Colorado’s Seasons of Gold, Photographs by Rod Hanna; foreword by Charlie Meyers. Text by Tom Ross, $48
There’s nothing in the world more beautiful than Colorado in the autumn. Well, maybe, this book is. “Colorado’s Seasons of Gold” is a spectacular look at the colors of fall. The endsheets, showing layers of fallen yellow leaves spread across the ground, are bright enough to hurt your eyes.
Colorado’s fall color is brasher and brassier than the colors in the East and the Midwest. While we do have reds and pinks and scarlets — and photographer Rod Hanna shows them in this book — our predominant autumn color is gold, a color as rich and bright as the precious metal dug from our mountain mines.
We think of high-country autumn gold as aspen trees, and there are glorious scenes in “Colorado’s Seasons of Gold” of aspen groves in full color. But cottonwood and willows turn yellow too, and when the leaves on the trees have browned and withered, there are still the golden grasses.
Hanna photographs all of these, from bright yellow trees peering out of mountainsides of evergreens to the remains of burnished aspen groves holding out against early snow. This grand, oversize book pictures the forest primeval in all its glory as it must have appeared over the centuries.
The Walls Talk: Historic House Museums of Colorado, by Patricia Werner, $16.95
We love house museums not just because of their architecture and decor but also because of the stories they tell about their inhabitants. In fact, many house museums — the Tabor Home in Leadville and the Jack Dempsey House in Manassa, for instance — are humble dwellings, notable only because of the famous people who lived there.
“I wrote this book so that I could know the people who lived in these dwellings,” wrote author Pat Werner, who died shortly before the book was published.
“The Walls Talk” is a collection of stories about the builders and owners of Colorado’s house museums. (In one case, that of the Old Homestead in Cripple Creek, “house” is something of a euphemism because the place spent its best years as a brothel.)
Of course, Werner includes the state’s famous mansions — the Bloom Mansion in Trinidad, Rosemount in Pueblo and Denver’s Molly Brown House. But there are also lesser-known homes.
The Auntie Stone Cabin in Fort Collins is a tiny log house that belonged to a woman who arrived in Denver in 1862 at the age of 61 and opened a restaurant on the site of today’s Union Station. Later, she went to Fort Collins, where she built the log cabin, which served as an officers mess.
Another lesser-known museum is the Barney Ford House in Breckenridge, which was surrounded for years by a high wire fence to keep out the curious but since has been opened as a museum.
Ford was an escaped slave who, with his wife, operated the house as a restaurant for many years. A well-known hotel and restaurant entrepreneur in Colorado and Wyoming, he also operated the Inter-Ocean Hotel in Denver. Illustrated with black-and-white photographs of the houses and their residents, “The Walls Talk” is a nice tour guide to the state’s more interesting houses.
Buffalo Bill: Scout, Showman, Visionary, by Steve Friesen, $22.95
“Did William F. Cody become famous because of the Pony Express, or did the Pony Express become famous because of William F. Cody?” asks author Steve Friesen in “Buffalo Bill.” And he answers: “Were it not for the re-creation of a Pony Express ride in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West for 30 years, it might have ended up a minor footnote in American history.”
Plenty of Western buffs would dispute that, but the fact that the question is posed at all underscores the larger-than-life figure that Buffalo Bill was in his days and ours.
Cody was, of course, a premier scout, buffalo hunter and Indian fighter. Those accomplishments are enough to put him in the pantheon of Western heroes. It was his showmanship, however, that made him the personification of the Westerner.
Never mind that the great “Pahaska” lost the show to bankruptcy, turned into a tout for other extravaganzas and at the end was as noted as much for his alcohol consumption as for his feats as a showman. “Buffalo Bill” is a delightful book detailing the showmanship era of Cody’s life.
Sandra Dallas is a Denver novelist who writes regularly about new regional nonfiction.
