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.
