Denver Days

Denver Days is a children's novel in the Children of Colorado Series, which our catalogue says also includes A Cabin in Cripple Creek and One Golden Summer. The series is written at a Third or Fourth Grade level, though the description promises plots that will appeal to children and adults of all ages.

A retailer listing gives the opening situation: ten-year-old Katie O'Brien arrives in Omaha, Nebraska in 1882 and finds a new home with Mrs. Neal and Aunt Clara Brown. Open Library files the book under orphans, juvenile fiction, frontier and pioneer life, and fiction, which fits a story about a child starting over in an unfamiliar place.

That is all we can confirm about the story itself. What we can say is that Western Reflections Publishing Co. published it in 2004 and that it belongs to a series of books for young readers called Children of Colorado.

Denver Days is for young readers working at a Third or Fourth Grade level, as the series description puts it, and for parents and teachers who want fiction that sits in a pioneer setting. A retailer lists a reading age of 7 to 9. Families building a shelf of Children of Colorado books will want it next to its companions. Adults who enjoy a simple historical story for children may find it appeals to them too.

Denver Days is by Sue Luxa, a former teacher and elementary-school librarian who wrote the Children of Colorado series for third, fourth and fifth graders. You can read more about her and her other books on her author page.

More about Sue Luxa →

Denver, the city in the book's title, was founded in 1858, after Green Russell and Sam Bates made a placer gold find near Little Dry Creek in July of that year. That find led to the Pike's Peak Gold Rush of spring 1859. The settlement was named Denver City after Kansas Territorial Governor James W. Denver, in hopes of becoming a county seat.

The railroad came in 1870, when the first train from Cheyenne reached Denver on June 24. The Kansas Pacific completed its line there that August. The city grew from 4,759 people in 1870 to over 35,000 by 1880. Colorado joined the Union on August 1, 1876, with Denver as temporary state capital, and an 1881 statewide vote made it the permanent capital. Children's welfare in the city is a subject of a scholarly article, Children without homes: the plight of orphans in Denver, 1880 to 1930, by J. Abrams, in Colorado History.

Source: Wikipedia: History of Denver