Suggestions for Further Reading

My initial step in writing this history was to reread, for background, two books in which I had confidence. The first was Colorado, by Percy Stanley Fritz (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1941), which gave me facts as they existed thirty-five years ago, before modern technology brought drastic changes to life in the state. My second background source was A Colorado History, written originally in 1966 by Carl Ubbelohde and updated in 1971 by Dr. Ubbelohde in collaboration with Maxine Benson and Duane A. Smith, two of the state’s leading historians (Boulder: Pruett Publishing Co., 1972).

My own point of view derives from the love of the region, which my wife and I have acquired during thirty years of wandering through each of the state’s sixty-three counties. My impressions have been strengthened by the books of three skilled writers. David Lavender’s One Man’s West (Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1956) brings out the flavor of the Paradox Valley on the western slope as the author experienced it in growing up there. The Colorado, by Frank Waters (New York: Rinehart & Co., 1946) gave me a fresh appreciation of this overworked river and its dominant position in the evolution of the state. Finally, I found in Centennial, by James Michener (New York: Random House, 1974) a superb narrative about all the creeping things of the South Platte Valley from its beginnings eons ago up to the ecological and political crossroad that Coloradans face today.

The Northwest country from Steamboat Springs to Brown’s Hole and Lodore Canyon is vividly depicted by John Rolfe Burroughs in Where the Old West Stayed Young (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1962). Wilson Rockwell presents the Colorado plateau and the valley of the north fork of the Gunnison in New Frontier (Denver: Sage Books, 1938) and Uncompahgre Country (Denver: Sage Books, 1965). Stephen Payne portrays life in North Park in his autobiographical Where the Rockies Ride Herd (Denver: Sage Books, 1965). The story of Middle Park is detailed in Island of the Rockies, by Robert C. Black, III (Boulder: Pruett Publishing Co., 1969).

I learned a great deal about those early Coloradans, the Spanish-Americans south of the Arkansas, by reading David Lavender’s story of the fur trade, Bent’s Fort (Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1954), Barron Beshoar’s biography of his grandfather, Hippocrates in a Red Vest (Palo Alto, Cal.: American West Publishing Co., 1973), and Ralph C. Taylor’s Colorado South of the Border (Denver: Sage Books, 1963). The best work on eastern-slope ranching has been done by Maurice Frink, W. Turrentine Jackson, and Agnes Wright Spring in When Grass Was King (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1956). Hal Borland wrote charming books about his boyhood in the dry-land town of Flagler, including Country Editor’s Boy (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1970).

I wrote of Central City on the august authority of Caroline Bancroft and her Gulch of Gold (Denver: Sage Books, 1958). I learned of mining in the San Juans from Robert L. Brown’s An Empire of Silver (Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers, 1965). The exuberance of Denver was laid out for me by Robert L. Perkin in The First Hundred Years (Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1959) and by the entertaining Denver! which Bill Barker wrote with Jackie Lewin (Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1972). For data on Colorado’s mountain railroads and their creators, I stole admiringly from Rebel of the Rockies—the story of the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad—by Robert G. Athearn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962) and from Rails That Climb—the Moffat Road—by Edward T. Bollinger (Santa Fe: Rydal Press, 1950).

In sketching the free-silver issue, I had at hand Elmer Ellis’s definitive biography, Henry Moore Teller (Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers, 1941). I borrowed also from three other biographies of special excellence: Horace Tabor, by Duane A. Smith (Boulder: Colorado Associated University Press, 1973); William Gilpin by Thomas L. Karnes (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970); and Frontier Capitalist (John Evans) by Harry E. Kelsey, Jr. (Boulder: Pruett Publishing Co., 1969).

All these books were of tremendous help to me. But my debt is greatest to the hundreds of papers on Colorado subjects contained in the thirty volumes of The Denver Westerners Brand Book—labors of love written by members of the Denver Westerners; and to hundreds of other papers published over the past half century in the State Historical Society’s quarterly, The Colorado Magazine.