Las Animas "Canon" or Canyon?

We were just watching a DVD last night about the Durango - Silverton train passing along its route in winter. Today, I opened up Volume One of my postcard collection and found two postcards out of place. Included in the Royal Gorge section were these two cards.

They are from the Durango - Silverton line. The top card is from a very humble printer and publisher. I don't know who either one is. There are no trademarks or copyright marks on the back. There are some clues that I can follow to help me find out who the publisher or the printer was. As you can see, it is part of a series of cards (this is number 73). The picture itself is also embossed. As I run my fingers over the card I can feel the indentations that help me to feel the rocky-ness of the canyon walls. It was printed before March 1, 1907. That white space to the right is all the room anyone had to write a message. In the case of this card, no message was written. But, someone wanted Esther A. MacKintosh to know that they were thinking of her.

I love the address: Hopkinton, Iowa - nothing else. It is great to think that the community was either so small or so intimate that the postal employee who exactly who Esther was and which house she lived in. All he (I'm sure they were all "he" back then) needed was her name. All the post office needed was her city and state. I find the spelling of the word canyon to be interesting. On both cards it is spelled canon, like in the Spanish but using an "n" instead of the Spanish "enyea" (an n with a diacritical tilde over it). It seems that at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century the American printers were still trying to figure out how to spell in English words that were pronounced in Spanish.

This is the back of the bottom card. It is by the HH Tammen Curio Company. I wrote about them in two blog entries ago. BY THE WAY: If you ever want to know more about the publishers and printers of post cards... copy this link into your web browser: http://www.metropostcard.com/metropcpublishers.html They have information about post card printers and publishers from around the world.