Silverton's growing season is dismally short. At most, this tiny town in the Colorado Rockies gets a month's worth of frost-free days each year—and exactly when those days will fall, you can only guess. "The weather here is hard to gauge," says local retired businessman Gene Halaburt. "One year it snowed on the Fourth of July." 

Silverton, which is about 400 driving miles southwest of Denver, is no ordinary town, admits Linda Bernard, the town's mayor. Bernard draws a salary of $110 a month, and claims to be the only officeholder in the world whose campaign slogan was "No Paved Streets".

If Silverton is not exactly up to 20th-century speed, the people here like it that way. During the silver boom at the end of the last century, the town boasted 37 saloons, three theaters, two newspapers, and more brothels than you could count. According to local lore, the song "There'll be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonite" was written in Silverton, back in the 1880s. The tune certainly wouldn't apply today to this sleepy backwater of pretty Victorian houses that line streets wide enough to have been designed by Baron Haussmann. The miners are gone now, replaced by tourists. Every morning, several hundred of them arrive by train from Durango—a 45-mile, three-and-a-half-hour ride that takes them through the staggeringly beautiful San Juan Mountains. By four in the afternoon, most of the day-trippers are back aboard the narrow-gauge steam train for the return journey.

Between the weather and the altitude (9,300 feet above sea level), not much flourishes in Silverton. But there are exceptions: Dandelions love it here; horseradish prospers; and rhubarb runs riot. And Silverton is passionate about its rhubarb—so much so that one resident recently felt compelled to draw up an inventory of every plant in the area. By her estimate, there turns out to be close to 400, which works out to almost one for every man, woman, and child in town.
  

The stalks of the rhubarb plant (Rheum rhabarbarum), a hardy perennial, look a bit like oversize, red celery, but rhubarb is actually a member of the buckwheat family, and a close relative of dock and sorrel. Though usually eaten as a fruit, it is technically a vegetable. Native to northern Asia, rhubarb was named for the barbarians who first introduced it to western Europe—and perhaps for the Volga River, whose ancient name was the Rha, and whence the barbarian Tatars (who may have brought it westward) came.
  

Known to the world for more than 4,000 years (it is mentioned in a Chinese herbal that dates back to 2700 b.c.), rhubarb, until relatively recently, had been used primarily as an ornamental plant and for medicinal purposes. Regarded in Europe as something of a wonder drug, it was prescribed as a purgative and as a cure for everything from animal bites and excessive freckles to cancer. It was the English who eventually recognized the culinary possibilities of rhubarb, developing recipes for rhubarb pies and jams, chutneys and compotes. By the early 1900s, they were consuming as much as 30 tons of rhubarb a day.
  

In the United States, where it was introduced after the Revolutionary War, rhubarb has long been viewed with suspicion. Its leaves are toxic—which some Americans apparently discovered the hard way early in this century when nutritional experts wrongly recommended that rhubarb leaves be eaten as a vegetable. (Initially, the toxic agent was thought to be oxalic acid, found in smaller quantities in spinach and sorrel, but recent research suggests that there is another chemical at work here.) The bitterness of the leaves—and of the raw stalks—may have something to do with the fact that rhubarb has also come to mean a heated controversy or dispute. Today, the prejudice against rhubarb in America may be waning. According to the Washington Rhubarb Growers Association in Sumner, Washington, farmers who also grow rhubarb are finally starting to realize a small profit on the plant.