IOWA Belle

Glancing uphill over his left shoulder, he confronted the terrifying sight of the Wunderlich house across the street rising “five to eight feet” in the air on a fifty-foot-wide wall of mud.

Dollie was christened “Iowa belle” by Telluride’s leading newspaper when she and Elwood secretly married, with a little help from their friends. Their box canyon was sublimely isolated by the wild San Juan Mountains of Colorado. Amid the steely-eyed, the quirky, the crooked, and the vile, the young couple seemed to have the world by the tail. Until the mountains turned around to bite.

The Cornet Creek flood of 1914 blew out of the canyon and smashed Telluride. The drama played out in minutes but echoed through the following century, producing a curious mythology around the heroic actions Dollie took to save her dog. This mythology only grew over time, yet she remained enigmatic. As a stock character, her true identity—even her name—was not thought a worthy addition to the legend.

In exposing the roots of those myths, we uncover a much darker one conjured by a vengeful newspaper editor, and carefully designed to do to Elwood what the flood could not.

As Dollie’s grandnephew, the author has unique insight into her story.