Summit: A Gold Rush History of Summit County Colorado - Hardcover

Gilliland, Mary Ellen

3.57

14 ratings by Goodreads

9780960362417: Summit: A Gold Rush History of Summit County Colorado

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 096036241X ISBN 13: 9780960362417

Publisher: Alpenrose Pr, 1980

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A lively gold rush history of Summit County, Colorado which has been designated a Best Seller by Colorado bookstores. Narrow-gauge alpine railways, Ute Indians, lusty mine camps, the 1860s birth of now-famous local ski towns and self guided mine tours all highlight this classic history. A parade of larger-than-life characters march across its pages--people like dredge king Ben Stanley Revett and Colorado's famed Snowshoe Itinerant, John Lewis Dyer, the skiing preacher. Saints and sinners (mostly sinners) lead the parade of prospectors, claimjumpers, shyster lawyers, shady ladies and hard-working miners who scaled the high mountain passes to create the history this book records.

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From the Publisher:

Three hundred thirty six detail-packed, richly-illustrated pages make this book a great buy. Unlike most books which start strong then fizzle after a couple of years, SUMMIT started strong and has continued to enjoy solid support from Colorado history readers year after year. SUMMIT stands as the first and only complete history of Summit County, Colorado's past. The book is written for local residents and the area's many winter and summer visitors. SUMMIT is not a scholarly tome, but a readable, entertaining and informative history.

SUMMIT features: . . . Nineteen detail-packed chapters . . . Nearly 100 pictures, most antique 1800s photographs . . . Rich design, spiced with century old drawings The book explores the early days of Summit's first explorers, camps with nomad Ute Indians here, follows the beaver men who came seeking pelts and found glittering metal. August 10, 1859 marked the Blue Valley's first official gold strike. Breckenridge sprang up to house a horde of prospectors and other towns followed. SUMMIT takes you up and over the old high passes, along the 1880's narrow-gauge rail routes and on jeep tours of the area's historic mines. The book highlights the county's colorful characters, reports on its crusading newspapers, and, finally, witnesses the birth pangs of Summit skiing. Timed to celebrate the town centennials of Breckenridge, Frisco, Montezuma and Dillon, SUMMIT offers a lively look backward at each, plus histories of dozens more old-time Summit communities.

From the Author:

Being the first to write a comprehensive history of this once-bustling gold rush area, I discovered many puzzles to solve. When did the town of Frisco get its start? Nobody really knew. Who was the mysterious Captain Leonard said to have named the town, then vanished? Why did silver mining here make such a strong resurgence a few years after the Silver Panic of 1893 devastated silver towns all over the West? Who was the elusive Captain Buford who started the lucrative Victoria Mine, only to walk away from his expensive effort? Why did 1865 Montezuma and its neighbors, Peru and Chihuahua, have Spanish names? These and other intriguing questions made my research into a challenging detective job, and gave me great elation when the answers emerged.

I wrote SUMMIT with amusement over the high aspirations and the highjinks of the early day mining entrepreneurs. They believed they could do almost anything-railroad tunnels through the massive Continental Divide mountains, redirection of torrential rivers, excavation of 90-foot-deep mine pits into boulder-packed glacial gravel. All this was accomplished without the aid of modern equipment, just men, horses and crude steam power. The misadventure and the larger-than-life characters that punctuated the SUMMIT story make for humorous anecdotes and stories galore. Mary Ellen Gilliland

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