Local History Challenge

Illustrated with many black and white historic photographs of mines and mining towns in Colorado, this book traces the industry from its development in 1859 to the late 1970s.

An Illustrated Composition and Documentary Compilation With Emphasis on the Spirit and History of Mining, Memorial Edition, an encyclopedic volume of 940-pages, which includes 1,000 footnotes, and 459 illustrations, among them rare and precious pictures. The author deals with mining-related historical occurrences and subjects and calls attention to the great contributions the mining profession has made to civilization at large throughout thousands of years. In so doing, he reveals significantly the "spirit of mining" - the very special air or pneuma, the whole atmosphere, the peculiarities, the breadth and depth, the characteristic philosophy of mining - an uncommon melody of inspiration - as well as the miner's way, or mood, the "Bergart", as Pastor Mathesius of St. Joachimsthal, the venerable pioneer of mining engineering, expresses it. This extensive work covers a broad field of human endeavor, compromising numerous observations, illustrations, excerpts and translations. Beside great scholars and famous men, the "unknown miner," the unsung hero of mining, and simple mining workmen are remembered in the same degree of respect and appreciation. Many of the poets, laborers, musicians, pastors, engineers, painters, physicians, entrepreneurs, and "torch-bearers of mankind" were inspired by mining, as this work reveals. Map-making, the developments of the steam engine, locomotive, railroad engineering, the Pullman (sleeping car) and the first modern British canal as well as the forerunner of social security were inspired by mining. Mining has greatly contributed to the arts through paintings, drawings, sculpturing, wood-carving, church-architecture, music, literature, story-telling, poetry and fairy tales. (The dwarves with their high-pointed hoods pictured in fairy tales are nothing less than little miners of the Medieval Ages!) Men of mining played a decisive role in the development of the alphabet which makes this communication possible.

In 1859, 100,000 folks started the journey to the Pikes Peak goldfields, but only 50,000 completed the trip. An additional 25,000 soon gave up and went back home. The remainder not only brought statehood to the central Rocky Mountains, but they also brought the industrial world to isolated areas in the high mountains, where they mined mineral deposits for gold, silver, lead, zinc, and copper, among others. This book, Historic Photos of Colorado Mining,provides an introduction to Colorado's mining history through photographs from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Accompanying captions provide specific contexts for the photos and tell the story of the prospectors, miners, engineers, teamsters, railroaders, and townspeople who served as entrepreneurs and workers in industrializing the Colorado Rocky Mountains. Many ruins from the mining days are now recognized as historic landmarks. But the stories behind the ruins are often as fascinating as the ruins themselves--the struggle to survive and thrive in the wilderness is always a compelling tale.

A field guide for exploring the many old mine sites across the West and understanding the relics strewn around an abandoned mine, or it can be useful in understanding the processes involved in mining in the nineteenth century in the United States.

Professor O. Glenn Saxon of the Economics Department of Yale University has in this study portrayed the development of the Colorado metal mining industry and has surveyed past and present fiscal policies in respect of the industry.

Brings together all of the men and women and all of the violent contrasts which made up one of the most enthralling chapters in American history.

A guide to appreciating and understanding the history of abandoned mining camps shows how to use the techniques of an historical sleuth to identify and interpret what one sees at a ghost town.

Depicts the history of more than one hundred Colorado towns abandoned after the end of the mining boom.

In Mining Among the Clouds, Harvey N. Gardiner examines what one reporter dubbed "aerial" mining - silver mining at such high altitudes that the miners were literally working among the clouds. In the summer of 1871, two prospectors ventured high up Mount Bross in Colorado's Mosquito Range. There they discovered an outcropping of silver ore in blue limestone. An unprecedented find, it set off strike after strike in Park County. Thus began the silver boom that gave rise to Leadville, laying the foundation for Colorado's Silver Decade.

Part of our heritage lies with the hardy people of the rugged gold and silver era, the mines where they worked and the towns where they lived. Colorado Mining Camps presents 207 communities which were significant in the Colorado mining boom. There were colorful characters of all kinds --- heroes and heroines, con artists and gamblers, itinerate preachers and dance hall girls, tin stars and gunslingers, millionaires and paupers, thieves and fools, braggarts and optimists. This is their story, and these are their towns.

This book includes the story of 240 of Colorado's mining camps, with emphasis on the human side. The men who swarmed to the mountains to find precious metal came in successive waves from the late 1850s on, combing the gulches, scrambling over the passes and climbing the peaks. Their story is full of adventurous chances, lucky strikes, boom conditions, reckless spending, banditry, claim jumping, railroad wars and labor troubles. The author searched the Colorado Rockies from the time she saw and sketched her first ghost town until she had rediscovered and painted the vanishing mining camps. Twenty-two maps give the location of each one and serve as a guide for those who want to reach them by car or jeep, by horseback or on foot. The hardships of the early prospectors, the strikes they made, the gold and silver mines they uncovered, the towns they established, and the rise and fall of their fortunes are vividly recorded. Names and dates are given of the earliest finds, of the most important mines and the money they made, of the newspapers printed, and of the hotels, churches and theaters erected. The difficult supply routes into the rocky fastnesses are also clearly traced. But all these facts are humanized by an author who is an artist rather than a historian, and to whom all this mining in the Colorado Rockies is essentially the story of heroic pioneer effort--the men and women behind the deeds. The book contains 212 separate sketches made by the artist-author on the spot at the oftentimes remote and completely deserted mining camps. These pictures, as well as her 1200 other lithographic sketches of Colorado towns, form an invaluable record of places which are rapidly disappearing under the ravages of fire, wind and snow.

A bewitching collection of tales about the lesser-known places and personalities that made Leadville the state's premier mining town in the 1880s. It is a tribute to the thousands of unknown dead that lie unmarked and unlamented in its cemeteries. Rags-to-riches immigrants, daughters of ill-fame and miners waltz across its pages with local ghosts, fallen peace officers and Lizzie Brown, Leadville's paragon of voodoo.