Historic Leadville in Rare Photographs and Drawings

Historic Leadville in Rare Photographs and Drawings is a picture book about a town that grew from a silver camp into one of the highest cities in the country. Christian J. Buys has gathered rare photographs and drawings, and the catalogue description says the images carry the detail written accounts leave out, from shopfronts and headframes to the people who stood in front of them.

That is the whole appeal of the format. A paragraph can say that Leadville had saloons and smelters, but a photograph of a Harrison Avenue shopfront shows what the lettering looked like and who was lingering at the door. Drawings fill in the gaps from the years before cameras were common in the mountains.

We have only the short catalogue record for this book, with no page count, year or ISBN on file, so we will not describe it beyond that. It sits alongside a written history of the same town in our catalogue, so you can read the story in one book and see it in the other.

This book is for readers who learn through pictures. Leadville visitors who want to compare the present street with the past, local historians, genealogists hunting for the look of an ancestor's workplace, and model builders or artists in search of period detail will all use it. It also pairs well with A Quick History of Leadville, which tells the story in words. If you are looking for long narrative chapters, this is not that, because the images lead and the text supports them. It is a book to browse and return to.

Christian J. Buys is credited with this book and four more in our catalogue, covering Leadville, Telluride, Aspen era journals and the illustrations of nineteenth-century Colorado. We know him through those books and have found no biography we could verify, so we won't offer one. The catalogue record for this edition is short, and we say so plainly. His author page lists all five of his books together.

More about Christian J. Buys →

The Colorado Encyclopedia puts Leadville at 10,152 feet in the central Rockies, the Lake County seat and the highest incorporated city in the United States. Gold first brought prospectors in the early 1860s, but the town itself was established in the silver boom of the late 1870s. It was incorporated at the start of 1878 with a few hundred residents and held about 30,000 by the end of 1879, nearly the size of Denver.

The encyclopedia describes a town with ethnic neighborhoods, Irish to the east, Germans to the west and Cornish to the southwest. Its State Street headquarters of vice stood among 35 brothels, 115 gambling houses and 120 saloons, yet by 1879 the town also had three newspapers and what was said to be the busiest post office between St. Louis and San Francisco. Brick storefronts and fancy houses replaced boomtown shacks after the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad arrived in 1880.

Source: Colorado Encyclopedia, Leadville