MARY COLTER: Architect of the Southwest.

By Arnold Berke. Princeton Architectural Press. 320 pp. $35

After the West was won, somebody had to imaginatively lose it. During the first decades of the 20th century, that task fell to Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter (1869–1958), the Minnesota-bred daughter of Irish immigrants. Working for the nation’s chief promoters of western tourism, the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railroad, Colter "restored," for American consumption, the indigenous architecture of the dispossessed, creating hotels, train stations, shops, and restaurants modeled on Native American and Hispanic cultures. Colter even built "ancient ruins," such as the Grand Canyon National Park’s Watchtower, its weathered, craggy façade covertly supported by steel girders.

The art critic Robert Hughes once called Colter a pioneer of "the American theme-park mentality." That backhanded tribute did at least anticipate a time when Colter’s genius for "oldening things up," as the architect herself put it, would look pretty impressive. After years spent riding through the Southwest on horseback, sketching pueblo ruins and Hopi villages, Colter knew all the uses for stone, brick, tile, iron, glass, and textiles. Her careful reinterpretations became the great architectural legacy of America’s railroad culture. Colter’s work would not be matched during successive waves of automobile-based tourism.

With this gracefully written account, Berke, an architectural historian and preservationist, provides the first serious study of Colter’s contribution. Whether from discretion or ignorance, he says almost nothing about her personal life. Though beautiful as a young woman, Colter never married and apparently didn’t form intimate attachments with men; nor did she care for the company of women as a class. She appears to have been a singularly toughminded character whose work was her passion.

Hopi House (1905), Colter’s first project for the Harvey Company, was built of local stone and wood to look like the ancient village of Oraibi in Arizona. An ersatz trading post stocked with Native American arts and crafts, Hopi House symbolized the partnership between commercialism and romanticism embraced by the Harvey Company. If the paternalism of her employers bothered her, Colter never complained. Rather, she made sure that the local Indians hired to perform the traditional dances knew their steps, and that the artisans charged with producing "ancient" murals and traditional sand paintings worked by the book.

Like Frank Lloyd Wright, who once designed a home without closets (his distraught client had too many possessions anyway, Wright coolly insisted), Colter must have been a nightmare to work for. At age 76, she was still making her crew of masons tear up a fireplace repeatedly to achieve just the right degree of "casualness" in the brickwork. Still, she earned respect because she demanded nothing she couldn’t deliver. She could lay adobe bricks, mix plaster washes, and fix viga joints better than most tradesmen.

Colter retired to Santa Fe in the 1950s. She had amassed an exceptionally valuable collection of Native American jewelry and pottery, but her favorite possession—some drawings made by Indian prisoners after the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn—had no monetary value. The drawings had been given to the family when she was a child, and she had hidden them under her mattress, defying orders to burn them in case of smallpox contamination. Shortly before she died, Colter donated the drawings to the Little Bighorn National Monument—her way, perhaps, of giving back to a dying culture what she’d stolen in good faith.

—A. J. Hewat