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Colorado

Colorado Before the Snow Flies

THE TALLEST TOWN IN AMERICA GROWS TALLER STILL WHEN VIEWED THROUGH THE LENS OF ITS REMARKABLE PAST

People visit the Grand Canyon for scenery, not architecture. But an assortment of buildings there, infused with history and the sensibility of one strong woman, are worth a long look.

If you drive West as far as you can along the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, you will come to a bowl-shaped building of logs and boulders nestled into the canyon’s side.
From Interstate 25 we took the exit for Trinidad and pulled into a McDonald’s on the edge of the commercial district, near the Colorado Welcome Center and the local chamber of commerce.

Americans invented the grand hotel in the 183Os and during the next century brought it to a zenith of democratic luxury that makes a visit to the surviving examples the most agreeable of historic pilgrimages

At the turn of the eighteenth century, a story went around Connecticut about a pious old woman who was berating her nephew for being such a rake. And an aging rake, at that. “But we’re not so very different,” he insisted.

An Art Deco masterpiece struggles to survive

Just outside Denver a small family-run amusement park is clanging and sparkling its way through its eightyfourth season. It shares the raffish, plaintive charm of its counterparts across the country, but there is a good deal more to Lakeside.

An astonishing saga of endurance and high courage told by a man who lived through it

This is a true story of a boy and his family living on the high prairie in a dobe house in eastern Colorado and the tragic experience that occurred in March 1931.

From Fort Ticonderoga to the Plaza Hotel, from Appomattox Courthouse to Bugsy Siegel’s weird rose garden in Las Vegas, the present-day scene is enriched by knowledge of the American past

U-Boom on the Colorado Plateau

Gold is where you find it, goes the old prospectors’ saw.

Henry Morion Stanley, who later found Dr. Livingstone, reports the Treaty of Medicine Lodge, Kansas, October, 1867

In the summer of 1867, after more than a year of relative peace between Indians and whites, the southern Plains were in a shambles. It was an old story of blood and blunder by then.
The year is 1859.
Throughout the summer and fall of 1898 a lady named Margaret E. Cody, aged seventy-five or there-about, was a reluctant guest of the county jail in Albany, New York. Mrs.
Perched on Mount Falcon as the mist rose and the cloudcapped towers caught the first rays of the morning sun, it would seem a dream palace, the residence of the Great Khan or a Dalai Lama, remote, unapproachable, yet somehow the center of the world.

The wrecker’s ball swings in every city in the land, and memorable edifices of all kinds are coming down at a steady clip.

There are places on this earth, in Europe particularly, where conservation is taken to mean the preservation of the notable works of man as well as nature.

A tiny, ailing, middle-aged Victorian lady and an alcoholic, one-eyed mountain man are a couple far too unlikely for fiction. But just such a pair met, and fell in love, and suffered in Estes Park, Colorado, in 1873. Isabella Lucy Bird, our improbable heroine, became a prolific and popular travel writer as well as an intrepid tourist, and her journeys resulted in many books, some of which are still being reprinted. This story of her Colorado romance is from A Gallery of Dudes, to be published soon by Little, Brown.

Surrounded, starving, far from help, Major Forsyth and his gallant little band of scouts prepared to face wave after wave of Indians.

Even when death struck suddenly, the starry-eyed Indian agent was still dreaming of turning his Ute wards into white men overnight.

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