In the winter of 1911, a handsome young man arrived in Meeker, Colorado. He wore a smart suit and introduced himself to the residents as John Hill – or Jack, as he preferred to be called. No one in that small White River Valley town had ever seen him before…
While doing research for my Master’s degree in 2017, I came across a newspaper article in the New York Times archive about a woman named Helen Hilsher, who disguised herself as a man in Colorado in the early part of the 20th century. I followed Helen’s trail through a number of online newspaper archives and wrote up what I found for Narratively, where it later became their seventh most-read piece of 2017.
You can read Helen’s story – or what I could piece together of it – here. The illustrations for the story are done by the extremely talented illustrator Ellen Surrey.
Amy Hughes, Writer 