Don’t be put off by the formidable title. If you want to add a bit of class to your coffee table, this gem of a book is what you need. It will advertise you as a solid Denver citizen with an interest in its history.
The cover is worth the price of the book. Eleven inches tall and 9 inches wide, it is an artful display of four turn-of-the-century — that’s the 19th turn into the 20th — photographs. The largest, taken in April, 1901, is a staged glimpse into a Denver District Court room, with a judge sitting behind an elevated solid wooden bench, the jury box on one side behind an ornately carved wooden railing, and quite possibly William W. “Plug Hat” Anderson posing in an elegant suit on the other.
“Plug Hat” was a noted criminal lawyer of the day who himself was tried for shooting Harry Tammen and Frederick Bonfils, owners of The Denver Post.
Under that photo are three smaller ones. The first is a portrait of the diminutive Mary E. Lathrop, who graduated from the University of Denver Law School in 1896 with the highest scores ever made. Later she became a thorn in the side of many of the vast majority of males.
The second is a magnificent frontal shot of the Brown Palace Hotel, standing huge in the Denver of the day. The third is a portrait of Joseph H. Stuart, a pioneer African-American lawyer admitted to practice in Denver in 1891. The back cover is filled with a photograph of the first Denver County Courthouse, completed in 1889, with horses and buggies on the dirt road in front and loungers in the lower left corner: one a bowlegged cowboy, the other probably a lawyer wearing a derby.
It is a beautiful book.
And it reads well. The large, glossy, double- columned pages are broken with photos and footnoted at the bottom of the pages, as though designed for five-minute interludes in one’s life. You will pick it up, leaf through it and get caught in a moment of old Denver at its most flamboyant: from its formation in 1859, through World War I.
In form, the book has the shape of a tree: 24 chapters fill the first 208 pages (the tree) and a 30-page appendix adorns its higher branches like Christmas lights. The first five chapters are the tree’s roots and trunk, providing the reader with an easy-to-follow documentary of our state.
You will travel in time from Coronado through the Louisiana Purchase, then brush past our early, short-lived organization as Jefferson Territory, followed by the formation of Colorado Territory; and your trip will be complemented by views of how the early pioneers and miners provided justice — at the beginning, swift and final; later, measured and, many would say, obscured. First there were the miners’ courts, the people’s courts, the frequently formed Committees on Public Safety (vigilantes) and later into the district courts.
Erickson adds branches to the tree with chapters on the Spanish-surnamed, women, and African-Americans; justice on the Western Slope; the death penalty; the development and impact of railroads; water and mining disputes; other memorable litigation; and conflicts with the press. Throughout, he tantalizes with the colorful but factual vignettes of the memorable personalities of the time.
The appendix brings this early data together by furnishing chronological listings of the names and critical dates for the early lawyers, judges, governors, women and African-American lawyers.
In less than five minutes, you can ingest an episode of an often-quirky, occasionally outrageous but always entertaining adventure of one or more of the early movers and shakers, well- dressed hustlers or courageous persons with heart and vision.
Examples: Judge Moses Hallet refused to allow Mary Lathrop to appear as a lawyer in the federal court. “Women should not be permitted to practice law.” But he wasn’t in town on June 17, 1898, and a federal judge from Wyoming admitted her. She promptly sued to foreclose a $150,000 mortgage against a prominent land company.
In 1876, Judge Amherst W. Stone was kidnapped by one side of a railroad dispute to prevent him from ruling against them. Did he mind? “(A)ccording to his own story, the lawless boys who took him round over the ‘hog backs’ treated him tip-top.” And present-day proponents of English-only might be surprised to find that because so many early legislators in Colorado spoke only Spanish, virtually all significant state business was published in both languages.
This well-researched (mostly from original sources) “myth buster” book will take you back to early Denver in a way that will bring the land and its early denizens to life.
Warwick Downing is a Denver fiction writer.
Nonfiction
Early Justice and the Formation of the Colorado Bar by David L. Erickson, $39.95
