Pie Town Woman

The story of Doris Caudill, one of the homesteaders Russell Lee photographed at Pie Town, New Mexico in 1940 — the woman behind the most famous images ever made of Catron County.

Context: University of New Mexico Press, 2001. Myers is herself a photographer; the book braids Caudill’s life with the story of Russell and Jean Lee’s stay and with Myers’ own reflections on memory and photographs.

Why it’s on the list: The Depression-era homestead in northern Catron County, told in detail and matched to photographs — the decade Pat Thompson and Helen Laney were coming of age, eighty miles away.

Where I saw it: Named in Part 2 of Debbie Lee’s four-part Catron County Centennial History, posted publicly by the Catron County Historical Society in April 2022. It is part of the Catron County reading list assembled for the Luna novel research — the county Kyle’s family town sits in.

Connections

• Russell Lee — whose 1940 FSA photographs the book is built around
• the private Catron County research page — the same decades, the same material culture
• No Life for a Lady — the other woman’s account, a generation earlier