About the author

Linda Wommack
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Linda Wommack is a Colorado native, and has enjoyed Colorado History since childhood. A distant relative to Bob Womack, of Cripple Creek gold fame, Linda has written of early Colorado history across the state in publications for the past ten years, and spends much of her time giving speeches and tours throughout Colorado, and also reviews books of historical nature for local and national publications.

Her most recent project, completing three years of research, is her fourth book, Published in the Fall of 1998, with an astonishing reprint in March of 1999, by Caxton Press.

Other books
by Linda Wommack

Colorado History
For Kids

it's 5th printing.

Cripple Creek Tailings
A Centennial Reading, 1891-1991

James A. Michener wrote these words in 1978, when his epic novel spanning Colorado history had been brought to national television.

The thoughts of novelists, once planted, need nurturing and thereby grow in the mind of a writer. Such was the case with this great novelist of epic proportions. Before CENTENNIAL, his writing resume included hundreds of articles and essays, as well as a novel called Tales of the South Pacific , which was later made into a motion picture.

Yet in 1936, Michener, then only twenty-nine years old, came to Greeley, Colorado, where he taught social studies at what was then called Colorado State College of Education. Later it would become the University of Northern Colorado. Michener was known as a scholar and had taught at such universities as Harvard and Ohio State, as well as in Scotland and Italy. The educational elite made it known that Michener was throwing away his career on a useless sojourn to Colorado, the barbaric west, they called it. Yet he spent four years at Greeley, forging a bond with Colorado he would never forget. He traveled, took pictures, notes and...remembered.

Fast forward some thirty-five years later when Michener, a member of President Fords Bicentennial Committee, was approached for the idea of a novel of American history spanning two hundred years. Yet as many government initiatives sound good, they fall through. A reflective and brooding Michener wrote in his memoirs, housed at the Michener Library at the University of Colorado in Greeley, the following:

...contributing to a vision of a true bicentennial, and to see it perish so ignobly hurt. Dated the 4th of July , Micheners words would proof to be ironic and prophetic. In a later entry in the same journal, he writes: Once I realized this, my responsibility became clear. My spiritual relation to my nation would be the western novel.

And so Michener took out his photos and his notes and began research for the writing of his yet unnamed Colorado epic. His research took him from Mexico, where he learned of Mexican culture and immigration, to Pennsylvania, his home state, where he researched westward migration, Conestoga wagons, as well as the habits and endurance of oxen. In Missouri he learned of the beaver trade and the great commerce that the mountain traders provided for the East.

Yet it was the inspiration of a photograph he had taken back in 1936, that put his novel into motion. The image was that of a lonely, deserted wind-blown line camp called Keota, on Colorados eastern plains. Here was the center of his novel. The epic would begin at the lands beginning, where Michener would always begin his future epics, and would build toward a human civilization with all the heartbreak and struggle, battle and survival of human nature.

And with the coming of Americas bicentennial celebration just three years away, (1976) Michener the man of vision, had a title for his first epic novel, a novel based in Colorado, would be titled simply,Centennial.

Next month: Part 2 of this 3-part series. Follow the story of CENTENNIAL, from plot and characters to scenes transformed into a television production.

Copyright © 2003 Linda Wommack. All rights reserved