our work was double what it would be today or more, having to build fires all the time for heating, washing, cooking, and bottling. It's no wonder I developed chronic fatigue as a child which I attribute more to the stress I experienced from my dad's alcoholism which had tragic consequences in the King family.