This reprint makes available again Frank Waters dramatic and colorful 1937 biography of Winfield Scott Stratton, the man who struck it rich at the foot of Pike s Peak and turned Cripple Creek into the greatest gold camp on earth. More than regional history, "Midas of the Rockies" is a story so fabulously impossible and yet so painfully true that it commends itself to the whole of America, the only earth, the only people who could have created it."
From the time of Coronado?s discovery to the era of modern ski resorts and sport climbing routes, adventurers have been lured irresistibly to the Rocky Mountains. In this book distinguished writer David Lavender traces the colorful history of the Rockies, focusing on the period that began in 1859 with the first gold strikes. The real and fabled attractions of gold, silver, furs, lumber, and lead brought swarms of people into the mountains, eagerly seeking wealth. A get-rich-quick spirit pervaded the Rockies, leading to lawlessness, violence, vigilantism, and political expediency. The Rockies is particularly revealing about the struggles which resulted in codes peculiar to the mountainous West. Duane A. Smith provides a new introduction to this Bison Books edition of The Rockies.
Since 1976, newcomers and natives alike have learned about the rich history of the magnificent place they call home from Colorado: A History of the Centennial State. In the fifth edition, coauthors Carl Abbott, Stephen J. Leonard, and Thomas J. Noel incorporate recent events, scholarship, and insights about the state in an accessible volume that general readers and students will enjoy. The new edition tells of conflicts, shifting alliances, and changing ways of life as Hispanic, European, and African American settlers flooded into a region that was already home to Native Americans. Providing a balanced treatment of the entire state’s history—from Grand Junction to Lamar and from Trinidad to Craig—the authors also reveal how Denver and its surrounding communities developed and gained influence. While continuing to elucidate the significant impact of mining, agriculture, manufacturing, and tourism on Colorado, the fifth edition broadens and focuses its coverage by consolidating material on Native Americans into one chapter and adding a new chapter on sports history. The authors also expand their discussion of the twentieth century with updated sections on the environment, economy, politics, and recent cultural conflicts. New illustrations, updated statistics, and an extensive bibliography including Internet resources enhance this edition.
Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Caxton Press This book features information and travel directions for sixty of Colorado's ghost towns and mining camps. There is an informal history of each town, along with early and contemporary photographs to aid in site identification.
Colorado Springs, Colorado, has long profited from Pikes Peak and built an urban infrastructure to sustain that relationship. In Profiting from the Peak, geographer John Harner surveys the events and socioeconomic conditions that formed the city, analyzing the built landscape to offer insight into the origins of its urban forms and spatial layout, focusing particularly on historic downtown architecture and public spaces. He examines the cultural values that have come to define the city, showing how military and other institutions, tourism, political and economic conditions, cultural movements, key individual actors, and administrative policies have created a singular urban personality. Capital accumulation has been a defining theme of Colorado Springs from its very beginning, with enormous profits generated from regional industrialization, railroads, land sales, water appropriation, and extraction of coal and gold. These conditions and its setting in the Rocky Mountain West formed a libertarian-oriented, limited governance philosophy. This persistent prioritization of liberty at the heart of Colorado Springs’s identity, specifically the freedom to conduct business and generate profits in a relatively unconstrained setting, has directed the urban sprawl of the built landscape and molded the region’s political culture. Profiting from the Peak will be of interest to historical and urban geographers, historians of Colorado and the American West, and anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the cultural identity of Colorado Springs.
This is a thoroughly revised edition of the Historical Atlas of Colorado, which was coauthored by Tom Noel and published in 1994. Chock-full of the best and latest information on Colorado, this new edition features thirty new chapters, updated text, more than 100 color maps and 100 color photos, and a best-of listing of Colorado authors and books, as well as a guide to hundreds of tourist attractions. Colorado received its name (Spanish for “red”) after much debate and many possibilities, including Idaho (an “Indian” name meaning “gem of the mountains” later discovered to be a fabrication) and Yampa (Ute for “bear”). Noel includes other little-known but significant facts about the state, from its status as first state in the Union to elect women to its legislature, to its controversial “highest state” designation, elevated by the 2013 legalization of recreational cannabis. Noel and cartographer Carol Zuber-Mallison map and describe Colorado’s spectacular geography and its fascinating past. The book’s eight parts survey natural Colorado, from rivers and mountains to dinosaurs and mammals; history, from prehistoric peoples to twenty-first-century Color-oddities; mining and manufacturing, from the gold rush to alternative energy sources; agriculture, including wineries and brewpubs; transportation, from stagecoach lines to light rail; modern Colorado, from the New Deal to the present (including politics, history, and information on lynchings, executions, and prisons); recreation, covering not only hiking and skiing but also literary locales and Colorado in the movies; and tourism, encompassing historic landmarks, museums, and even cemeteries. In short, this book has information—and surprises—that anyone interested in Colorado will relish.
Delivering Aid examines local welfare practices, policies, and debates during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in a diverse collection of western communities including Protestant cash-crop homesteaders, Catholic Hispanic subsistence farmers, miners in a dying mining center, residents in a dominant regional city, Native Americans on an Indian reservation, and farmers and workers in a stable mixed economy. Krainz investigates how communities used poor relief, mothers' pensions, blind benefits, county hospitals, and poor farms, as well as explains the roles that private charities played in sustaining needy residents. Delivering Aid challenges existing historical interpretations of the development of America's welfare state. Most scholars argue that the Progressive Era was a major transformation in welfare practices due to new theories about poverty and charity. Yet drawing on evidence from local county pauper books, Krainz concludes that by focusing on implementation welfare practices show little change. Still, assistance varied widely since local conditions--settlement patterns, economic conditions, environmental factors, religious practices, existing relief policies, and decisions by local residents--shaped each community's welfare strategies and were far more important in determining relief practices than were new ideas concerning poverty.
