Sandra Dallas – författare

A powerful novel of the secrets women keep and the lies they tell to survive life in a small, nineteenth-century Colorado mining town.

Here is the story of Colorado's old hotels - some lavish, some lascivious, a few just long forgotten. Before the turn of the century, when travel was arduous, not to mention downright dangerous, voyagers to the Rocky Mountains wanted to lower their travel-weary limbs into plush chairs, nibble oysters, and sip champagne. No luxury was denied them when they arrived at most Colorado hotels. At the Hotel de Paris in Georgetown, for example, an unexpected guest might dine on wild game, tiny French peas, crusty French bread, and properly chilled wine after only a few minutes' wait. At the Sheridan in Telluride a heartier traveler could sit down to a plank steak, named after the piece of wood whose size it resembled. At the Teller House in Central City one could order buffalo tongue in aspic. At Gold Hill, where the miners knew good food if not good French, one could select from Casey's ""Tabble Dote"" a cup of coffee ""demy tass"" and ""floatin' Ireland.""To the eastern visitors' happy surprise, the hotels for the most part were opulently Victorian, as proper as they were in Boston or Saratoga, with ladies' entrances, ordinaries, and endless private parlors. Yet there was still enough of the raw frontier in hotels where a miner might sleep an eight-hour shift on someone else's sheets for a mere fifty cents. He would sleep in the cold, clawed by a bedmate's spurs and chewed by bedbugs, but he did have one guarantee of relative comfort - the landlord's posted promise of ""No More Than Five in a Bed.

Prospectors lured to the West in hopes of striking rich settled a thousand towns in the Colorado mountains. The cry of ""Gold!"" or ""Silver!"" or a few flecks of color in a tin cup sent them to remote, often inhospitable locations to search for the precious metals.Close on the heels of the miners were the merchant, the gamblers, the prostitutes, the washerwomen, the capitalists, and the con men. Together they turned the mining camps into bustling towns where saloons never closed and the safest place for a man to walk after dark was down the middle of the street with a gun in each hand.Colorado Ghost Towns and Mining Camps is the first new book in more than twenty-five years to document these mountain communities. Most of the early settlers are gone, leaving few persons with any oral tradition to pass on to future generations. For many of the 147 towns and camps listed in this book, not much remains to be preserved beyond what Dallas and photographer Kendal Atchison have recorded.The book is lavishly illustrated with 290 photographs. In addition to those by Atchison and early historical photographs, rare photographs from the 1920s and 1930s are included, many never published before. Some of Atchison's superb photographs evoke nostalgia with views of abandoned buildings deteriorating amid meadow wildflowers. Soon nothing will remain but the Colorado landscape, with the eternal mountains towering close by.The town histories are traced from their beginning in strike-it-rich excitement and glittering boom years, through the declines, to the present day. Some of these hopeful towns, such as Lulu, were deserted as quickly as they were settled, lasting barely more than a season, while a few, including Aspen and Breckenridge, are as lively today as they were a century ago. But most of them, like Animas Forks, flourished until the gold or silver played out and were abandoned, leaving a few lonely cabins or picturesque ruins. Towns such as Aspen, Crested Butte, Cripple Creek, and Breckenridge have lived on to become popular ski resorts, and these places warrant additional vignettes that add color and to the text.Written to inform and entertain the general reader, this book will be a delight for armchair adventurers as well as invaluable for vacationers interested in visiting the sites of these Colorado boomtowns. Most of the places are no longer shown on modern road maps, and special maps of the region have been prepared for this book.

Almost every citizen is laudably ambitious to build a house unlike that of his neighbor,"" wrote an observer in early Denver, ""and is more desirous that it shall have some novel feature than that it shall be surpassingly beautiful.""This history of early Denver has over two hundred illustrations of buildings designed by nouveaux riches miners and frontier businessmen who had more money and fanciful imagination than taste. There is also a picture map of the business district in 1892 that shows where many of these extraordinary structures stood.Victoriana was in bloom, and architectural purity was scorned. Greek revivals had mansard roofs, Gothic castles had Italian tops, turrets and minarets sprouted in unlikely places, and everything was trimmed or fenced with cast­iron lace. Gingerbread store fronts, crenelated church towers, plushy lavish hotels, pompous homes, and glittering gambling houses and brothels gave the ""Queen City of the Plains"" an outlandish, distinct style that came to be known as Cherry Creek Gothic, from the creek that bisects the area.Denver residents were as gaudy and unpredictable as the buildings they erected. The unsinkable Mrs. J. J. (Molly) Brown built the fantastic House of Lions, an architect's nightmare guarded by two Sphinx-headed lions, in order to break into Denver society. Madam Jennie Rogers and Madam Mattie Silks, rivals for the title of queen of the demimonde, each had her turn reigning over the famous House of Mirrors. H. A. W. Tabor, the bonanza king whose scandalous love affair with Baby Doe cost him a political career, gave Denver a business block and an opera house that attracted such performers as Oscar Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt.This companion volume to the author's earlier work on Colorado hotels, No More Than Five in a Bed, is written with humor and understanding for the famous and the infamous who saw their dreams of wealth and splendor fulfilled in their city. It will appeal not only to students of architecture but to every­ one interested in the flamboyant personalities of the times.