The Story of Colorado's Gold & Silver Rushes

Originally published by Macmillan in 1970 as "The New Eldorado."

Phyllis Flanders Dorset chronicles the rise and fall of Colorado's gold and silver mines over a forty year period, concentrating on mining camps at Leadville, Cripple Creek, and Central City.

Colorado, in all its lead-slinging glory, comes alive in 'The Story of Colorado's Gold and Silver Rushes,' where fortunes were waiting to be won or lost. Famous and infamous, mighty and small, all stampeded toward the big strike---Bat Masterson, who brought law to the rough-and-tumble mining camps; journalist Horace Greeley; the real 'Unsinkable Molly Brown;' Silver Croesus H.A.W. Tabor and his beautiful paramour Baby Doe; 'Silver Heels,' the whore with a heart of gold; and the fabled four-flusher 'Soapy' Smith. They came to the cities---Leadville, Cripple Creek and Denver--the 'Paris of the West.' Thousands of visitors, as varied as Russian royalty and Ireland's Oscar Wilde, crowded the western spaces for a look at the hard-drinking, high-living pioneers of Colorado, where law, order and morality came in second in the race for riches.

Illustrated with five maps.

Includes Bibliography and Index.