Colorado: A bicentennial history (The States and the Nation series)

Those who travel to look at Colorado will find as much meaning in Marshall Sprague’s well-told story of its historical conflict as will those who live with the beauty—and the challenge. Mountains—so beautiful, the land dominated by the Colorado Rockies, that miners who “thought of returning to the comfort and dull security of their homes back east,” in Marshall Sprague’s words, “found themselves held by the appeal of their giddy environment, the spaciousness, the violence and serenity of the climate, the brightness of stars and the gorgeous sunups.” The beauty itself could encourage a miner’s belief that surely his luck would turn. THE state of Colorado, its rolling plains barricaded by the Continental Divide and a jumble of Rocky Mountains of matchless height, width, and majesty, began to take shape when Napoleon doubled the size of the infant United States by selling to it everything he owned west of the Mississippi at a price of four cents an acre. A Marshel Sprague Novel the state and the nation