Lady
Packer

In 1909, Frank Rivers was desperately searching for a way to get food up to his men at the Rivers and Gorman Ruby mine.  Trails were buried under 10 feet of snow and winter floods had washed out roads and bridges.  With Gold Fever in everyone's bones, it was little surprise no labor could be found for the arduous task of packing supplies to the mines. The trails were nothing more than foot-wide traces clinging to the faces of sheer canyon walls.  In desperation, Frank Rivers asked 26 year old Olga Schaaf to do the job.   At 14, she was breaking horses earning $5 a week.   She was well known in Durango for driving a livery team and taking camping tourists into the mountains with a buckboard in tow.

In an emergency plea, Frank Rivers asked Olga to pack just this one trip up the mine.  She refused saying she didn't know anything about packing. "Don't worry about the packing, I'll do the packing, just get the horses up there" said Rivers.   And so she did.  On the return trip down, she met John Ball along the trail, the Superintendent of the Neglected Mine. "You running a pack outfit? I can't get anyone to get my supplies up to the mine." Before Olga could say no, she was under a three year contract packing supplies to the Neglected Mine.  At a time when women were making $2.75 a week, Olga was making $300 a month. She became famous and was one of the very best.  The men came to depend upon her for her infallible dependability as she came through with her supplies at any risk, in any weather. She was known for her kindness to the animals, sometimes 35 to a string. Since Olga was fairly short in stature, she packed burros rather than mules and she knew each of their names; each burro had a custom saddle to fit. The packs weighed 85 - 125 pounds and carried anything: food, rails, timbers, coal, even the corpse of a miner.

On one of her trips, three burros were killed in their fall carrying dynamite.   Another time, her horse fell on ice and then on top of her, breaking her leg.   A young miner by the name of Bill Little took it upon himself to nurse Olga through a protracted recovery.  A romance ensued and the two were married in 1913.  He joined her in the packing business, each running separate strings.

They operated 80 burros out of May Day, a few miles Northwest of Hesperus.   A railroad spur was built specifically from Hesperus to within one block of their house where they unloaded the railroad cars and transferred the supplies onto the burros.  Bill and Olga shoveled coal from railroad cars into sacks the burros would carry.  In turn, the sacks were re-filled with the ore coming down the mountain. They ran cattle and pastured their burros on their 535 acre ranch at the mouth of the La Plata Canyon. Olga and Bill Little packed to every mine in the La Platas - the Monarch, the Lucky Moon, the Gold King, the Durango Girl and others. 

One year a winter storm stranded Olga, her burros and all the miners at the Neglected Mine on the Junction Creek side of the mountain.  Having run out of food and facing starvation, Olga coaxed 18 miners and 25 burrows through 10 foot snow drifts.    Through trails only she knew in weather 30 degrees below she pleaded and prodded each one of them through a 16 hour trek.  Thanks to Olga, they lived to tell about it. 

She retired from packing career in the 40's.   In 1958, Olga was featured on the television show This is Your Life in the Denver Coliseum with her world-wide distinction of being the only woman packer.   At the end of the show, she and Bill were given a brand new 1959 Edsel.  Bill died in 1969, Olga in 1970.  He was 81, she was 87.