Colorado: An Illustrated History of the Highest State by Thomas J. Noel and Debra B. Faulkner, $34.95
Anything Tom Noel writes is a good read, even when a third of the book is a tout for some of Denver’s leading businesses and families. This book, which Noel co-authors with Debra B. Faulkner, begins with Colorado’s earliest residents, who set the stage for 12,000 years of migration to Colorado.
The book continues to contemporary times with the 2006 opening of the Denver Art Museum and Gov. Bill Owens breakdancing at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts.
“Colorado” is an upbeat pop history that encompasses politics, labor, economic development, recreation – any subject you can think of. In fact, it includes places and events we never thought we’d look back at with nostalgia. Remember Stapleton Airport? And driving there for Sunday dinner? Dancing at the Sky Chef? What about Colorado Fuel & Iron’s big smokestacks? Then there were those two-lane highways that wound through every little town on the Colorado map as they connected with the rest of America.
“Colorado” is nicely illustrated with old and new pictures, some rare. Many are from Noel’s personal collection, such as a newspaper half-tone showing downtown Fort Collins in about 1940. And the authors use some of Muriel Sibell Wolle’s watercolors of old Colorado buildings.
Frontiers: A Short History of the American West by Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, $26 | Ah, that all history books were this well done! “Frontiers” is a CliffsNotes version of Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher’s award-winning history, “The American West: A New Interpretive History.” Like most Western history today, it is in the vein of Patty Limerick’s “The Legacy of Conquest,” with emphasis on whites wiping out Indians and raping the land. And who can deny that this is what the white guys did?
“Frontiers” is an objective, if faintly anti-business, history of the West, a competent once-over of everything from early settlement to nomadic gold rushing, which was “a kind of 19th-century rite of passage for American men.” This well-written story is strewn with fascinating tidbits.
Early fur trappers thought the HBC initials of the powerful Hudson’s Bay Co. stood for “Here Before Christ.” Cowboys weren’t gunslingers, and most of their gunshot wounds were accidental.
“Men shot themselves while working, while removing their guns from wagons or packs, and even while undressing,” the authors write.
What makes “Frontiers” such fun to read? It’s the authors’ dry asides. Early Indian agents who supplied liquor to their charges were like today’s drug lords supplying cocaine, they say. And “few Americans of the day paid attention to the Mexican side (of controversies). Few do today.”
The authors close by telling how the myth of the West is alive and well and being used by business, the entertainment industry and politicians.
The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War, by Leonard L. Richards, $25 | Most early Californians were anti-slavery, and California joined the Union as a free state. Nonetheless, Southerners dominated state politics. The first senator to serve a full term was a Mississippi slave owner who controlled patronage jobs, filling them with so many Southerners that the customs house was known as the “Virginia Poorhouse.”
This pro-slavery faction wanted to break California into two states, with the southern half open to slavery. With all the knaves and scoundrels in both California and Washington, D.C., it’s surprising that it didn’t happen. Leonard L. Richards’ highly detailed book exposes enough corruption to make today’s Washington scandals seem like child’s play.
Sandra Dalls is a Denver novelist who writes a monthly column on new regional nonfiction.
