Book
About the Book
Andersons of Yankee Creek
Pete Anderson
Andersons of Yankee Creek weaves four generations of stories into a portrait of one family’s life on the Front Range of Colorado. Gustaf and Mathilda Anderson emigrated from Sweden in 1881, arriving separately and alone in Colorado, where jobs were waiting with the Colorado Central Railroad. In 1895 they purchased a farm in the Upper Bear Creek area of Evergreen, a half section tucked up against the Arapaho National Forest at 8,500 feet elevation. They called it simply “The Place,” and it became the center of family life for the next one hundred years.
The book draws from a remarkable set of firsthand sources: interviews recorded in 1968, 1975, and 1985 by the Clear Creek Historical Society with Frank and Pearl Anderson, supplemented by family photographs, written remembrances, and community history. Their voices come alive on the page.
The stories include the emigration of Gustaf and Mathilda from Sweden, the arranged marriage of their son Frank to Pearl Spencer, and the deepest snowstorm ever recorded on the Front Range, which trapped members of the family for months and nearly killed them. Readers follow Frank as he breaks horses and hauls freight over Squaw Pass for the Evans Ranch, and Pearl as she arrives from a Denver orphanage and builds a life she never could have imagined. Later generations weather the feast and famine cycles of mountain living to open what would become one of Evergreen’s most beloved community institutions: Anderson’s Mountain Market.
Evergreen, Colorado’s first resort community and the summer playground of the Denver elite, was a place of extraordinary beauty and extraordinary hardship. The Anderson family lived all of it. This is their story.